In Dexton, Iowa, every man, woman, and child grapples with the challenges of small-town life, each seeking redemption—or escape—from a land to which they’re deeply rooted.  The local sheriff searches for a missing girl while trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter.  A returning soldier, haunted by violent visions, finds his hometown no longer feels like home.  When a girl loses her mother, she forges an unlikely family with a mysterious drifter and a man claiming to be her father. Within a center for troubled teens, intersecting narrators get caught in purgatory between the past and future. And in the title story, a child befriends a sick classmate, forcing the boy to pick sides in a school that shuns weakness.

In Replacement Parts, we witness a recurring cast of characters as they navigate their way from adolescence to adulthood. Intimate in nature but novelistic in scope, these twelve linked stories span the generations, each replacing the next until everyone is finally forced to face their own dark history.

Marc Dickinson is the author of the short story collection, Replacement Parts (Atmosphere Press, 2024) His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Cream City Review, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, South Dakota Review, American Literary Review (as winner of the ALR Fiction Prize), as well as other journals. He lives in Iowa with his wife and two children, where he teaches creative writing at Des Moines Area Community College and coordinates the long-running reading series, Celebration of the Literary Arts.

This event will be moderated by Matt Alberhasky.  He is a professor at DMACC where he has taught writing, literature, and film for the last eighteen years. He is author of Take 2: The Horror and Romantic Comedy Genres, which was published in 2022, and is currently working on a book on Film Noir. He lives in Ankeny with his five children and is a confirmed cinephile.