Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the new story collection The Library Cosmic. His other books include The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in your new collection?
A: The stories in The Library Cosmic were largely written in 2022 and early 2023. But writing, and more importantly, rewriting, takes a long time.
“The Church of The Hot Pink Jesus,” “The Resting Place of Trees,” and “Spectres of Bibliotheca” have all felt fairly finished and in their final form since then.
But the other three stories in the book, “The Library of Water,” “Wild Dream Country,” and “The Library Cosmic” itself, have all undergone many, many edits, many rewrites, as I travelled slowly towards the stories I truly wanted them to be.
Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of one of the stories--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The Library Cosmic is my coolest title. It was an easy pick for the collection for a few reasons. Libraries, the shelter of third spaces and community spaces, run through all the pieces of this book. The title story is also the longest story in the book (actually, it is a short novella).
The other significance of the title, for me, is an indirect little nod to the original king of comics, Jack Kirby. There are lots of nods to Kirby's work throughout the book, most obviously in the huge, strange, and mechanical giants that appear in different forms, inspired by such Kirby imagery as the The Celestials and Galactus from his work at Marvel Comics.
The title, The Library Cosmic, is another wink to Kirby's work, as "The Power Cosmic" is what Kirby and his collaborators gave to The Silver Surfer, a character that I adore in Kirby's illustrations.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the collection?
A: I just knew. The order never really changed! They aren't all chronological, but if you squint, and think hard, you can put it all together.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Libraries are for everyone. Community matters, and solidarity across time and space to other people in the struggle matter. The struggle is ongoing, and the enemy is colossal, but that doesn't mean we cannot beat them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: So much! Primarily, my Ph.D. thesis, god help me. But I'm also sitting on two novels! One about a near-future Atlantis, a colossal submarine slowly sinking to the ocean floor, and a second about a far future space colony, set on the back of a huge jellyfish.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We are sitting here in the muck of an era of book bans, and AI garbage, and disinformation. Take the time to make things for yourself, take the time to give what you can to the world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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