Spotlight On…

Today we talk with Micah Dean Hicks about oyster bars, Blood Meridian, and the loss of magic in the world.  If you haven’t yet read this writer’s odd and compelling work, you’re missing out.

Tell us about the first story you remember writing?

Because my parents saved everything from my childhood, I’ve read stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten: something about a wolfman who eats people in space. I think my priorities were in the right place as a kindergartener. I don’t remember writing them, though. I guess I have two answers to your question. There’s the first time I can remember a story being something I had produced, and then there is my earliest memory of consciously thinking about the writing itself.

The oldest story I remember as mine was written when I was around 10. It was about a band of thieves. They all lived in the forest, and each one played a different instrument. I don’t think they ever actually stole anything. I wrote it on sheets of paper and filled a three-ring binder. Later, I typed it and added more. It was going to be a novel. When I was a kid, I didn’t have any conception of short stories. Everything I started (and never managed to finish) was going to be a book.

My oldest memory of actually doing the writing was when I was about thirteen, in my bedroom, in our home in Arkansas. I had an old black table in my room that I used for writing. I kept pencils on it and cleaned it every week with too much Pledge, so it was always slippery and smelled like lemons. I remember thinking that I needed to get better at switching between different characters and getting inside their heads — I didn’t know what it was called then. So I wrote out a scene where a man walking down the street realizes that his watch has been stolen. Then I wrote the scene again from the POV of the man who stole it. Then again from the POV of a woman who saw it happen, but didn’t tell anyone. I still wonder why she decided not to tell. I think I remember this because it was the first time that I wrote understanding that writing was work, but that I could also try new things and get better.

How often do you struggle with your writing? Or does it come easily?

I love how it feels to sit down and write something, so I don’t struggle with that, unless not having enough time counts as a struggle. Revising, editing, reading the story over and over, that’s always a struggle for me. Tinkering and repairing is not nearly as fun as creating. I also struggle with ideas. I’ll get a piece of an idea in my head — once I knew that I wanted to write about a soprano, an alto, and a tenor — but then I have to do a lot of prewriting to figure out where the story is in this. I’ll write about what the characters are like, where they might end up, what problems they might have, what their world looks and tastes and sounds like. Sometimes it only takes a few hours of this to know what the story is going to be about, and then I can go write. Recently, I had an idea for a story that I knew was going to take place inside a tiny oyster bar. It took months of writing and thinking about it to figure out anything other than that.

Describe your typical writing environment.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere to do all my prewriting. I pull it out and scribble something down at the bar, my parents’ house, in the car, waiting in line. Like most writers I talk to, I think about stories constantly, but I have to do my thinking on paper to get somewhere. For the actual writing, I’ll do it anywhere besides a Starbucks. I’ll write in the food court at the mall. In the passenger seat (I beg not to drive on trips so that I can write instead). More often than not, I write on my couch. I would really like to be able to write sitting at a desk like a grownup, but my back gets tired. Instead I usually work at my laptop, sitting cross-legged on the couch, in the dead of night.

What’s your favorite story you’ve written? Why?

That’s a tough question. I tend to get very excited about my newest story and like that one more than anything else. Right now, it’s a story about a woman who is adored by everyone in the oyster bar, who beats all the men in bar contests and rules the place. A nasty little man called the oyster eater knows that he doesn’t have chance with her, each of them being who they are. So he decides to tear the bar down so that they will both have to be new people and maybe then he’ll have a shot.

I like the atmosphere of this story. The world is a really strange place. I like going to strange places. The characters are interesting to me. I’m still learning a lot about them. When I know everything, probably then I’ll be ready to work on a new story and won’t be interested in this one as much.

What I like about my new work is that I feel like I’m starting to understand what it is that I look for in stories when I read and how I can get that into the things I write. There’s always this feeling of wonder or discovery in my favorite stories. It’s like when you’re flipping through channels, and you come across some animal show, and you see a fish or insect or blind albino aquatic cave lizard that you never knew existed. All at once, something new has entered your universe (but it was there all along, you just didn’t know). Your whole world seems bigger, more amazing, that something like this could exist. You want to know more about it, go on YouTube and look at every video you can find of it nosing around in the rocks. You want to know how people react to this thing, what they’ll do with it. I get the same feeling when I read a story like García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” when the angel crashes in the front yard and the characters have to do something with it. That feeling of discovery is what I get excited about, what I want my work to do for people. It’s what I’m working toward, and I feel like with every new thing I write, I’m learning how to do it better.

What’s the last book that you loved?

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I read it a few months ago, and I’ve read things I’ve liked since then, but nothing that can shake the impression it left on me. It’s the setting, mostly. I love setting, and the world that McCarthy gives us in the book is amazing. It’s hopeless, dangerous, horrifying, and absolutely magical. The Judge on the mountain-top making gunpowder is like something out of ancient myth. I also like that it stays out the characters’ heads, for the most part. They do things. They say things. There’s the world. McCarthy doesn’t let us get bogged down in having them reflect on this. Which is telling, I think. If the brutality is not worth commenting on, it normalizes it. This is just life for these people. Something Aimee Bender says about setting also comes to mind, how in some stories, the world itself is a reflection of what’s going on inside the characters’ heads. I could go on and on about this book. I’m going to have to go back there some day.

Does reading online influence your writing style? How would your work change if you lost access to the Internet for a year?

Wow. I can’t imagine how I would live without the Internet for a whole year. I start feeling anxious if I can’t check my email at least once an hour. I guess reading online teaches me how much is out there that I have to compete with as a writer. Not just fiction, but news, videos, social networking, sites with cat pictures, and all the other online media that people consume every day. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there. I think it reminds me that my stories need to be as entertaining and exciting as possible if I want people to read them.

The Internet is also great for working with other writers. I’ve got friends all over who I read for and who read for me. My work would suffer without having their eyes to look at it. And I’d get lonely. It’s tough feeling like you’re writing in a vacuum. Having people out there who you can talk to about publishing, or craft, or other problems keeps me sane. Just a few months ago, I wrote to Rae Bryant, editor of Moon Milk Review, asking for her thoughts on the kind of magical/surreal work we’re both interested in. She was kind enough to have that conversation with me, even though we didn’t know each other. Without being able to do things like that, I can’t imagine what my writing would be like. I’d still do the work, but the work and I would both suffer.

What strikes me about your writing is the strangeness, but also how that oddity doesn’t hamper narrative thrust and flow. What’s the importance of absurdity in your work? Many of your stories have a fairy-tale feel about them in that the normal world is canted and when that oddness occurs, it’s not remarkable to the characters. What does that acceptance of the strange in your fiction mean and what does it say about our lives in this world?

I do work toward a fairy-tale feel or toward writing about places that have different rules than ours. I think that’s interesting. I want stories to take me places I haven’t been before. There’s a scene in the movie Northfork where a group of men go into a diner. There’s no menu. They take turns trying to guess what’s available while the waitress shakes her head. Finally, one of them gets it right, and she nods. They congratulate each other on finally being able to order. What a fascinating place!

I think it’s a lot more fun when the characters don’t question this strangeness. It seems to me that if you write a story where something really crazy happens, either the characters can freak out about it while the reader follows along, or you can let the characters accept things and move on while the reader does the job of freaking out and being amazed. Not to say that there aren’t stories that can shock both the characters and the reader, but I think this is very hard to do. As a reader, I get tired when the ghost appears and the characters scream and scatter. I’m fine with the ghost showing up. I want to know more about that ghost. García Márquez said this well in an interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review, talking about how his grandmother told stories: “The wildest things, in the most natural way.” That’s what I want to do.

What does it say about our lives in the world? I’m not sure. I know for me, the world seems to have an absence of magic. I’m a pretty skeptical, non-superstitious, non-religious person. That’s why when I get the unexplainable in a story, I don’t have much patience for characters overreacting to it. I crave the unexplainable and the amazing. That’s my best guess as to what it means. There is a lack of magic in our lives, and we all want magic. Stories can give it to us.

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Micah Dean Hicks is a master’s student in the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. His work has been accepted to over twenty publications, including PANK, kill author, Prick of the Spindle, Tryst, and Moon Milk Review.