i n t e r v i e w

COMP: Thank you for allowing us to publish your brilliantly haunting, genre-bending short story, “Aurelia.” Can you tell us about the story’s earliest idea or image? What were you most surprised to learn as the story evolved from draft to draft?

Micah Dean Hicks: I’m so happy to have the story appear in COMP! I had previously written another short, lyrical fairy tale called “The Listening Tree” that appeared in the Fairy Tale Review. I wanted to write another piece that felt like that, that might belong to the same emotional, magical world. Probably the first image was of the twins, hanging onto one another and blurring together. Then this mythic swimming hole hidden away in the woods where young people snuck away to consecrate mistakes. I love ghosts, and I love delving into gender, so I wasn’t surprised to see those elements work their way in. I think the last thing that came to me as I was working through drafts was the bad boyfriend, how pushy and gross he would be, how he led to some really great interiority where the main character reflects on her feelings about men: “They’d eat even our shadows if they could.” That line felt honest and startling to me.

C: The style of “Aurelia” is astounding—its language is lush, sensory-rich, and rhythmic (e.g. “A dewberry-small, tattered little knot in my sister’s heart . . .”), and yet, at the same time, its plot is spare and fleet-footed, à la fairy tales (e.g. “So it was that I let myself be tied to a boy . . .”). How did this style develop? With what work(s) of art is “Aurelia” in conversation, stylistically?

MDH: I love poetry and music, so I’m always thinking about how to give my prose more of a rhythmic, oral quality. For very short pieces like “Aurelia,” I draft and revise them aloud, speaking every line as I type it, trying to get the words to sound right in my mouth before I put them on the page. I also love really textured, sensory-drunk prose like Angela Carter’s. I think fairy tales, for all of their spareness and simpleness when it comes to plot, offer highly textured worlds—dark and shaggy forests, smoke-hazed and crooked cottages. Fairy tales beg for that heady detail and lush language. So “Aurelia” is in conversation with a lot of things, but maybe Angela Carter most of all.

C: Congratulations on the publication of your short story collection Vulture Gold (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in September 2026)! We can’t wait to read it. How does “Aurelia,” which will appear in the collection, deepen or deviate from the book’s other stories and/or themes?

MDH: Thank you! Vulture Gold is a collection of loosely linked fabulist stories. Together, the stories create a world of magic, ghosts, and shapeshifters set against the backdrop of the American South. Many of the stories deal with gender, complicated desire, and guilt, so “Aurelia” is definitely hitting those same notes. But characters from one story also reappear in others, like a desperate tailor searching for his sons or a manipulative thief who styles herself a wonder broker. In the title story, “Vulture Gold,” we meet an older version of Aurelia, now ruling over the land of dead and everything lost.