Micah Dean Hicks /
June 5, 2019
The Listening Tree

About The Author

Micah Dean Hicks

Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, and Kenyon Review, among others. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams is available from New American Press. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is available now from John Joseph Adams Books.


No form has touched my writing so much as the fairy tale. Their rural landscapes of dark, breathing forests, so much like the woods in Arkansas where I grew up. How speaking to the powerful always comes with unspoken rules, and to violate those rules carries a price. That magic can also be horror. Their fascination with unfairness and cruelty, an obsession I share. So much in fairy tales is painful, a bloody mouthful of cut glass. But also this one beautiful truth: the least of us, no matter how mistreated or lonely or lost, are worth telling stories about.