Thomas Heise’s “The Corpse Flowers” was selected as the 2nd place winner by Jennine Capó Crucet for our Summer Short Story Award for New Writers. First, read Heise’s prize-winning story here, then check out this interview in which Heise talks about the weight of backstory, how poetry comes into play in his writing, and how his stories emerge.
I wasn’t surprised to read in your cover letter that you’re also a poet—your sentences have a lyrical quality to them. Can you speak to how poetry informs your prose (or vice versa)?
As a fiction writer, I’m always trying to make every sentence sing a few notes. Poetry trains me to attend to sound patterns and to the tensile strength of individual lines, which carries over into the sentence-level focus I have when writing fiction. But in addition to this, I like how a fragment or an image in poetry can resonate, shimmering with the unspeakable. In fiction, I’m especially interested in characters whose interior lives are deeply felt but tightly reined in, with only occasional spillover. It requires poetry’s economy and compression.
The lyricism in “The Corpse Flowers” allows the story to hold grief, insomnia, memory, and longing without over-explaining them. It gives Michael permission to drift between the external world and the interior one, between botany and biography, between Adelia’s past and his own.
I’m always interested in what writer’s choose to include for backstory. This story relies on the past to give weight to the present, but I’m curious about how you decided what to leave out and what to include.
I love this question. The first draft of “The Corpse Flowers” was much longer. Pages were left on the cutting-room floor for the final version. I tend to write too much, cut, then expand again, and cut until I feel like the story has found its shape. The challenge is sustaining momentum while integrating the past. For me, the past is almost always more interesting than the present because it is more malleable—a space of imagination, reverie, wish-fulfillment, denial, and so on. I’m a fan of atmospheric drift which, to return to your earlier question, can move a story with poetry’s associational logic.
I’m drawn to backstory that behaves the way memory actually behaves—selectively, unreliably, and often at an angle to the present. With Adelia, I wasn’t interested in a full biography. I wanted the pieces that felt emotionally charged for her: her parents’ disappearance, the ferry rides with her aunt, the sense of being unmoored from her own origins. For Michael, it’s the same. We don’t get the whole story of his marriage or his insomnia; we get these sharp, painful flashes.
As I wrote the story, I kept thinking about Faulkner’s famous quip, the past is “not even past.” Events radiate forward through time, but remembrance and reflection are creative acts in the present that recreate and reshape our histories. I like it when a story slows down and dilates, opening a portal to memory. But I’m suspicious of backstory that tries to “explain” a character. Life is rarely that tidy.
So, I cut anything that felt like pure information and kept what illuminated the strange, tender connection between these two people in this overheated office, talking about flowers and loss and the things that haunt them.
These characters feel so real and the texture of their conversation feels so authentic. I’d love to know if they came to you fully formed. If not, what was the process of discovering them like?
Thank you—that means a lot. Michael has been living rent-free in my head for years. He’s also the first-person narrator of my novel manuscript The Dream House [Any agents out there wanting to read more? Hit me up!] “The Corpse Flowers” was originally a chapter in the book. I’m glad that lived-in texture comes through. For her part, Adelia emerged as a voice—precise, a little eccentric, full of stored-up knowledge and loneliness. Then the rest of her unfurled in slow motion, like the flowers that obsess her.
And finally, I’m always curious about how writers get writing done. What’s your writing process like? Are you an everyday writer or a catch-it-as-you-can writer? Do you have a sense of the shape of the story before you begin, or do you let it take shape as you write?
I sometimes envy writers who see the whole story before they begin. That would save me so much time. But it would also eliminate some of the joys of discovery.
I rarely have the shape of a story at the outset. I tend to start with an image or a voice and write my way toward understanding it. The structure reveals itself slowly, like a photograph developing in a tray.
Since I work in several genres—fiction, poetry, and criticism—I’m always writing “something.” I tend to write in the evenings. Time is a scarce resource. I’m always searching for more of it.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree