While much attention is paid to the depth and breadth of the novel, short stories get no respect. It’s the novel that budding fiction writers everywhere are trying to write. Young wordsmiths rarely exclaim, “I want to write the Great American Short Story!” But to ignore the craft of telling a complete story and developing compelling characters in only a few pages would be tantamount to portraying the haiku as practice for the real job of creating an epic poem. And worse than disrespecting the artistry of the diminutive tale, literati the nation over, such as those in Kirkus Reviews and Feed magazine, have all but pronounced the short story dead.
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Apparently, no one informed Glenn Blake ’79.

Blake, who teaches creative writing at Rice and is an instructor in the University of Houston’s creative writing department, has recently published a collection of short stories titled Drowned Moon (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), a project that has taken him all across Texas and the nation on book signings and readings. The book is about to be republished in paperback form, unusual for a small university press, according to Blake, and a testament to its popularity. It seems that an audience does exist for such works. And Blake’s collection is as highly acclaimed as it is popular. It’s been nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Center USA West Award, the Jesse H. Jones Award, and the Southern Review Short Fiction Award, to name just a few.

After earning a degree in English at Rice in 1979, Blake went on to earn a master’s in the creative writing department at the University of Houston. His early focus was poetry, but he soon moved to short fiction. Blake’s poetic sense of rhythm and cadence along with the attention paid to the importance and placement of each word are evident even in his prose writing style.

The title of Blake’s collection is Drowned Moon, which he says refers to the way a full moon looks when its reflection appears on a body of water just at the horizon’s edge—it seems as if the moon is submerged. The title also hints at the bleak sense of loss and the omnipotence of water that pervades many of the stories. While water in fiction is often symbolic of a cleansing and healing force, Blake’s stories often portray it as an agent that washes away hope and sets the stage for tragedy.

The tales of Drowned Moon focus geographically on the lonesome, swampy, southeast area of Texas, somewhere around the Old and Lost Rivers between Beaumont and the Louisiana state line. The particular geography—prone to storms, floods, and other water-related weather—forms a backdrop and sometimes even plays a role in the stories. In “Chocolate Bay,” for example, what appears to be a slowly rising tide threatens to eventually swallow and destroy a young marriage and family as it has done to the families that came before. But the stories themselves transcend their location, detailing the universal struggles of human relationships—relationships between husbands and wives, siblings, and even strangers—allowing each story to appeal to a large audience.

And like an intricate Chinese puzzle box that reveals layer upon layer of dimensions before the core is reached, many of Blake’s stories seem deceptively simplistic at first yet yield surprising twists along the way. They are often told in present tense and in a direct manner. But through the looking glass of the murky water that is their landscape, many of Blake’s stories begin to morph into something you suspect is much larger, much more complex than the simple narrative that appears on the surface. Sometimes, the story itself prepares you for the surprise, which is true of “The Bottom,” a story that gives the reader hints in the form of mock newspaper headlines throughout that something big is about to happen. Other times the twist comes later, such as when it is revealed that an extremely selfish and domineering older brother may have finally earned his much-deserved and anticipated comeuppance in “Hazard.” Blake saves the twist in that story until the finale, with a character’s utterance of a single word.

So now that the popularity of his first collection of short stories has helped Blake make a name for himself, you might be wondering what he intends to take on next. Well, would you be surprised to learn that he’s working on the Great American Novel? It’s due to his editor by Christmas 2002.

—M. Yvonne Taylor