Glenn Blake reads "Marsh" at JHU

"If you continue to write poetry, you're going to hurt someone." An editor once said this, a veiled piece of advice, to Glenn Blake. Blake, in turn, took the comment to heart and tried his hand at short fiction. His first collected effort, Drowned Moon, has won him some rave reviews among harsh critics and has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the world of short fiction.

Currently a professor of writing at Rice University, Blake has studied at both Rice and Johns Hopkins University (as a graduate student). Honors include a special mention for the Pushcart Prize in 1997, as well as the PEN Southwest award for fiction. He has published stories in American Short Fiction, Southwestern Review, Grand St. and more.

On Oct. 10, Blake stood in front of a room full of professors, graduate students and undergraduates to read "Marsh," a story from his collection. The story centered around three main characters -- Marshall, a young boy of unmentioned age, his grandmother who houses him and Wick, his aging great uncle who lives in the house across the street.

The minute he started talking, it was obvious that Blake had been a poet. He read in an artsy, sometimes painfully lilting voice, putting stress on the ends of each sentence such that dogs became melodramatic and front porches became monuments to melancholy. His stories, also in the poetic tendency, fixated; time stopped for a little while Blake contemplated the headstones in the yard where Marsh lives with his grandmother, the dogs that plague Wick.

The story itself is about death and rebirth, the recognition and nostalgia brought about by something as simple as one's name. It does not follow the typical timeline of a story, but rather skips around -- Wick dies within the first few pages of the story, yet most of the story is about Wick's relationship with both little Marsh and Wick's brother Marshall, whom Marsh very closely resembles (at least in Wick's eyes). Marsh's grandmother shows him the family cemetery, where all of his aunts and uncles and, as far as the listener could tell, parents, are buried.

There she tries to explain death to him, a concept he cannot at first seem to wrap his brain around. In childish naivete, he steps on the gravestones, imagines ghosts as fireflies, and does not grasp the sense of permanency that his grandmother is trying to impress upon him. Blake's simple dialogue (or perhaps it was just the way he was reading -- rather, chanting -- the phrases) gave a sense of black-and-whiteness, of unmarred innocence treading blithely along on top of the deceased.

Wick, Marsh's great-uncle, is the focal character of the story (never mind that he dies in the first part of the piece). Sprinkled within the tale are semi-humorous accounts of Marsh's various antics: trying to get Wick's prosthetic leg back from the dogs, trapping fireflies and bees in jars and wishing that the bees would glow but thankful that the fireflies didn't "bite" like the bees did. In returning the leg to Wick, Marsh finally has to have a full-on conversation with Wick. Blake uses this moment of meeting to sweep up into a fit of nostalgia, of stories about Wick's leg and of the gripping war story that accompanied the loss of that limb.

While Wick takes the reader back in time to the war (what war, exactly, I will confess that I am not sure), Blake paints, through dialogue and Wick's story, a colorful portrait of Marsh's grandfather and an intensely sad but somehow not entirely grotesque picture of war -- rivers the color of blood, "there ain't no doctor here," the despair caused by unnecessary death. Wick, in his old age (Blake describes him as "transparent," with "veins like a treasure map"), starts to blur the line between Marsh's resemblance to Wick's brother and Marsh actually being some strange reincarnation of the deceased Marshall. The last line of the story is simply "she misses you" -- a beautiful, poetic ending to a story about the immense concept of what death actually is, and the powerful memory that can come about with something as simple as a name.

After all of the praise, however, one must say that Blake did in fact show a few of the tendencies that can explain why people with poetic tendencies don't tend to write much in the way of short stories. While Blake has an apparent mastery over the English language, the story was somewhat stagnant, and the way that the continuum therein was not consistent made it difficult to listen to (Where are we again?). Of course, I may be a bit hypocritical, as this is the exact same problem that I tend to have with my own fiction. (As a poet, I craft horrible fiction. I can't escape it. I think I may exist solely to drive Prof. Davies up a wall.) But while Blake's actual words are beautifully lyrical and he effectively captures a mood, he perhaps leaves the reader with a desire for a bit more, well, narrative order to things.

Overall though, the story was a well-crafted one, and Blake is an extremely interesting man. It gives people like me a bit of hope; if one cannot make it as a poet -- a profession which, depressingly, barely seems to exist anymore -- fiction and publication is possible, and it's possible to become quite good at the art of fiction. And that's always an uplifting thought to take away from something as simple as a fiction reading.