UT Tyler students now have the opportunity to take a creative writing class from a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, which is, in essence, a “hall of fame” for Texas writers. Glenn Blake is the author of “Return Fire: Stories,” “Drowned Moon,” and “The Old and The Lost: Collected Stories.” He came to UT Tyler from Johns Hopkins University and has previously taught at Rice University and the University of Houston. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Southwest Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.
(This episode is an extended version of a previously aired interview.)
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. A recent addition to the UT Tyler Department of Literature and Languages is a veteran educator and a much accomplished author. In 2020, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. Think of that as the Texas Writers Hall of Fame. Our welcome to Glenn Blake.
Thanks for being with us.
Glenn Blake: Well, thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike Landess: Now, before our interview, I asked that you send me some background information on all you’ve done. Seven pages later, I realized it was never gonna fit in this interview. It’s just not long enough to be able to get it all in. You have a lot of accomplishments.
Glenn Blake: Oh, well thank you. Thank you.
Mike Landess: Now you’re the author of “Drowned Moon,” “Return Fire,” the Old and the Lost, and your novel “Delo.” Is that out now? Has it been released?
Glenn Blake: It is due under contract the end of this year. God help me. That’s only… I have 11 months left.
Mike Landess: Oh, OK.
Glenn Blake: But this is the final draft, and it’s time to wrap it up because everyone’s dead. I feel like I’m in the final scene of Hamlet and I’m just stepping over bodies.
Mike Landess: Everybody in your book is dead ?
Glenn Blake: Yes, exactly.
Mike Landess: Good to know. Now, of the many honors that you’ve received for your work, you told me the Texas Writers Hall of Fame is right up there at the top.
Glenn Blake: Oh, yes. It’s like a lifetime achievement award. I’m not ashamed to admit that my knees buckled and I tear it up. Yeah. And I’m very honored to be in that select company. I really am. I’m really happy to be here in Tyler.
Mike Landess: Right. Well, it’s, it’s good to have you here in Tyler. Now you’re teaching creative writing here at UT Tyler right now. But as esteemed as our school is, you didn’t leave Johns Hopkins in Maryland just to come to the Piney Woods of East Texas, right?
Glenn Blake: Well, it’s it’s an interesting story in that. Not many people know this, but my wife and I are in effect from Tyler. Karen found out, well, they’re opening a new medical school in Tyler; would you like to go home? And I said I would love to go home. I would love to go back to the Piney Woods. When we flew into the airport at Tyler on 64 for the job interview, we headed later that afternoon and we pulled up about two miles to Tyler Memorial.
We parked the car and Karen went off in one direction and visited her family. And I walked off into the gravestones and visited my family. And so I could see Karen talking to her grandmother. Talking to her mother. Talking to her uncles and aunts. And so our family’s here. And so we’ve been going out there regularly and visiting with them.
Mike Landess: Tell us about Karen and the medical school.
Glenn Blake: Well, she directed the Center for Simulation and Standardized Patients at George Washington at Foggy Bottom, which is in D.C. right across, not too far from, the White House. Half of what she does is deal with actors as standardized patients for medical students, and the other half is simulation where she is now at this conference in Orlando, she found out there was a position here and she was really excited about that.
She made so many friends, almost with a consortium of doctors and standardized patients and medical colleagues in Tyler that it’s so good for her to come back.
Mike Landess: So let’s get back to your career as an author, and you’re teaching kids in East Texas about creative writing. What’s that been like?
Glenn Blake: Well, it’s fascinating for me. Like I said at the end of the semester in the fall, I say goodbye to my students and, God, do I love the students here? And I looked out and some of the students were weeping and most of them had tears in their eyes. And what I said to them is, you need to remember this, that I love you guys.
And the reason I love you guys is I am you. I’m from East Texas, and their stories are no different than my stories. Sometimes when you teach creative writing to 18 year olds, it’s a challenge. I mean, I make this joke that when I was at Johns Hopkins, every week it was a Bar Mitzvah story and then another Bar Mitzvah story and another Bar Mitzvah story.
And if we were lucky, someone’s grandmother died, and I would just think, oh, thank God, we have a dead grandmother. That’s pretty much all they have to write about. But as you get older, you have different stories to talk about.
Mike Landess: How difficult is it to find ways to connect with young people?
Glenn Blake: What’s different is how they put the word on the page. That technology has changed. I still get up every morning. I think I told you at, at 4:30. I’m on my computer at 5:00. I usually write till like noon or one. I teach in the afternoon. I still write by hand with a pencil on a legal pad. I do that because it slows me down. I think you should have to physically pause as a writer. When you make the mark of a comma, because that’s what a comma is, it’s a pause. Some of these students compose, of course, on a computer, on a laptop, some of ’em, their iPhone. And they can type faster than they can think. And the challenge for me as a writing coach is to encourage them to slow down.
Because if you don’t slow down, because fiction is just poetry. Poetry is just music. It’s stresses, it’s rhymes, and you have to be able to hear the song of that prose. I have a professor friend of mine down at Rice that gave the final exam in December and filled the board with it. In cursive, and the students said, oh, what is that? We can’t even read that anymore.
Mike Landess: Aramaic.
Glenn Blake: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Mike Landess: I guess the thing I’m wondering about is that kids consume so much off a screen. All of us do to some extent. But no matter how old we are, but certainly young people consume arguably more than most.
And this is the age of TikTok where it’s quick, it’s fast. It’s funny as whatever. And you move on to the next thing. It’s like eating, not eating a package of Twinkies, eating a box car of Twinkies each day.
Glenn Blake: Exactly. Well, that’s why when I talked with Dean Gray and the wonderful Dr. Hui Wu, the chair of the Department of Literature and Languages, I designed a course titled “Short, Short Story,” which is a new, exciting form in fiction. So I’m teaching a course in what’s called “micro fiction,” flash fiction and sudden fiction. And these are narratives. We’re in micro fiction right now this semester, and these are short stories that are maybe one-half page long.
Flash fiction may be one page long. Sudden fiction may be two pages long. Now, someone might say, this has something to do with the short attention span of younger writers. I just think that there’s so much out there, like you’re saying, but it’s almost like sitting in front of a large TV screen with a remote control, and you just pause about every four seconds on a different channel.
That’s the way some of these young writers think. And then I’m constantly baffled with these student writers view more movies in a week than they read novels in a year. Now that has to affect their idea of scenes, of character development. Conflict, crisis resolution is something completely different.
So I think one of the big challenges of a writing coach: not to dictate to your student writers what you think a narrative or a story is.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been acclaimed author, and now UT Tyler Creative Writing instructor Glenn Blake. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)