GEORGE SINGLETON__________________________________________________

These days George Singleton is a widely read and well-respected writer, but when his short story “Welcome Homeless” appeared in the Summer 1989 issue of The Georgia Review that wasn’t yet the case. He had published only a few stories in other literary magazines, and when his manuscript arrived at the GR offices unsolicited (as do the vast majority of submissions we receive) Singleton himself was completely unknown to the Review staff. The Georgia Review seeks strong and original work regardless of whether it’s written by “big name” authors or so-called “newcomers,” and “Welcome Homeless” surprised and delighted the editors. Since his first GR appearance, Singleton has had ten more pieces in our pages including two, “Vaccination” and “Jayne Mansfield,” in our current issue; further, he has published four story collections, two novels, and an offbeat book of writing advice.
        Singleton’s antic humor is a key ingredient of his fiction. His protagonists—some of whom recur across his body of work, as do supporting characters and locations—are most often overeducated, white southern men perpetually frustrated by their circumstances and surroundings, “lowly buffoons with giant hearts and philosophical inclinations,” as William Giraldi describes them in his essay “A Holy Impropriety: The Stories of George Singleton” (Winter 2010). Though in most ways these lead characters seem, to themselves and to us, profoundly out of place in the dive bars and junkyards they frequent, they are undoubtedly—and however unhappily—products of the Piedmont culture in which they were born and reared. Singleton’s narrators freely criticize (and even lampoon) the people and places they live amidst; though sometimes mistaken for “outsiders,” they often establish genuine camaraderie—even a sort of intimacy— with “common folks.”
        For example, in “How Are We Going to Lose This One?” (Winter 2007), Alex Mull regales the denizens of Doffers Paradise Lounge with his plan to crash his ex-girlfriend’s wedding while dressed in a bear suit. After the bartender and regular customers dissuade him, a character named Shupee tells Alex, “I bet you never thought you’d come in here today and learn so many things, did you? People we get who ain’t from around here, they come in thinking they’ll be surrounded by the lost and the losing. But we’re some regular philosophers, when it all boils down.”
        Stet Looper, a graduate student in a dubious low-residency program in Southern Culture Studies and the narrator of “Which Rocks We Choose” (Summer 2006), quizzes a local scrapbooking group (which he had earlier derided) about events that occurred during their lifetimes and “made [them] view the world differently.” He’s shocked when a woman named Gayle Ann Gunter replies, “Do you mean like if you know somebody got lynched, but it all got hush-hushed even though everyone around knew the truth?” The violent history Gayle Ann recounts leads Stet in search of evidence and corroboration, both of which prove hard to come by. “On my drive back home I wondered if there were any low-residency writing programs where I could learn how to finish a detective novel,” he concludes. As Singleton said in a 2007 interview posted at failbetter.com, “[My characters are] trying to do what’s right. They’re grappling with moral issues, or with what’s-the-greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number-of-people notions.”
        By exploring consistent settings and employing recurring primary and secondary characters, Singleton builds a believable (if wacky) fictional world via a sort of aesthetic accretion. In a recent e-mail to the Georgia Review office he wrote, “From the first story in These People Are Us to the last story that I wrote yesterday, you’d find a slew of characters and places that weave in and out. It’s not exactly Faulkner’s strange county, but it’s the best I can do.”
        Singleton’s story collections are These People Are Us (River City Publishing, 2001; Harcourt, 2002), The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Algonquin, 2002), Why Dogs Chase Cars (Algonquin, 2004), and Drowning in Gruel (Harcourt, 2006); his two novels, both published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, are Novel (2005) and Work Shirts for Madmen (2007). Most recently he has published a guide for writers titled—in wry Singletonian fashion—Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008). His stories have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals, though nowhere so often as in The Georgia Review. Readers can find his work in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, Zoetrope, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Epoch, Esquire.com, and New England Review, among others, and anthologized in New Stories from the South, 20 Over 40, Surreal South, Writers Harvest 2, They Write Among Us, and Behind the Short Story. He’s published nonfiction in Bark and Oxford American, and some of that work has been included in Best Food Writing 2005, Dog Is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship, and Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit.
        George Singleton has taught English and fiction writing at Francis Marion College, the Fine Arts Center of Greenville County, and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and has been a visiting professor at the University of South Carolina and UNC-Wilmington. He is depositing his papers at the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he received his MFA. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Pickens County, South Carolina, with the clay artist Glenda Guion and a number of stray dogs and one cat.

                                                                                                            D.I.

Watch Singleton read from “Vaccination” and “Jayne Mansfield,” and discuss humor in writing.