click to buy

Born 1958 in Greenwood, South Carolina, the reigning master of the comic short story (not just among Southern writers but in the whole of American Literature), George Singleton, was awarded a bachelor in Philosophy from Furman University in 1980. Singleton went on to earn a MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, South Carolina.   His earliest published short stories were placed with Playboy, Apalachee Quarterly, New Southern Harmonies, Georgia Review and Southern Review.

Three early stories were featured in the 1994, 1998 and 1999 editions of New Stories from the South, 1999.  Singleton has since published with Kenyon Review, Arkansas Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Shenandoah, and four additional editions of New Stories from the South.  Singleton teaches fiction at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities.  He and his wife, ceramicist Glenda Guion, reside in Dacusville, South Carolina with their many dogs and other strays, and his collection of ashtrays.

After the release of his first collection of short stories, These People Are Us: Stories published by River City Press in 2001, Singleton was featured on a National Public Radio series “Artists of the New South”.  NPR commentator David Morphus rightly points out that Singleton’s stories center around the rural south that is being encroached upon by developers alongside the large highways. His characters find themselves in predicaments of either their own making (as in “Outlaw Head and Tail”) or from bumping up against the monolith of mass American culture of strip mauls, business suits, and indistinct boxed architecture.

Fred Chappell comments during the NPR commentary, that Singleton “is one of the very few people that I know about who is writing about what I call the ‘slab-burbs’, the suburbs along the super slab highways that go through the South… where a kind of sophisticated American culture meets and old-fashioned country culture and the clash can be heard for miles.” In stories such as “Crawl Space” and “Remembering Why We’re Here”, Singleton’s comic wit emotes this clash with the humor of a keen observer and philosophic analyst.

click to buy

In his next two collections, The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002) and Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood (Shannon Ravenel Books), Singleton utilizes first person narration to create a sense of immediacy and the insider skepticism of one ‘who knows’ from first hand experience.  Most of these stories, located in the fictional South Carolina town of Forty-Five, build on themes set by These People Are Us:  The absurdly comical situations wherein people test, bump up against or flatten the boundaries of what is acceptable or even plausible given their environment and condition; and the collision between widespread land development and a rural lifestyle that distrusts, instinctively, any pressure toward homogenization.

Both collections unify these themes in the stories of the Mendal Dawes.  Mendal first appears in “Show-in-Tell” where is father uses him as an unaware emissary to his old sweetheart by sending him to school with tokens of dubious historical significance, but of a private significance to Ms. Dawes former flame.  As he learns what his father is up to, Mendal also learns more of his family history, and all the while adjusting to the off balanced up-bringing he has received.   Throughout these stories, Mendal struggles with his desire to leave the South, his compulsion to stay, and his awareness that it is all changing.

click to buy

In 2005, Singleton released his first novel, Novel (Harcourt, Inc.). Novel Akers, along with his adopted brother and sister, James and Joyce, live in the fictional town of Gruel, South Carolina. Already the reader can see they are in for a ride.  James Joyce and Novel, a snake handler (a slippery occupation) by trade, live in the grueling circumstances of making ends met.  Novel has a second job writing speeches for politicians.  One would think that his abilities handling snakes would provide him with unique and necessary tools for this trade.  Through various calamities, Novel transforms his wife’s, Rebekah (Bekah), weight-loss clinic into a writer’s retreat.   After frustration builds regarding the paying guests and their mediocrity, detailed in an iconoclastic play of language, Novel closes the retreat and struggles with writing (being?) an autobiography.  After his writing has failed, he accepts work as the official Gruel Historian.    At one point Novel is taunted, “Your family should have named you Short Story, if anything, or Poem.”  Layered in thin allegories that are stretched perhaps too thin, Singleton’s dark comic wit is in perfect form and displayed beautifully on this larger canvas.

In his most recent collection, Drowning in Gruel (Harcourt, Inc. 2006) ‘place’ takes on a more central role, becoming a silent but ever-present character uniting all of these stories. By coming or going, staying for good or just passing through, each characters is predominately defined by their relation to Gruel, South Carolina.  Their connection to gruel is in essence their connection to the misery of life as revealed there.  Nearly everyone is in a horrible circumstance, suffering from calamities or they are on their way to misery, to Gruel and we watch them with the alertness and unwilling by undeterred focus of watching a train derail.  In this way, ‘place’ equates with ‘state of being’ and carries existential weight and significance.

click to buy

Singleton, who has disciplined himself to writing 600 words a day, credits his writing success to being, “stupid and stubborn… writing is about keeping going and being hard-headed.” He has published more than 110 stories.  His most recent book, Work Shirts for Madmen, was released September 17, 2007.

George Singleton’s collective work places him in the ranks of the best among accomplished contemporary short story masters Jill McCorkle, Rick Bass, and Richard Bausch and alongside modern masters Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Paul Bowles and Flannery O’Connor.

(profile written by M. Dale Jones)