From print issue v. 30: “A Conversation With George Singleton”
by Nancy Dew Taylor
George Singleton must have the biggest work desk of any living writer. As anyone knows who’s read Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008), Singleton keeps a variety of tools on his desk. The Allen wrench suggests he “tighten up sentences and strengthen verbs.” The micrometer warns him “not to lay it on so thick.”
Singleton doesn’t have time for self-importance. Asked what he had written about that morning, he replies, “I didn’t get to write yesterday — or today — BECAUSE I HAD TO ANSWER A BUNCH OF QUESTIONS.” He might also have used as an excuse just plain exhaustion. In his job as both writer and teacher at the SC Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities, Singleton so far this season has written 47 letters for former students to MFA programs, remaining are recommendations for Guggenheims.
Hard work is how he got where he is. Every day he gets up early, writes a thousand words, revises the thousand he wrote yesterday. He might write down a list of “heartless decisions by factory owners — for example, opening up a rope and cordage factory at the site of a lynching from a century before, or a casino atop once-fertile bottomland taken away from farmers after a couple bad drought years.” His lists, fabulous and funny, are a trademark. His talent for naming is another. He claims he gets names from obituaries and the telephone directory, mixing and matching. In Stray Decorum, his newest collection of stories (Dzanc Books, 2012), the bar medley includes the Doffers Paradise Lounge, He’s Out Casting, Gus’ Riverside Informal Tavern, and the Slip-In. Street names like Old Hard Creek Mill Road, Looper, Snipes, and Slaughterhouse Roads, and Slickum Mill Road find matches in trailer parks (Camelot, Belle Meade, Vista Belle), developments (Monkey Grass Estates, The Rookery, Neck of the Woods Acres), and towns (Gruel, Calloustown). He sometimes puts real people’s real names in his stories, too.
Singleton admits he also likes painting himself into a corner and figuring a way out. Some people, he says, “would backtrack to the narrative’s problem and grab a different roller, find a safer escape route from the room, position drop cloths differently, read up on how another painter dealt with the situation, or wait for half the room to dry before proceeding in a rational manner. Not me.” Singleton himself lives on Hester Store Road outside Easley in a home he shares with Glenda Guion, a ceramist, and a continually varying number of dogs and cats — where, yes, he shares chores. As a philosophy graduate, he is still attracted to cynics and skeptics, doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to have an “Oh, yeah, but what about…?” attitude to most things in life.
After graduation from Furman, Singleton entered an MFA program he didn’t really like and could ill afford. He dropped out to paint houses. His father’s illness brought him home to run a “very small textile supply company that manufactured calfskin replacement belts that went on spinning frames.” He continued the work after his father died, but in 1984 returned to graduate school, this time at UNC-Greensboro.
In those years, between 30 and 60 MFA programs existed nationwide. “Now,” Singleton says, “there are close to 400. It’s an odd cottage industry, and I have found that many of the students have become slightly cutthroat. And many of them seem to be more interested in How to Get Published than How to Write a Better Story/Novel/Poem.” At Greensboro he was required to take both poetry and fiction workshops — “a great idea, I think.” He and his friends often stayed out late, but they got up and wrote. “If we didn’t, Fred Chappell quit talking to us.” When that silence occurred in a fiction workshop, Singleton knew “I’d let him down and that I had to do better. I had to think better.” Of both Gil Allen, his first writing professor, and Chappell, Singleton told a Kenyon Review interviewer, “[They] stick in my mind, and I hear their voices in my head most days.”
He hears other voices, too. He first got interested in writing “while watching Henry Gibson recite those absurd poems on Laugh-In.” That took him, some years later, to the plays of Ionesco and Beckett, after which he found himself attracted to the works of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth. “Then came O’Connor, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Charles Portis, Lewis Nordan, and so on,” he says.
Asked whom we should read and why, Singleton answers with a list:
William Gay for language; Lewis Nordan for tragicomedy; Fifty Shades of Grey so we will know how to write poorly; Dan Chaon; Jamie Quatro; Cheever for craft; my buddy Ron Rash for language/pacing; Barry Hannah for mind-blowing juxtapositions of words; Charles Portis; Flannery O’Connor over and over again; Rodney Jones the poet; Jill McCorkle for funny/sad; Kevin Brockmeier for out-of-this-world stuff; Abby Thomas’ Three Dog Life; Michael Parker’s If You Want Me to Stay; David Markson’s Vanishing Point for great weirdness; John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulpwood; Harry Crews’ Feast of Snakes.
Asked about his griefs (“Weird question, Dr. Phil.”), Singleton responds by saying he wishes we weren’t such “a gun-happy country. No need for assault rifles.” He has nothing against people hunting “if they eat the meat and wear the hide.” He’s also concerned about healthcare. “Why,” he asks, “is everyone so scared of it?” And about a large industry: “I see nothing but bad things coming out of a corporation wishing to monopolize what the public can read.” Does that corporation bring in writers to do readings and signings? When we buy from that corporation, “does anyone in my community make any money, then use that money to, say, buy her child organic sweet potatoes?”
Like most writers, Singleton ponders, on bad mornings, whether “that last story was, indeed, my last story.” But if he just keeps on getting up early and sitting down to write those thousand words, we won’t have to worry. Except, perhaps, about room on his desk. Asked what his current favorite tool is and why, Singleton responds, “My father’s 1 13/16 Zimaloy artificial hip. It reminds me — I hope — that writing isn’t all that difficult, comparatively speaking.”
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