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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.
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 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, ”He [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.
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 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004),
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.
In 2005, Singleton released his first novel, Novel:
A 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.
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 next book, Work Shirts for Madmen, will be available
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
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