{"id":30929,"date":"2024-03-27T14:56:19","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T18:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=30929"},"modified":"2024-06-11T09:24:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T13:24:54","slug":"up-close-george-singleton-finding-the-absurd-gets-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/up-close-george-singleton-finding-the-absurd-gets-harder\/","title":{"rendered":"Up Close: George Singleton: Finding the Absurd Gets Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the first day of the fall semester, 2022, the phone rang in Joni Tevis\u2019s Furman Hall office. She answered and heard a slightly unhinged man ask persistently about taking her nonfiction class.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis guy sounded like a nut. I thought, \u2018How can I get rid of this person?\u2019\u201d says Tevis, the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English.<\/span><\/p>\n

It took a few beats, then Tevis realized she was being pranked by her friend George Singleton \u201980, the author and former teacher. It was Singleton\u2019s first semester since retiring from teaching at a university in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he\u2019d rather not name.<\/span><\/p>\n

Singleton left the classroom, but he hasn\u2019t stopped writing. He\u2019s been crafting stories that make people laugh, and think, since 1983, writing about working-class people in absurd and comedic situations. He\u2019s published over 250 short stories and 10 collections. \u201cThe Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs\u201d was published last summer.<\/span><\/p>\n

His characters are \u201ccomplex in their simplicity,\u201d he says. They\u2019re caught in ridiculous schemes in small, and often small-minded, South Carolina towns. Singleton jabs at, exploits and buries stereotypes and ridicules the ridiculous. Tevis likens him to George Saunders, \u201cwriting the absurd and finding the pathos in it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Singleton\u2019s personal favorite story, \u201cShow-and-Tell,\u201d published in The Atlantic in 2001, a father coerces his son to take mementos to third-grade show-and-tell that are cloying relics from when he courted the boy\u2019s teacher.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2006, he published a novel after a publisher bugged him into submission. Singleton called it \u201cNovel,\u201d with a main character named Novel. Two years later he wrote \u201cWork Shirts for Madmen\u201d \u201cjust to make sure I could write [a novel] that wasn\u2019t as bad as \u2018Novel,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

This year he published a collection of personal essays called \u201cAside,\u201d chosen from 30 years of work.<\/span><\/p>\n

When he got to Furman in 1976, Singleton discovered authors whose writing echoed his sensibilities. Thanks to professors Jim Edwards in philosophy, David Parcell who taught French, and Gilbert Allen in English, he read John Irving, John Barth, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon and others. Singleton thought, \u201cMan, I can do this!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Singleton writes because he\u2019s compelled to. For a stretch of about 15 years, he wrote a short story every two weeks, at a workman’s pace, even as he taught full time. He eschews categories, like \u201cGrit Lit\u201d or \u201cSouthern author.\u201d But, he says, \u201cThe one thing that\u2019s on my mind all the time is, will this story that I\u2019m starting now end up being my favorite story I\u2019ve ever written,\u201d surpassing \u201cShow-and-Tell?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGeorge is a character, and his stories are hilarious. But I think sometimes that makes people forget, or overlook, that he is a serious, cold-hearted genius. You get him talking about a book or a writer and he makes you stop laughing, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, right. He\u2019s a genius,\u2019\u201d says Nic Brown, a novelist, memoirist and creative writing professor at Clemson University, and a victim of a Singleton phone prank.<\/span><\/p>\n

Singleton brushes off accolades. At Furman he was Phi Beta Kappa. He\u2019s won a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He\u2019s a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Tevis and Brown say he\u2019s a devoted, kind and generous friend.<\/span><\/p>\n

Singleton says, \u201cThe only thing I\u2019m doin\u2019 is makin\u2019 up stories and tellin\u2019 lies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lately, Singleton says, it\u2019s getting harder for fiction to be stranger than truth. In \u201cCurious Lives,\u201d a group called \u201cVeterans Against Guns in North America\u201d works to make America \u201cgreat like it was when people didn\u2019t kill each other at random.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI write absurdist stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cI can\u2019t make up anything weirder than what\u2019s going on now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The acclaimed writer has been crafting stories that make people laugh, and think, since 1983.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":389,"featured_media":31516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2665,1963,2660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes-spring-2024","category-furman-magazine","category-spring-2024"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30929"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32567,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30929\/revisions\/32567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}