By: Dylan Magruder
George Singleton is the author of two novels and seven collections of short fiction including Between Wrecks and the just-released Calloustown. He is a former Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. George grew up in Greenwood, South Carolina and currently lives in Spartanburg where he teaches fiction at Wofford College. His stories have appeared in magazines including the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, and Playboy.
I was a student of George’s when he taught at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. In the two years I had him for a teacher, he gave a lot of notes, made a lot of jokes at my expense, and always reminded me to read and write more. He used to say he kept a gallon of WD-40 under his desk to remind him if he didn’t write every day he’d get rusty. In the years since then, he’s come out with three collections of short stories each funnier and more heartbreaking than the last. I got to ask George a few questions while he was on tour for his latest, Calloustown. Set in a fictional but all-too-familiar South Carolina town, these stories’ wacky, redneck characters and disillusioned narrators could come only from the mind of George Singleton.
How do you make yourself write every day?
I keep thinking that I’ll write the perfect short story one day, and it ain’t going to happen just sitting around waiting for it. Randall Jarrell once wrote about the chances of writing a great poem are about the same as sitting in a lounge chair in one’s front yard and having a meteor land in one’s lap. Same goes for a story, I guess.
What advice do you have for students applying to graduate school?
If it’s for a Ph.D. program in English, Don’t do it! Reconsider culinary school! If it’s for an MFA program in writing, I advise to–if possible–go to a traditional program that has classes that meet weekly, i.e., not a low-residency program (though there are a few good ones out there). At a regular MFA program, I would pick a program where you’re not given a TA with so much work teaching English 101 that you don’t have time to write. I would also pick a program that doesn’t bombard the student with literature classes. Take a course on How to Teach Rhetoric and Composition (you’ll probably end up teaching those things), plus the workshops. The world doesn’t end if you don’t get into Iowa. Look at where your favorite writers did or didn’t go to grad school, and look at those programs.
What is your strategy for submitting work to publications and what submitting advice would you give to students and recent graduates?
I wish someone had told me some of these things, I swear. I have a funny feeling that my old professors thought, Don’t tell Singleton how to submit or he’ll go off on a thirty-five-year drinking binge.
Here’s the thing. Write one story and send it out to a few places. While those journals are considering, write another story or two and send to a few different places. On and on. If you get a rejection on Story #1, but the editor writes, “Not quite, but keep us in mind,” immediately–if the reading period’s still open–send that editor Story #2 or #3 when it gets rejected.
A long time ago I made the mistake of using Writers Market for addresses. I found a “journal” called Inside Joke. I had a short-short about a stand-up comic. I sent it to Inside Joke. They took it. Six months later I got this photocopied and stapled thing. The “journal” was published for prisoners, though some kind of non-profit. Then I started getting fan mail…
I use the back matter of New Stories from the South and Best American Short Stories for reputable magazines.
You’ve written seven collections of short stories but only two novels. What do you think attracts you specifically to short fiction? What do you think are the biggest differences between writing a collection of linked stories and writing a novel?
I do like stories better, and I know that I’m better at it. Oh, I’ve probably written a good ten novels in the past, maybe more, but usually I end up salvaging one or two things as stories out of them. Patience is one thing–I don’t possess that gift.
With linked stories (which almost, kind of make a novel) it’s easier to write, say, twenty stories about a town or person, then figure out the twelve or fifteen that work best. And for the most part the magazine and journal editors make the decision for me–if something’s good enough for the Atlantic Monthly, or Oxford American, or Georgia Review, then it’s probably worthy in a collection. Likewise, if I send a story out and it even gets rejected at something like Skinned Up Knees and Elbows Review, then it might’ve been a bad story.
Are you proud to be considered a “southern” writer? What do you think it means to be a “southern” writer?
I’ve been in the Pacific northwest, the midwest, and the northeast over the last fifteen years or so and someone, invariably, asks, “Do you consider yourself a southern writer?” Personally, I think they want to know if I drink like Faulkner, Barry Hannah, et al. What else would I consider myself? And how come no one’s asking writers from those regions, “Do you consider yourself a Pacific northwest writer?”
But, yeah, I’d say I was proud. I got inducted into something called the Fellowship of Southern Writers last year. I don’t think there’s a Fellowship of Mid-Atlantic Writers Who Love Maryland Crabs.
Considering your experience at Wofford over the last few years, how do you feel about the next generation of southern writers? And, more generally, what do you see changing or what do you think should/shouldn’t change in how creative writing is taught at the college level?
I have to be careful here. I’m optimistic if and only if the beginning writer isn’t afraid to read. I’m hopeful, too, that the next generation might find it useful and necessary to write stories without racist epithets in every piece of dialogue.
As for teaching, I wish to goodness I could have a year-long course. In the first semester, we would read only contemporary fiction and keep a reader-based response journal. And in the second semester it would all be writing and workshopping–and reading, still, but not like a story a day.
What are your top ten books that everyone should read?
How to Get Off of a Deserted Island. That would be #1. I’m not sure it exists, but it would be a good one to have. These will change, of course, but I’d go with The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories of John Cheever, 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme, All 25 New Stories from the South anthologies (I’m counting that as one), My People’s Waltz by Dale Ray Phillips, Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan, Nine Stories by Salinger, A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews, Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle, Elegy for the Southern Drawl by Rodney Jones, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates. I’m not good at math. I should put a math textbook in there somewhere.
Dylan Magruder is a junior English major, concentrating in Creative Writing. He started writing when he was a little kid because his mother was a writer and his idol (she still is), but he really got into writing short fiction and poetry when he attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where he was introduced to the amazing writers—like Dale Ray Phillips, Raymond Carver, and Matthew Dickman—who showed him how great writers can find the beauty and the sadness in simple, human moments. They made him want to write like them.