On Writing, Teaching, and the Best Way to Eat Possum
by Katie Burgess
From The Southeast Review Volume 27.2
George Singleton’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Oxford American, and New Stories from the South. He has written four story collections—These People Are Us, The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, and Drowning in Gruel—and two novels: Novel and Work Shirts for Madmen. He currently teaches creative writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He lives in Dacusville, South Carolina, with clay artist Glenda Guion, a number of dogs, and one cat.
Singleton’s latest book, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers, contains lessons and aphorisms collected from his years of teaching writing. He has taught at the high school, college, and graduate levels, and was my instructor at the Greenville Fine Arts Center back in the twentieth century. The following interview took place over a series of late-night emails.
Katie Burgess: Your latest book, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, offers advice to students of writing. What’s some of the best advice you’ve received from past instructors?
George Singleton: “Comedy must be serious,” and “Just tell the damn story.” Fred Chappell once told me, “Don’t waste your time trying to write poetry. Stick to fiction,” because I had to take a poetry workshop, and I just didn’t seem to have my heart in it. That was pretty good advice, I think.
KB: Is there any piece of advice in the book that you yourself have trouble following?
GS: Hell, I have trouble with any advice about writing. I’ve used too many adverbs (sometimes nervously, sometimes pompously); I’ve used too many semi-colons. I’ve found myself writing in coffee shops, but at least in a notebook, where patrons probably thought I only sketched out a bomb.
KB: You also mention the importance of being patient with editors. What are some areas where you’ve had disagreements with an editor?
GS: Are you going to cut down my answer?
I’ve had a disagreement with an editor when she wanted me to take fourteen or so stories, change the main characters’ names into the same name, and make it a novel. I said, “That would be one guy with fourteen different ex-wives and fourteen different ex-jobs. I wouldn’t like him.” I won that one. Ninety-nine percent of the time, though, the editors have been rational and correct. There have been some misunderstandings about southern terminology and/or local customs. I’ve had problems with an editor understanding that a red dot store means a liquor store, and that the best way to eat a possum is to catch it live, feed it for a week, then kill it.
KB: You’ve taught both high school and college. Are there significant differences between the two? Are there particular challenges you face as a public high school teacher?
GS: This is a giant generalization, but it might be easier to teach fiction writing to a smart high school student than a graduate student who has a BA in literature. If I have to spend half a semester un-teaching, it can get ugly. My only challenges as a public high school teacher have to do with dealing with administrators with honest-to-goodness doctorates in How to Make a Perfect Corkboard.
KB: Several of your stories poke fun at South Carolina’s educational system; for example, there’s the recurring character Libby Belcher, the “dumbest girl in class,” who nevertheless grows up to be superintendent of her South Carolina school district. Has that ever offended any of the people you have to work with?
GS: See above. Yes.
KB: In Pep Talks, you warn against FreeCell, Solitaire, and computer games, saying that “the only useful game on a computer is called ‘dictionary.’” What’s the biggest thing that distracts you from writing?
GS: Voices calling out to me from everywhere. My couch often thinks I need to spend more time with it. So do my dogs, the coffee pot, the refrigerator. I’ll find pieces of paper and fallen limbs that really need to be burned immediately. The other day I needed to look up something about golf carts. Then I spent an hour or two reading up everything anyone needs to know about the new E-Z-Go four-person gas or electric cart, manufactured in Augusta, Georgia.
So the answer is this: I get distracted easily, by everything. And I’m paranoid and superstitious, which doesn’t help matters on a daily basis.
KB: In an essay you wrote for the textbook Behind the Short Story, you discuss the difficulties of writing from an unfamiliar perspective, saying, “I couldn’t truly figure out if a woman would say, ‘I’m now going to put on my pajamas,’ on her honeymoon, or ‘camisole,’ or ‘teddy,’ or ‘I’m fixing to get buck-naked, Killer.’ ” Do you think it’s useful for a writer to step outside his or her own demographic in fiction? Or is it better to stick to what you know?
GS: I try to write a few third person narratives every year, even though I typically “hear” a story in first person. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to do. A miler doesn’t just go out and run a mile every day—there’s distance training, weight lifting, interval training, and so on. So it’s a good thing, I think, to attempt to step outside one’s comfort zone. Unfortunately for me, most of those adventures outside my comfort zone leave me shivering, and I catch a cold, and it screws me up for a month.
I can keep going with this metaphor, if you want. I can absolutely slaughter it.
KB: In Pep Talks, you advise that “It’s nearly impossible to write a story or novel wherein the main character is unlikable, immoral, mean, or sinister. It’s really impossible to do this in a first-person narration.” What do you think of novels like Lolita, or Zombie, or the Jason section of The Sound and the Fury, where the narrators are pretty much despicable people?
GS: I don’t know Zombie. As for Jason, yes, it’s a section. I understood only the Benjy section. Imagine that. “Please hush,” Mother said. “We’re trying to get you out as fast as we can. I don’t want you go get sick.” See how it all ties together?
And I guess maybe I was speaking for myself. I’m not smart—or brave—enough to get it down correctly.
KB: You also suggest that “a writer might get his or her best ideas due to excess.” Would you say that that has been true for you?
GS: Well, I don’t know. I thought so at the time. I’ve seen other writers treat their bodies like Dumpsters, and they produced good work. I’ve also seen writers who spend a lot of time in the gym, and not produce much at all. But these, again, are gigantic generalizations. I’m not so keen on Aristotle’s views toward Moderation, so I guess a spartan lifestyle could work out just as well as a hedonistic one.
KB: What would you be doing if you weren’t a writer?
GS: Mercenary.
KB: What was the first story you ever published? Was it rejected many times before it got in somewhere?
GS: The first “real” story that I had accepted and published—which wasn’t excerpted from an unpublishable novel, and wasn’t in The Greensboro Review because they felt sorry for me—came out in Sou’wester. It had to do with a guy living at the pavilion in Myrtle Beach, working as a guard (I think) during the winter months. I’d heard of this literary journal, and I mailed it to them. They took it. Soon thereafter I wrote a story about a comedian, and sent it to a “magazine” called Inside Joke. They sent me a complimentary subscription. It showed up in the mail as a photocopied newsletter of sorts, stapled. Prisoners got it for free, for some reason, due to a non-profit status. In the next few issues there were letters to the editor, written by convicts, about my work. That might be the highlight of my writing career.
KB: As someone who writes about the South, do people tend to have certain preconceived notions about what your work should be about? Do you get labeled as a regional writer?
GS: I think I get labeled as a regional writer. Who cares? There are other things to worry about in the world. As for expectations—when I write things that aren’t comic, sometimes people say, “That wasn’t funny. I thought you were supposed to be funny. That story was sad, and kind of sick.” Whenever I’m outside of the South or southeast doing readings, somebody in the audience is going to say, “Do you consider yourself a southern writer?” I normally say, “I guess so.” What else could I be? What else is there, anyway?
KB: You occasionally include political asides in your work. Harp Spillman, for instance, in Work Shirts for Madmen, makes ice sculptures of famous Republicans that melt and become the Three Stooges, Mussolini, and Koko the gorilla. Are there any pitfalls that a writer should avoid when it comes to mixing politics and fiction?
GS: Yeah, I’ve been told a hundred times that writing shouldn’t be political. I think a man listening to Rush Limbaugh turned down his radio and blurted it out to me at a stop light. I do believe that once the story line gets overshadowed by didactic harangues then the writer’s probably lost his or her audience. I’m pretty liberal, but I end up going “Yeah, yeah, yeah” when I read about how great it is to recycle, collect rain water, urge legislators to fund stem cell research, and so on. The story should matter, not the ongoing bullhorn pronouncements. And who knows when it’s going too far? I had fun writing about those ice sculptures, but maybe it lasted a page too long. Maybe readers went “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.”
KB: Do you have a certain routine you follow when you write? Do you write at a certain time, listen to music, etc.?
GS: I would rather write in the morning, before dawn. I mean, I would like to start before dawn. I’m not enamored by absolute silence—and I have all these dogs around whining so much it sounds like a kazoo band’s scattered around the house—so I usually listen to loud music, over and over and over.
KB: In Pep Talks, you mention how bookstores don’t sell nearly as much fiction as they do self-help books, novelty items, etc. Why do you think more people aren’t reading fiction? Do you think there’s anything that writers can do about it?
GS: I read the other day that more Americans say they are reading fiction, but that poetry’s on the decline. First off, I think most Americans are lying about reading fiction. From what I can tell—this will sound mean, and I don’t care—the best way to get your work read these days is to either make up a bunch of lies and say it’s a memoir, or write a really sappy, melodramatic book with as many adverbs as possible so that it’ll get chosen for book clubs. My next novel—Tenderly, Wantonly, Wisely She Packed Her Louis Vuitton Backpack: A True Story of Survival in Manhattan—will be a litmus test of sorts.
KB: Who are you reading right now?
GS: Here’s what I read back-to-back-to-back recently: Candide, Madame Bovary, A Hundred Years of Solitude. I’d never read Madame Bovary in the past, oddly. I read those books because I wanted to get a better sense of a character who had bad things happen to all those around him, a cheating spouse, and a surreal village with a rich history. As to contemporary stuff—I read what’s in the lit journals just about every day.
KB: What are you working on right now? Stories? Another novel?
GS: I’m halfway finished with a novel about a guy named Grudge who has bad things happen to everyone around him—it started when he accidentally killed his mother during childbirth, and continues through a series of foster families, then college, then his life that ends up with an untrustworthy girlfriend in a small shantytown of illegal aliens squatting in the middle of a giant tract of bamboo. He wants to reinvent himself as a comedian. It’s called Side Notes for a New Grudge. And I’m still working on a series of stories about a guy named Stat Looper who’s supposedly getting a low residency Master’s degree in southern culture studies from a satellite campus of Ole Miss called Ole Miss-Taylor. I kind of took a breather from those stories, and will reconnect with that character and his problems once I finish the first draft of Grudge’s tale.
KB: What are your plans now that you’ve received a Guggenheim Fellowship? Will you take off time from teaching?
GS: I’m taking the Fall semester off. I need to travel to a swampy area north of Beaufort, SC, and the Savannah River Nuclear Site. And Nashville. And Maggie Valley, NC. I’m in the middle of a picaresque novel, so wherever I land, I would imagine, will somehow end up in the story.
