Up Close: George Singleton: Finding the Absurd Gets Harder

On the first day of the fall semester, 2022, the phone rang in Joni Tevis’s Furman Hall office. She answered and heard a slightly unhinged man ask persistently about taking her nonfiction class.

“This guy sounded like a nut. I thought, ‘How can I get rid of this person?’” says Tevis, the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English.

It took a few beats, then Tevis realized she was being pranked by her friend George Singleton ’80, the author and former teacher. It was Singleton’s first semester since retiring from teaching at a university in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he’d rather not name.

Singleton left the classroom, but he hasn’t stopped writing. He’s been crafting stories that make people laugh, and think, since 1983, writing about working-class people in absurd and comedic situations. He’s published over 250 short stories and 10 collections. “The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs” was published last summer.

His characters are “complex in their simplicity,” he says. They’re 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, “writing the absurd and finding the pathos in it.”

In Singleton’s personal favorite story, “Show-and-Tell,” 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’s teacher.

In 2006, he published a novel after a publisher bugged him into submission. Singleton called it “Novel,” with a main character named Novel. Two years later he wrote “Work Shirts for Madmen” “just to make sure I could write [a novel] that wasn’t as bad as ‘Novel,’” he says.

This year he published a collection of personal essays called “Aside,” chosen from 30 years of work.

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, “Man, I can do this!”

Singleton writes because he’s 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 “Grit Lit” or “Southern author.” But, he says, “The one thing that’s on my mind all the time is, will this story that I’m starting now end up being my favorite story I’ve ever written,” surpassing “Show-and-Tell?” 

“George 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’re like, ‘Oh, right. He’s a genius,’” says Nic Brown, a novelist, memoirist and creative writing professor at Clemson University, and a victim of a Singleton phone prank.

Singleton brushes off accolades. At Furman he was Phi Beta Kappa. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Tevis and Brown say he’s a devoted, kind and generous friend.

Singleton says, “The only thing I’m doin’ is makin’ up stories and tellin’ lies.”

Lately, Singleton says, it’s getting harder for fiction to be stranger than truth. In “Curious Lives,” a group called “Veterans Against Guns in North America” works to make America “great like it was when people didn’t kill each other at random.”

“I write absurdist stuff,” he says. “I can’t make up anything weirder than what’s going on now.”