“Believe me when I say I never think about being taken seriously”: Short-story master George Singleton talks about his change-of-pace essay collection https://ift.tt/J0uTYja
George Singleton opens his new collection of essays, Asides, with a warning: “I hate writing essays. It’s not my gig.”
Take that, dear reader, with a few grains of corn — and the rest of what it takes to make a fine bourbon. You’ll want some libations for the next few hours of reading and laughing at such classic Singleton lines (often about his beloved dogs) as “Marty has an underbite that could get him a job as a soup ladle at any fancy French restaurant.”
Yes, short fiction is his forte, with 2023’s The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs being the latest of his 10 collections. He’s been hailed previously by the Southern Review of Books as a “sage storyteller” and “chronicler and inquisitor of southern bedlam.” The short story is his gig.
But the truth is plenty strange, too, and South Carolina-based Singleton’s writing style, choice of subject matter, and keen sense of the absurd make him a natural — sorry, George — essayist.
We talked via email about the book, writing generally, and dogs, of course:
You say you hate writing essays, but is there something freeing about them for you? The pressure’s off. It’s a fiction writer’s holiday. You can go on tangents. A piece of writing can be about barbecuing or stealing beer.
You’d think it would be more freeing, right? Not for me. I’m not sure why. I mean, with a personal essay, I should know what went on and where the essay is headed. As for tangents, I fear that I go on enough tangents when writing fiction.
In your “Apology/Preface,” you write, “There happen to be some great essayists.” Who are some essayists or non-fiction writers generally, especially in the South, you admire and recommend?
Matthew Vollmer has a great collection titled This World Is Not Your Home. I’d just read it when I, for some reason, thought, “Hey, George, you should try to gather up all those essays you’ve written over the years.” John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead is perfect. Although it’s more of a memoir — each chapter works as an essay in and of itself. There’s Boy with Loaded Gun by Lewis Nordan. I dip into that book often. Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations. There’s a slew. Oddly, maybe my favorite book of essays is Mark Twain’s What Is Man?, which has a hilarious essay in it titled “How to Make History Dates Stick.”
Your essays, your stories, your novels — your Facebook posts, everything — seem so natural, so you. Did your voice come easily as a writer? Was it just a matter of refining it, honing it, gaining experience? Or were there years of false starts and struggle, like with the rest of us? Please tell me it was the latter.
Oh, the latter, by far. I spent ages 21-28 writing three horrendous, third-person point-of-view “novels,” which added up to 1,000 pages. I didn’t know how to send the things out. And I knew that they were pretty execrable anyway. All along I had writing professors say, “You’re kind of funny. Maybe you should try writing in the first person.” I didn’t want to do that, for I feared — like an idiot — that a reader might take the “I” for “George.” When I first started writing short stories in first-person, something clicked when it came to voice. Nowadays, I try to write a couple stories in third person per year, but — like the essay — it kind of comes off, for me, like a school assignment.
Did you ever wrestle with whether you’d be taken seriously as a Southern literary writer — widely published, accepted — while writing such funny stories? Did you think you’d need to be seen as a more “serious” writer here in the land of Southern Gothic?
Believe me when I say I never think about being taken seriously or about being a “Southern writer.” I think it helps that I barely think of myself as any kind of writer, southern or not. Over the years — especially outside of the South — when it came to Q&A time, inevitably, someone in the audience would ask, “Are you a Southern writer?” What the heck? Are there options? Can I consider myself a Northeastern writer or an Inuit writer? To be honest, I think they want to know if I’m going to let loose like Faulkner, Harry Crews, or Barry Hannah and act a fool.
You write about Mabel, Dooley, River, Marty, Joan, Hershey, Inklet — what is it with you and dogs? I mean, I understand they’re superior to people. But could you explain it to readers who may not be aware?
Oh, man. It ain’t like I’m the next St. Francis of Assisi, but there’s something heartbreaking about seeing a stray dog, a thrown-out dog, a dog on the run because of fireworks. I used to live across from a tree farm where idiots continually let dogs out of their cars or trucks. Inevitably, those dogs made it across the street to my house. At one point, we had eleven — way too many. A couple of them were in their late teens, as far as we knew, so I thought our numbers would decrease soon. They just kept living. Marty made it to 20, Charlie to 22.
All of the dogs over the years are, of course, loyal, so excited when I come home, and so on. Dooley wouldn’t eat when I was out on a book tour. Mabel perched at the back door and looked for my car for days on end. Cleo — the only rescue we have now — is a female, spayed, but she gets so excited she jumps on the bed, straddles my torso, and humps like crazy. It’s kind of embarrassing.
In Asides, two essays reference Vienna sausages, first as “the miracle cure for all sick dogs” and later as an ingredient in a hangover remedy. I’m not sure what to make of this, except it does make me wonder: Are you having more fun than most writers?
Let me make it clear that I don’t get any kind of residuals from Armour’s fine line of Vienna sausage varieties…But it’s true, when a dog, over the years, starts feeling puny, a chopped-up Vienna sausage usually brings him or her back. As for hangover cures, to be honest, I think one could forget about the Viennas and just go for the habanero I have in that particular recipe. Or maybe add the pepper to, say, liver mush.
Humor isn’t just for laughs, of course. It can be a great way to explore serious subjects, especially complicated family relationships. You write about your father in multiple essays. Was that difficult writing? Did humor help?
My father was a complicated man. He died when I was 24. Over his life, he battled cancer twice and he fell 45 feet into the empty hold of a ship. I didn’t appreciate it so much growing up, but he underwent pain daily. He went from his hips being nailed back together to a few artificial hip operations that kind of worked to a final artificial hip that worked so well he didn’t limp or need a cane. He could be irrational and vicious. He went from morphine/Darvon addict to drinking a quart of vodka in one sitting. But over the years, he weaned himself, somehow.
Or he could be the most caring man on the planet. He was a big lover of stray dogs, too. When I first got caught with a nickel bag of marijuana back when I was seventeen, my mother announced that I’d be using heroin presently. I said, “Dad told me he smoked, and he never took heroin.” My mother said, “He got very sick and never did it again.” My father came home, opened the bag, ate some of it, and said, “Marijuana. We used to be able to get a duffle bag of this stuff for ten dollars, back in the Fifties,” when he was on merchant ships that traveled to the South Pacific. I said, “Mom says you got really sick and never smoked again.” He looked at my mom and smiled. He said, “No. I got really hungry and thought I was going to fall off the deck.”
Anyway, like Samuel Beckett offered up, There’s nothing funnier than human misery. It wasn’t that difficult to write about — it might’ve been had I written essays about him directly after his death in 1983. If anything, I had to worry about getting sappy or melodramatic.
Are you always writing stories? I seem to recall hearing you say on a podcast that your pace has slowed somewhat over the years, but I’m guessing a story is always percolating. What’s next? Another collection with a classic Singleton title?
I guess I’m writing stories. I have slowed down. Maybe I’ve said everything I wanted to say. I know that I’m not writing novels or essays. Or cookbooks. I don’t really have a collection ready — I guess I have enough new stories to make one but to be honest, I have no love for going out on the road to shill the thing.
Just yesterday, I did a panel at the Greenville, S.C., library with Ron Rash and Julia Franks. When it came time for audience questions, this dude couldn’t get his hand up fast enough. Then he said to me, “So you’re a functioning drunk…” And then he went into something about how, in college, these two guys would always try to save me down in the laundry room. I guess I’d written about it one time, or it showed up in an interview. Anyway, the guy said, “Do you think your life would be better if you’d accepted Jesus and weren’t a functioning drunk?”
Thus why I don’t go out in public much anymore. And I won’t until everyone reads Amy Vanderbilt’s etiquette book.
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