George Singleton is best known for his short stories, ten volumes of them, and especially for his singular, bizarre sense of humor. He invents small plots with characters behaving just this side of unbelievable. This collection, however, of 28 short pieces is, presumably, comprised of true stories. Singleton finds this somewhat limiting, but with his eye for the odd, not much. These pieces can be thoughtful, poignant but quite often the “real” life around him is as bizarre as his fiction.
For example, he writes of “Strange Love in a Small Pasture.” It’s not what you might think. A pot-bellied pig named Blackie, escaping a house trailer fire, went to live in a nearby pasture, directly under an old sway-backed mare named Candy, and wouldn’t come out. Candy would not let Blackie be taken away and so the pig remained, directly under the mare, for 12 years until Candy’s death, and then some. An observer reports: “the pig was talking to Candy, and laying against her, the pig was frantic, nudging her, pulling on her tail, then going over to pull on her mane….”
Animals figure large in Singleton’s work—mostly dogs. He lives at the edge of a 500-acre tree farm, where “hammerheads,” as he calls them, from the nearby towns come and dump unwanted dogs. George and his wife, Glenda, take them in, dozens over the years. It keeps them busy and occasionally becomes a special challenge when leaving instructions for the dog sitter. Some dogs can eat with others; some can’t. Some eat an appropriate amount and then quit. Others eat their own food and anything another dog leaves, then throw up. One eats and then urinates in her bowl. And so on.
Several of these stories are about his childhood, of course. Each Southern writer gets one. Singleton writes about his father, a complicated fellow it seems, but is adamant that unlike many Southerners, he is NOT interested in Ancestry.com. He already knows more than he needs. Like many another working writer, Singleton has written an entire volume of writing advice. Here he includes an essay entitled “How to Write Stories, Lose Weight, Clean Up the Environment, and Make $1,000,000.” The short version is: each day write 1000 words, then go out and collect 50 aluminum cans from the side of the road. Use the money to buy stamps. When you sell something, don’t move out of your trailer. Invest the money in mutual funds. Wait 20 years.
Singleton is a lifetime South Carolinian, and like other Southern authors in states that are not Mississippi, wants to remind people that Faulkner and Welty are not all of it. South Carolina has Conroy and Dickey and Padgett Powell and Dorothy Allison, Ron Rash, Josephine Humphries and William Price Fox, and of course, George Singleton.
