Michael Gills—the irrepressible author of the stunning collection Why I Lie—recounts a night he didn’t drink with George Singleton—remembering it with the enthusiasm and clarity of one who’s looked at a corn tortilla and seen the face of Mary, Mother of God.

… July 17, 1988 to be exact—George gave a reading in Winston-Salem. My wife and I drove up, and I was really looking forward to going out drinking with George. But his girlfriend—B., I’ll call her—had absolutely one-hundred percent forbidden the two of us to drink together. So I resigned myself to buying a six-pack, cranking a country station and cruising the back roads home to Greensboro. Only my wife, Jill, for whatever reason, said, “Hell no. We’re driving home. And you’re going to cook me a bygod steak.” Good thing because at that very hour this lunatic Michael Charles Hayes walked out into the middle of Old Salisbury Road and started headshooting passersby with a .22 rifle. “Roll down the goddamn window,” he’d say. “Take this motherfucker,” he’d say and stick the barrel right up to these poor peoples’ cheeks. Listening to demons, he killed four and maimed five in a thirty-minute spree. So the truth of it is, had it not been for my sweet, stern wife, that reading of George’s would have killed the both of us.

—Michael Gills, author of Why I Lie

Photograph by Christina Storozkova.

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One night George was listening to a radio program where people could call and share local high school football scores. He called in and said, “I’ve got a score for you—Fine Arts Center 42, Washington Center 0.”

“Wow,” the host said. “I didn’t even know the Fine Arts Center had a football team.”

It didn’t, and the Washington Center was for special-needs kids.

“Oh yeah,” George said. “They’re just a bunch of skinny artists, but they’re getting better. I’ll call you next week when they play the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind.”

—Katie Burgess, once again, studied with Singleton at the Greenville Fine Arts Center

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One summer, George shimmied into the crawl space underneath Jim Clark’s house every night for a month straight and sang "Killing for Jesus" at the top of his lungs.

—Terry Kennedy, Asst. Director of the MFA Program at UNC-Greensboro

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This from the roast-worthy poet and nonfiction writer, David Kirby. When we asked if he had a George story he said…

Probably, the only issue being that all my George stories involve lawbreaking, such as the time I was waiting outside the gas station for him when George comes piling out with his arms full of Cheetos and Funyuns and the owner in hot pursuit…

—David Kirby, author of twenty-nine books, including The House on Boulevard St. and, most recently, Little Richard: the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

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This from the roast-worthy writer, Steve Almond:

I remember seeing [George Singleton] at some civic lit fest in the South—Nashville or Charlotte, one of those cities with a flower for a theme and lots of corporate sponsorship. I’m taking this elevator downstairs to the lobby and the door opens and there’s George, stinking of cigarettes with a can of beer in his hand. It’s, like, 8am and he starts howling “Steve Almond! Steve Almond!” because, see, the first time we met was in New York, at some Book Magazine junket, where he got plastered and I was (of course) stoned out of my fucking mind.

Anyways, down in Nashville or Charlotte or Richmond or wherever it was, George drags me to an abandoned bar in the hotel where he continues to drink and smoke. It emerges that he did not, in fact, sleep the previous evening. Then he looks at his watch and says, “Shit! I’ve got a panel.” And he lurches over to the panel, where he reads beautifully and answers questions in his big booming voice, very relaxed and exuberant, so that everybody is thinking, “Wow, The George seems like he must be drunk but it’s 8:30 in the morning so he’s clearly just PRETENDING to be drunk.”

So yeah, George.

At this point Almond added that he and George had been lovers, but those of you who know Almond understand that this is just a nervous tic of his.

Photograph by Christina Storozkova.

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I was visiting UNC Greensboro, where George had studied writing. George was giving a reading on campus that week. Afterwards Jim Clark [director of the MFA Program at UNCG] and a bunch of students hung out on the front steps of an old house on Carr Street. He and Jim were close friends and told some wild stories from George’s grad school days. He hung out at Jim’s house a lot back then—the house sat right across the street.

In another nearby house’s yard, there used to be a lot of what they called worm snakes, these tiny dark snakes. There must have been a burrow. So one night, George and Jim collected a bunch of them and stood outside the Baptist church on the corner of Carr and Tate, and as people poured out the door following services, George and Jim stood there clutching these tiny snakes in their upheld hands, howling, making faces—heathens trying to freak the believers.

—Aaron Gilbreath, writer and essayist

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One day we were hanging out at a “classy” bar downtown with the drama teacher who was teaching me and George fake fighting moves. We were asked to leave and went to a less classy bar where George trapped the drama teacher in the men’s room with an orange traffic pylon. When the thespian forced his way out of the toilet, he threw the pylon at George and we moved on to an even less classy bar.

—Mark Franks, English teacher at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities

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One afternoon George looked out the window (creative writing was in a portable classroom), saw the principal headed our way, quickly passed around a pack of cigarettes and told us each to take one. Moments later the principal walked in the door (along with a group of visiting parents) to find us busy workshopping, our Marlboros tucked casually behind our ears.

—Katie Burgess, studied with Singleton at the Greenville Fine Arts Center

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George Singleton. I’ve heard tales all of my writerly life. Bunyan-esque stories. A wild man. A giant personality. A trickster, a wise-ass, a snake-handler, a Guggenpulitzheimer recipient, a bawdy drunk, a newly avowed teetotaler, a genius, a madman.

I seemed to be literarily doomed to the role of following him. If I showed up to give a reading, invariably George had just blown through town. I knew that—by comparison—my readings were tame. It was like the audience had just been treated to the spectacle of a man-versus-bear wrestling match, and now I showed up with a tubercular parakeet in a cage who couldn’t much sing, what with its little parakeet coughs.

And so when I finally met George, I was immediately surprised that he wasn’t seven foot two inches tall. I was taken by the fact that he had no visible bear scars. I was most impressed that he had a significant other who was beautiful and smart and funny. Who could live with such a myth? I was surprised that George didn’t speak in tongues. I was surprised that—on the superficial level, at least—he seemed relatively normal (by writers conference standards of normal—which are not very normal—think weird homemade scarves, facial tics, Tourrette-like outbursts).

But is he really normal?

No. He is not.

What follows is mythology, eye-witness reportage written by fiction writers (who are unreliable at best when it comes to eye-witness reportage), and accounts various and sundry.

I will say, too, that there were many who refused to participate for fear of recrimination. Most who refused said that the incidents were so awful and regrettable that they could not be uttered at cocktail parties or backyard barbecues—and would have to remain the kind of dense and disturbing tale whispered from one young aspiring writer to the next—in the hushed alleyways of AWP.

We have invited George to respond to any such stories that reside here. He can disclaim them. Or he can shout out, “You lie!” in the privacy of his own home…

In any case, all of you are also invited to add to the lore.

And…before we begin, please read the WARNING.

WARNING: George Singleton stories, in roast form, may be dangerous to psyche, your sensibilities, your literary aspirations… If you do not like what you’re reading, stop immediately. If you have any adverse symptoms—nausea, dizziness—please seek medical attention.

—Julianna Baggott

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The brilliant and riveting and provocative—and sometimes woolly scarf wearing James Dean-ian—William Giraldi (a fiction editor at AGNI who’s written for The Antioch Review, The Believer, The American Scholar, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Georgia Review, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, and Poets & Writers) says this of Singleton, with occasional sprinklings of aged verse…

(Let me first add that George immediately upon meeting Giraldi gave him the nickname Cool Breeze. He also slipped the pizza guy $20 to offhandedly refer to Giraldi as Cool Breeze.)

—Julianna Baggott

We were in Joseph Smith’s moral amusement park, an otherwise pristine mountainous locale called Utah, trying to teach Mormons how to scribble stories free of mendacity and hyperbole—ahem—why evolution is superior to voodoo, and how the mammalian always trumps the reptilian. The writers’ conference had trucked in a feast of MSG for us, but libations were scarce—we had drunk most of them that afternoon—and so George and I cajoled a local nubile beauty queen in cowboy boots and an Indian getup—Indian as in Pakistan, not Pocahontas—to chaperone us—we didn’t have a car and were anyway an Everest above the legal limit—to the nearest marketplace that peddled alcoholic goods and perhaps Diet Coke. This nubile beauty queen had looks enough for her own Richter scale, plus she played Lou Reed on her radio—Lou Reed! And she not yet legal enough for the various and, uhh, voluminous. (I mention this only to remain loyal to the baboon in me, to the fact that every straight male over the age of thirty has female nubility on his mind more than, say, his offspring and salary, and, well, oxygen.)

So we get to the Utah liquor store a few paces from conference headquarters down there in pretty Park City and guess how those Mormons dissuade honest taxpayers from Dionysian enjoyment? They don’t keep their beer cold, and the beer they do have stacked triangularly in the aisles is not worth shooting with a .22 rifle, never mind drinking. We had in our grip—George had in his grip—a list from the conference goers, and on this list was listed the names of the spirits we should purchase and deliver. This market had nothing on our list, but we were directed—by a non-Mormon Cadamite who had perhaps perused Sade?—to the grocery store just around the corner that stocked name-brand beer above room temperature. There we went, and here’s what happened next:

In the cold beer aisle—blessed Mother Mary!—a youngish gal ambled up to us wearing a cap that said—guess. You’ll never guess. It said: Oxford, as in Oxford, Mississippi, and then the name of a bookstore! Yes, a famous and beloved bookstore where, it turns out, George had unraveled a yarn not very long prior. This female said, “George Singleton, I don’t even believe it. You get over here right now and give us a hug.”

Now, George has the sheen of a slightly taller Harrison Ford, and a face only a pinch handsomer than Clark Gable’s. He said, not turning his gaze from the cool colors (hear Evelyn Waugh when you read this): “My darling, George is in the process of selecting beverages. I am relied upon—nay—worshipped, so do wait one while George selects.”

And so she waited, staring at him as his eyeballs—a smidgen bloodshot, heavy with the paucity of sleep endemic to every writers’ conference—tried to focus long enough to identify a horse urine called Pabst Blue Ribbon. The woman salivated, I swear. Then—you’ll never believe this—I could barely believe it myself, but she said, “George Singleton, you run away with me right this instant. I’m in love and you’re the target.” George didn’t even look sideways from the cooler. This female fan of hilarity and brutality from Oxford, Mississippi was professing love, loyalty, and lubrication, and all George could do—and this was the most bizarre part—was recite those lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins about “Not, I’ll not carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee,” blah blah, more God talk and worries over doctrinal despair that only Hopkins and George and maybe Faust care about.

“Darling,” George said, “my heart belongs to another. Here, take this tissue.”

“Who? Who is she?”

“Not who,” he retorted, “but it. The cosmos. Stephen Hawking stuff. You wouldn’t understand. Here, wipe my brow. George sweats.”

I know what you’re thinking: how long could it possibly take to locate the Pabst Blue Ribbon? And I tell you: as long as it takes for a lass to become heartbroken by the preeminent Southern storytelling fellow in a Mormon grocery store. At the end of it all, with the maenad still cooing, George said, “Cool Breeze”—he calls me Cool Breeze—“I spy the PBR,” and he pointed. “Do be a gent and mule-carry a case. Our work is done here.” To the gal he said, “Young lady, I suggest to you the way of the samurai, or perhaps a treatise by Krishnamurti,” and lay a palm on her hair. “Stand clear of hustle. Do not bustle. Avoid outrage,” and we began to move.

“But George, our baby,” she called after us, unschooled in the facts of anthropoid reproduction.

“Cool Breeze,” he said, “let this be a lesson to you. Here, carry my cane.”

And you’re probably wondering: what about the nubile beauty queen in cowboy boots who had driven us to retrieve libations? I’m giddy to report that her having been in such close proximity to the erotic miasma that is George Singleton—the Singularity, I call it, the point of no return—rearranged the chemicals in her cerebellum and caused her to fall satanically in love with yours truly. We speak seriously now about communes and nakedness and will live, I have no doubt, happily ever etcetera.

But the Singularity is out there. So ladies, I warn you: beware.

—William “Cool Breeze” Giraldi

Photograph by Christina Storozkova.

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One day George was driving in the country and hit a snake with his truck. He went back for the dead snake, put it in a duffel bag, and took it home. He had to go to a faculty meeting the next afternoon—George really fucking hated faculty meetings—so he brought the duffel bag with him and kept it under the table. A few minutes into the meeting, he opened it up and started yelling, “Snake! Sweet Jesus!” until he had cleared the room.

—Katie Burgess, studied with Singleton at the Greenville Fine Arts Center

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George inadvertently introduced me to my last girlfriend Ansel when I was working at Powell’s Books in Oregon. The roast’s timing is nuts because I have a whole essay about it (and a comic take on the place of autobiography in fiction) coming out in the September issue of Gargoyle. But here’s the basic story:

George sent Ansel into the bookstore for a copy of the 2005 Atlantic Summer Fiction Issue. I was endlessly grateful because I assumed he was playing matchmaker, but he swears the magazine-finding mission wasn’t some cunning social engineering. He’d simply used her name in the short story “Director’s Cut” in that issue and figured I’d give her a copy. I’d met him once before when he was reading in Portland. Now whether Ansel and my ensuing romance was the unexpected fruit of a professional fibber’s benevolence or the dramatic complication of one author’s real-life game of character chess no longer matters, because meeting Ansel changed the course of my entire life, for the better.

Ansel had interned at the Oxford American where she helped fact-check George’s piece on hangover cures for the Food Issue. In their brief email exchanges, George, like any respectful gentlemen overexposed to California’s famous photographer, had assumed Ansel was a he. When he called her Mr. Elkins, she shot back, “It’s Miss to you.” Struck by her sass and the matching force of her unusual name, he tagged the mom character ‘Ansel’ in that Atlantic story, which became chapter fourteen of his latest novel, Work Shirts for Madmen. Her payment: a free copy of the magazine.

“Go to Powell’s,” he told her, “ask for Aaron Gilbreath, and tell him to give you a copy.”

Finding this out later, I was grateful George hadn’t sent the whole cast of “Director’s Cut” into the store, otherwise I would’ve been handing out magazines to the real-life namesakes of the characters Raylou, Harp Spillman, dry drunks with fused elbows named Vollis, Evan and Kumi, and some wife of an Irish Traveler named Flora Gorman, and we wouldn’t have had a leaf of paper left in that 68,000-square-foot building.

Someone paged me to the front desk over the store intercom, and when I arrived, this fragrant, shapely, delicately freckled beauty with a black peacoat and a mop of Betty Boopish ringlets said, “George Singleton told me to pick up a copy of the Atlantic.”

A surge of butterflies rushed my tightened chest like unmetabolized LSD suddenly released from my spinal cord. I blinked hard, fearing this woman was the first of what might be many debilitating acid flashbacks. Before she answered my garbled question about the Singleton reference, I released a dumb “Uhhhh,” introduced myself even though she knew my name, then tripped on my own foot while leading her to the magazine rack. Of course I bought it for her. With my employee discount—I was kind of broke. She suggested we go out for barbecue, and we scribbled each others’ numbers on magazine subscription cards that had fallen on the floor. When I emailed George to thank him for “accidentally” introducing me to this talented, bright, line-dancing, bbq-eating poet, he said, “You owe me buddy.” I agreed.

She and I fell in love, moved to New York together, traveled around the South, spent Christmas at Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo, broke up, and remain close friends.

Years later, George sat down on the steps with Ansel and me for a while and talked. I hadn’t seen him since Powell’s two years earlier, and to my surprise, he recommended I write an essay about how Ansel and I met. I told him I’d never considered it because I wasn’t sure he’d want me dragging his (I won’t say good, but) name him into my weak writing—seemed rude to use him as material.

“No man,” he said, “go right ahead. Then you can interview me and I’ll tell you a bunch of lies.”

—Aaron Gilbreath, writer and essayist

Photograph by Christina Storozkova.

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