George Singleton: The Dogs Keep Barking, but the Caravan Moves On

  I attended the authors confab at the Greenville SC Co Library Jan 20 before Henry's BBQ and the Fuman basketball game versus WCU. My friend Ron Rash was on panel with Furman alum George Singleton and a Ms Franks who is writing a novel about Copper Hill NC. She says should be out in a couple years. I'm excited about it.

      Somewhere I rubbed  Singleton the wrong way. There were two George Singleton's of the mid 80s grads of Furman, the writer and the basketball player. Singleton the baller was scouted heavily for the NBA

    The writer has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and other lofty climes. He's not Marshall Frady FU 63, but neither am I.

      After 45 minutes of a well moderated panel conversation with a lot of jocularity--I think you can find it online as was live streamed--I got the first question in the remaining 15 minutes. I said George my Dad was a Baptist minister and I remember about ten years ago in the Furman magazine you had a quip about some kid on your hall at Furman who repeatedly tried to tell you about Jesus and save your soul. By your own testimony your are somehing of a functional alcoholic and I just wonder if on occasion you second guess yourself and thought about forsaking the notoriety and yearn to have spent your days more quietly as a Baptist Deacon in some small Upstate SC town you often ridicule.

    He called me out and said Your Stephen Fox aren't you. I asked what does it matter  , you are on the panel and I am not, but yes I am that Stephen.

     I thought he had a good answer referencing somebody who said the dogs  bark, but the caravan moves on.

      George, a Furman grad, now teaches at the Methodist school, Wofford, in Spartanburg SC, a town he shares with Trey Gowdy.

        Then I asked Rash a question about Cormac McCarthy. Wanted his take on Hal Crowther's view Cormac McCarthy coulda mined East Tennessee more before he moved South west. After the program and a visit to another room with up and coming Upstate authors, I caught Rash in the hall with his wife as they were leaving. Turns out wife Caroline is from Belton Honea Path where she mighta known Lillian Ashley but I didnt have presence of mind to ask. Told Ron the Fox Store frequented by Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God was actual store owned by the sons of my Grandfather's Fox's first cousin near the Walden's Creek UMC in Wears Valley Tennessee outside Pigeon Forge down the road from Chinkey Pen where Cousin Marshall Fox was cut behind the knee and bled to death in 1907. His grave is in the church cemetery.