{"id":196412,"date":"2026-06-28T17:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T01:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196412"},"modified":"2026-06-28T17:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T01:37:07","slug":"margot-singer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196412","title":{"rendered":"Margot Singer"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the mid-1990s Margot Singer (b. 1962) holds the title of principal at McKinsey & Company<\/a> in New York. She earned it through a decade of client teams, slide decks, and red-eye flights, the analytic grind the firm asks of the people it grooms for partner. The credentials sat in place early. Harvard<\/a> first, an A.B. in History and Literature, magna cum laude, in 1984. Oxford<\/a> next, on a Marshall Scholarship<\/a>, an M.Phil. in international relations in 1986. Then consulting, and consulting paid. By the measure of the firm she had arrived.<\/p>\n

In 1997, at thirty-four, she walks out. She trades the partner track for fiction and a family and heads west, and a few years later she enrolls in a doctoral program in English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah<\/a>, where she takes the degree in 2005. The move reverses the usual line of ambition. Most people climb toward the corner office. Singer left it for a desk and a manuscript no one had asked her to write.<\/p>\n

Her writing returns to Jewish displacement and inherited memory. The families in her fiction leave Europe ahead of the catastrophe, some for Palestine, some for America, and their children carry the weight of that move whether or not they can name it. She came to the subject with the consultant’s training in her hands, an ear for structure and a habit of mapping a problem before she solved it, and she turned both toward questions a deck cannot close.<\/p>\n

Her first book, The Pale of Settlement<\/a> (2007), gathers nine linked stories under the name of the western borderland of the Russian empire where the czars confined their Jews. The recurring figure is Susan Stern, a journalist in early-2000s New York with family in Israel and German-Jewish grandparents who fled in the late 1930s. The stories move from Manhattan to Jerusalem, from a dig in the Galilee<\/a> to Kathmandu<\/a>, and they circle one question. How much of a life comes down as inheritance, and how much does a person choose?<\/p>\n

In one strand a character kneels over an excavation in the Galilee<\/a>, brushing dirt from shards that might confirm an ancient text. The work runs patient and uncertain. The past arrives broken, a piece at a time, and the digger decides what the pieces mean. Singer treats memory the same way. Her characters sift, and the sifting never settles.<\/p>\n

The collection won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction<\/a>, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and it took an Honorable Mention for the PEN\/Hemingway Award<\/a>. A debut by a former consultant in her forties had announced a writer.<\/p>\n

Ten years on came the novel Underground Fugue (2017). Singer set it in London in the weeks around the July 2005 transit bombings and built it on a borrowed architecture. She had been listening to Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach<\/a> (1685-1750) left an unfinished work, the Art of Fugue, and from it she took a shape for the novel: four alternating points of view, each voice entering in turn and carrying the theme forward, the way a fugue hands its subject from part to part. She mapped the book’s recurring images on a chart laid out like a musical staff, returning to flight, heights, stars, water, grayness, music, and the underground.<\/p>\n

The four voices belong to neighbors thrown together by chance. Esther, an art conservator, has come from New York to nurse her dying mother and to escape the grief of her son’s drowning and a marriage falling apart. Through the party wall she plays Bach on her mother’s old German piano, and the man next door hears it. That man is Javad, a neuroscientist who left Iran decades back, called now to examine a silent stranger the tabloids have named the Piano Man, a possible case of dissociative fugue. Javad’s son Amir slips at night into the city’s disused tunnels, a teenager with a private life his father barely registers. The father asks where the boy goes and gets back nothing, just out, hanging around, and the explorations carry Amir underground on the eve of the attacks. The fourth voice is Lonia, Esther’s mother, who escaped occupied Europe as a girl through a coal-mine passage that answers Amir’s tunnels across sixty years.<\/p>\n

The title carries both senses of the word. In music a fugue interweaves voices around a single subject. In psychiatry a fugue is a flight from the self, a forgetting. The Latin root, fuga, sits under refugee and fugitive. Singer wrote the migration in the book as a flight from homeland and from identity at once, then found, drafting it, that the deeper story ran the other way, toward connection, toward what her people were running to. She laid out the argument in a 2017 essay for The Paris Review<\/a>, “Can a Novel Be a Fugue?”, and traced the form back through Aldous Huxley<\/a> (1894-1963) and others who tried to give fiction the structure of music.<\/p>\n

Underground Fugue won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award<\/a> for Jewish American Fiction and the Nancy Dasher Award, and the Sami Rohr Prize<\/a> shortlisted it. Before publication Elle<\/a> named it among the year’s most anticipated novels by women.<\/p>\n

Alongside the fiction she has worked the border between criticism and craft. With Nicole Walker she co-edited Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013, second edition 2023), a book that asks what happens when a writer pushes the line between memoir, journalism, criticism, and lyric essay rather than where the line belongs. Writing programs across the country assign it. Her own habit of borrowing structures, the fugue for a novel, runs straight through the argument.<\/p>\n

Her most recent book turns the method on her own family. Secret Agent Man: Essays (Barrow Street Press, June 15, 2025) circles her father and the question that gives the collection its title, whether he once worked for intelligence. She does not solve it. She had no interest in a tribute. She wanted to know where he came from, who he was, and who she became as his daughter. The essays let the mystery stand, on the premise that the stories families tell themselves stay unfinished by nature. The book won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and reached the semifinals for the Chautauqua Prize.<\/p>\n

For more than twenty years she has taught at Denison University<\/a> in Granville, Ohio, where she holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair in Creative Writing and directs the creative writing program and, in a turn that puts the McKinsey training back to use, the university’s arts strategy. She directed the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement, the fellowships office, through the 2010s, and from 2009 to 2022 she led the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop, a summer program for high school writers. Denison gave her its Bonar Family Mentorship and Teaching Award in 2018. The fellowships and residencies stack up behind the books: the National Endowment for the Arts<\/a>, the Ohio Arts Council, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, and stays at Yaddo<\/a>, Ragdale<\/a>, and Ucross. She lives in Granville with her husband and two children.<\/p>\n

A pattern holds across the work. Singer treats a story as an inquiry, not a verdict. She digs, she sifts, she sets the voices in counterpoint, and she leaves the gaps where they fall, between what a family remembers and what the record shows, between the life a man inherits and the one he makes. The consultant who once turned ambiguity into a recommendation now keeps the ambiguity on the page, where it does the harder work.<\/p>\n

December 19, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n

We did this via email (her website<\/a>):<\/p>\n

* When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? <\/p>\n

I had absolutely no idea. I hated grownups who asked that question. <\/p>\n

* How did you find out that writing was your thing? <\/p>\n

I always loved to write. It’s one of those things that I just knew, deep down, from a very young age. And everybody told me I was good at it, which helped. <\/p>\n

* How did you avoid losing your ability to write clearly after spending so many years in higher education? Did all that education affect your style and your thinking? <\/p>\n

Since when does higher education stunt your ability to write and think?! I prefer to think that I reclaimed my writing faculties by going back to school after ten years in the business world! For a while, I could only think in groups of three bullet points. And I had picked up some awful habits, like using “impact” as a verb. <\/p>\n

* Why did you do a PhD in Creative Writing? <\/p>\n

I sort of fell into the PhD. I moved to Utah to be with my boyfriend (now my husband) who was living there at the time. I thought I’d go out for a year or two and ski and try to teach myself how to write. Because I’d quit my job, I decided to apply to the MFA program at the University of Utah, and I liked it so much that I stayed on. Also it was pretty clear that if I actually wanted to get a job teaching at the university level, I’d be better off with the Ph.D. <\/p>\n

* If Mark Twain or William Shakespeare did a PhD in Creative Writing, how do you think that would’ve affected their work? <\/p>\n

I like to think that they would have appreciated having the time to write. For me, being in the program was permission to spend a few years reading and writing pretty much whatever I wanted, while hanging around nice and helpful people gave me deadlines and urged me on. It was a gift. <\/p>\n

* Tell me how your book Pale of Settlement came to be. <\/p>\n

For a long time, I was just writing one short story after the next with no particular plan. Then one day I realized that I had a group of stories that seemed to fit together, thematically. These were the first few stories in the book. At that point the main characters all had different names, but it became clear they were really all one character, Susan. <\/p>\n

*Have you spent much time in journalism, if not, how did you research that part of the book? <\/p>\n

I spent the summer after my first year in college working for a small regional newspaper in Waltham, MA called The Middlesex News. I had the police beat. The cops liked to tease me. Every morning when I came in to read the blotter, they’d call out, “Hey, Lois Lane!” I also worked on my college newspaper, but I sold ads, I never wrote a thing—I was too intimidated. As for the research, I just read a lot. Also, I have an ex-boyfriend who is a reporter. That helped too. <\/p>\n

* What do you love and hate about teaching? <\/p>\n

I love the students, especially when they get excited about their work. I hate the whining. Neither students nor academics seem to appreciate how good they have it. <\/p>\n

* Is there any part of writing that comes easily to you? Which parts of writing are most difficult for you? <\/p>\n

None of it feels easy, though I suppose that, compared to other people, it is probably relatively easy for me to hear the “music” of a sentence in my head. What’s hard is deciding which word should come next. And then. And then. <\/p>\n

* What are the most interesting reactions you’ve had to your book? <\/p>\n

One reviewer (who shall go unnamed) insisted on the “subtle and marked allusions” in one of my stories to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” I had never read the poem until I looked it up then. Funny how that works. <\/p>\n

Also, a few people have come up to me at readings and asked me to explain how it was that Jews lived in “Palestine” before 1948. One lady actually said, “But I thought Palestine didn’t exist.” I rattled on about the Ottoman Empire and the Treaty of Versailles and the British Mandate for a while until her eyes glazed over. Now I give a little historical context before I read. <\/p>\n

* Have you spent much time in Israel and what do you love and hate about being there?<\/p>\n

My father emigrated to Israel with his family in 1939, and my uncle and cousins still live there today. When I was growing up, we went to visit my grandparents for a couple of weeks every other summer. The longest I spent there was the summer of 1983, when I took classes at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I haven’t been back to Israel since 1997. <\/p>\n

I love Israel, even though (or maybe because) as everybody knows, it’s a crazy place. But in Israel I’m always caught in the middle – not a tourist, but certainly not a local, either. It would help if I spoke Hebrew, but I don’t. <\/p>\n

* What’s the story of you and Judaism? Have you ever flirted with belief and practice? <\/p>\n

I’m not religious in the least. Although once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I got fed up with my parents’ half-assed approach to Passover and I highlighted the (Maxwell House) haggadah so my father wouldn’t skip through so much of it. On the rare occasions that we have a family seder, he still uses that haggadah with the highlighted bits. <\/p>\n

* Have you flirted with blogging? <\/p>\n

Nope. I don’t know how you find the time. <\/p>\n

* What most surprised you about the process of publishing and promoting a book? <\/p>\n

How utterly insane and irrational it is, from a financial viewpoint, to write a book. (I knew this, but it surprised me all the same). And how incredibly rewarding it has been nonetheless. <\/p>\n

* Anything weird or funny happen on the road to all of your awards? <\/p>\n

Before I submitted the book to contest, I tried going the agent route. Most of the agents I sent the manuscript to didn’t even bother to reply. One agent, however, wrote back immediately—like in a day. She rejected the book, but kindly advised me to “try to get some of the stories published in literary magazines.” In fact, nearly all of the stories already had been published in literary magazines. Not only had she not bothered to read my manuscript, she hadn’t even bothered to read my cover letter. I guess that’s not funny or weird, just pathetic. Thank god for the contests and awards – without them the short story would really be an endangered form.<\/p>\n

I call Margot Friday morning.<\/p>\n

Margot: "It did occur to me early on that I was writing about Israel in a way that a lot of people in this country don’t."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Could you elaborate?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "A lot of the American writers who have written about Israel in recent years have tended to write about it from a more religious standpoints. Nathan Englander, Tova Reich. Not so much, what does it mean to have this connection to a place when you are not necessarily particularly religious? Where your family is sorta from but only very recently. There’s been less written about the period from the 1980s until now. I’m thinking about ‘A Palestine Affair<\/a>‘ by Jonathan Wilson, set in the 1940s. There’s less written about the more contemporary period, which is a time of great questioning for Israelis, probably more Israelis than Americans questioning these Zionist ideologies that a lot of Americans are vaguely brought up with. Americans have the attitude, why should I care about Israel? It’s not a place I want to go. It’s dangerous, unpleasant. I was going there all the time. We had grandparents there. We didn’t go to synagogue. I didn’t have that kind of indoctrination that Americans get."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Am I being blind or was there an absence of ideological intent in your book?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "That’s right. I tried quite hard not to be ideological."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Are there common ways people respond to your book?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "No."<\/p>\n

"I haven’t had many responses that surprised me. I was surprised in the opposite way — over how many people get it."<\/p>\n

Luke: "There are some similiarities between you and the protagonist Susan?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "Some. Initially I started writing stories that were drawn more closely. As time went on, they evolved away from me. It was me but not me, the me that might have been had circumstances been different."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Publishing your book. Is it the greatest thing that ever happened to you?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "My children have to trump the book but it’s up there."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What was it like being a Jew in a goyisha place like Utah?"<\/p>\n

Margot: "I found myself for the first time in my life in a Jewish community. It was not what I expected when I moved there. My husband is not Jewish. Because it is such a Mormon place, the Jewish community is pretty cohesive, liberal, welcoming and inclusive. Because I have young kids and they were in pre-school, I found I was hanging out at the Jewish Community Center a lot. Unlike New York, where I didn’t feel like I needed to seek out any Jewish stuff. In Utah, I found I was part of the community. It was cool. I didn’t grow up with that. My family did not belong to a synagogue. We didn’t go to any community centers. We had this stream of Israelis who would show up to the house from time to time… I feel more isolated here in central Ohio, even though Columbus has a large Jewish community, but I’m not really a part of it."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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