Ned Randle resides in southern Illinois, just across the Mighty Mississippi River from St. Louis, a region of the country that informs his writing.
From as far back as he can remember he’s been fascinated by language, impressed by the way writers, particularly poets, string words together in rhythmic patterns to paint pictures, to set mood, to evoke memories and feelings. Consequently, he began writing poetry while still in high school. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and reviews including Lummox, Poydras Review, West Texas Literary Review and The American Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Prairie Shoutings and Other Poems was published by the Spoon River Poetry Press, Btradley University, and Coffeetown Press, Seattle, published his full-length collection Running at Night: Collected Poems in 2013.
In the 1980s, after reading Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, Randle was moved to try his hand at writing fiction. He wrote at least two manuscripts which were buried in an old desk drawer until later resurrected. He was motivated by the idea of writing mainstream fiction that could incorporate the rhythm, language and literary devices of poetry. It wasn’t until he read Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain that he recognized it could be done and since then he’s been focusing on writing fiction. His fiction is imbued with lyrical language and pacing influenced by his work has a poet. His short stories have appeared in literary publications such as The Examined Life Journal, Soundings Review,
Red Earth Review, and Prism Review. His debut novel Baxter’s Friends, one of his revivified manuscripts,was released in 2013 by Coffeetown Press to very good reviews. Another, disinterred book, Cemetery Road, is tentatively scheduled for release in May 2019 by Cervena Barva Press.
They say you can tell a man by the company he keeps. In addition to the authors mentioned above, others he’s spent instructive time with are Hubert Selby, Jr., Tom Robbins, Robertson Davies, and the Russians- Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He’s also long been fascinated by the Lost Generation of writers living in Paris after World War One, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot, and later years, Henry Miller. But not so much their works, as their lives as lived in Paris.
Randle is not classically trained as a writer, although he’s studied writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Webster University and Southwestern Illinois College. He received a BS in Pharmacy and worked as a registered pharmacist for a number of years. In his late thirties he returned to school and received a law degree from St. Louis University School of Law and practiced intellectual property (patent, trademark and copyright) law for over twenty years. The writing would not wait, however and he’s devoted the last few years to writing.
Regal House Publishing will be publishing Ned Randle’s work of fiction, St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club, in the spring of 2020.
