All Posts By

Randall Ivey

Blog

The Peoples’ Songs

A review of Confederate Poets and Poems, Volume II and III (Shotwell Publishing) edited by Clyde N. Wilson. For anyone who might say I do not have a spine, I would refute him or her by saying, “I most certainly do.  It’s been damaged twice.  And I have the walker, cane, and wheelchair to prove it.” My first bout with spinal…
Randall Ivey
June 30, 2026
Blog

Farewell!

A Review of Wendell Berry’s Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story by Randall Ivey I have never worked on a farm.  My paternal grandparents did.  They were cotton farmers and dabbled some in tobacco, although their chief means of subsistence was work in the textile plants that used to occupy the South Carolina upcountry like kudzu.  I have gotten…
Randall Ivey
May 19, 2026
Blog

Reunion with the Dead

Hey, there!  Hey!  I remember you!  You Will McMillan, ain’t you?  That’s right.  Me and you went to Compton High together.  But you probably don’t remember me.  We wasn’t close or nothing.  Knew each other to say hey when passing, but that’s about all.  You was a brain.  Always had your face in a book.  Always reading and studying.  Not…
Randall Ivey
September 18, 2025
Blog

A Man of the South

With Father’s Day 2024 come and gone, I have had the opportunity to consider the coincidence that occurred that weekend – namely my watching two superb westerns from different decades, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West from 1958 and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales from 1976.  As a longtime aficionado of the western, I should, of course, have already…
Randall Ivey
July 10, 2024
Blog

Ol’ Fred

FRED CHAPPELL was America's greatest living writer. Of that I have no doubt, not that the modern miasma of contemporary letters offered him much serious competition.  (His only rivals for the epithet were Cormac McCarthy, now passed, and Wendell Berry, nearing ninety.) He was a master of most every major literary genre - poetry, fiction, criticism, et al. His scope…
Randall Ivey
January 18, 2024
Blog

Landscape

The sun, a single red eye, burnt what was left of the earth, holding everything beneath it in a heavy, never-dimming glare.  It never left the sky, not even in those hours once reserved for night and the stars. The land lay red and uneven under it like flayed flesh, gorges deep and hills steep.  Almost nothing remained, all flora…
Randall Ivey
July 10, 2020
Review Posts

An Aesthetic Feast

A review of An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories (Green Altar Books, 2019) by Catharine Savage Brosman One of the most felicitous occurrences in literature is when a first-rate poet turns his or her talents to the writing of short fiction.  Among those who have done so, turning out first-rate stories, have been William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop,…
Randall Ivey
January 14, 2020
Blog

In Search of the Real Southern Democrat

It was an indelible moment, one that has resonated with me up to the present day. My father and I had gone to whatever permutation of Wal-Mart existed at that time in Union County in late 1982.  (Maybe it was still Edwards then, maybe Big K; the chronology is no longer clear so many years later.)  He was a supervisor…
Randall Ivey
February 21, 2019
Review Posts

I’ll Take My Stand

A review of I'll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners (LSU, 2006). In this age where the homogenization of our culture is nearly complete, thanks largely to widespread media and rampant industrialism, I'll Take My Stand remains as fresh and relevant as the day it was published more than seventy years ago. Instead of indulging in reactionary daydreams or nostalgia,…
Randall Ivey
April 3, 2018
Review Posts

That Old Black Magic

A review of Fred Chappell, Familiars, LSU Press, 2014. The cat, the felis silverstrus catus, both wild and domesticated, has exercised a considerable fascination for the creative artist throughout the thousands of years of Western and non-Western civilization.  One need only peruse art and history books containing sculptures of the animal originating in Byzantium and Egypt, among other ancient locales,…
Randall Ivey
September 12, 2017
Review Posts

Preserving the Good

A Review of Catharine Savage Brosman, Southwestern Women Writers and the Vision of Goodness, McFarland Press, 2016. The term “man of letters” has fallen largely into desuetude over the last few decades, and for good reason. Very few such entities exist nowadays on the literary landscape either in this country or elsewhere. One is more apt to come across a…
Randall Ivey
July 18, 2017
Review Posts

Death of Kin

“Family’s getting scarce,” Cousin Jeanette says As Uncle Wallace, her daddy, lies In hospital bed in Union Lashed with tubes that keep him fed. Wallace has outlived all siblings save one, Uncle Autry, “Aut,” father of two sons And one daughter; he fascinated us Younguns with missing thumb. Before them we’ve lost Uncles Russell, Doug, And Hub and Aint Bertie.…
Randall Ivey
December 13, 2016
Review Posts

A Plinth of Night

Every night he watched them, this strange trio, the two men and the woman (that is what it looked like, a woman, that is what it appeared to be in the darkness), make their way by foot along the side of the highway and go over the railroad tracks and disappear to goodness knew where.  Then, maybe an hour or…
Randall Ivey
October 31, 2016
Review Posts

Old Man’s Burden

Mr. Newhouse’s daughter in Atlanta no longer knew what to do about her younger son, Kyle.  He was completely out of control.  He violated curfew regularly.  He cultivated distasteful friends and assumed their worst characteristics and generally behaved with unwarranted sullenness and disrespect.  He had been given everything, after all: a private school education, trips, without chaperone, to places like…
Randall Ivey
March 1, 2016
Review Posts

Pride

Variation on a theme by Chekhov “Oh, Eldridge. Well. Ain’t seen you in a week. I thought they must have re-routed you or something, boy.” Eldridge Sartor had spotted Mr. Hitt moseying from his front door to the mailbox as soon as he pulled up. “Naw, sir,” Mr. Sartor replied. Even though Mr. Hitt was now standing no more than…
Randall Ivey
September 29, 2015
Blog

He Loved To Tell The Story: An Appreciation of William Price Fox (1926-2015)

From personal experience I can draw any number of anecdotes that would vividly personify William Price Fox, the South Carolina novelist, story writer, and chronicler of the South who died in April at age eighty-nine, a few days following his birthday, another vibrant person claimed by the scourge of Alzheimer’s. This occurred in 1988. I hitched a ride with Bill…
Randall Ivey
September 21, 2015
Review Posts

Crow Boy

This story is for Ben Greer, fellow upcountryman. The South Carolina Upcountry, 1955 He hears them talking through the swinging door. Now what are you crying for? He’s the same. Everything’s the same, I tell you. I know but I can’t help but worry. About what? He’s the same and as healthy as can be expected. You’re a man, Dr.…
Randall Ivey
July 7, 2015
Blog

My Father Attends Funerals

For Julian Ivey In a time when the dead are forgotten As quickly as yesterday’s news, My father attends funerals In coat, tie, and mirror-bright shoes. This formality is largely gone now When people gather to see off the dead. They might come in workclothes, Tee-shirts, overalls, and caps to cover their heads. Not my father. A child of the…
Randall Ivey
September 9, 2014
Review Posts

Second Sight

Revival week at Covenant Baptist Church in Compton, South Carolina, was a time of great festivity. Some claimed it rivaled, in spectacle and variety, the state fair in Columbia. Indeed it had gotten to be such a large event, with ever increasing attendance year by year, that the church organizers, ten years before, moved the proceedings from the humble brick…
Randall Ivey
July 10, 2014
Review Posts

The Importance of Reading in the Digital Age

Were it not such a looming and very possible prospect on our collective cultural horizon, a discussion of the demise of the book in its traditional form, that is, a compendium of knowledge bound in the confines of paper, cloth, and glue, would be not only amusing but almost surreal. The book has always been with us, ever since Mr.…
Randall Ivey
June 4, 2014