Böcker av Bland Simpson

Between North Carolina's coastal plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains lies the Piedmont: some 250 linear miles of rolling, long-settled lands covering almost half of the state. Geologically speaking, piedmont regions are found all over the world, but North Carolina's Piedmont is among the largest in the United States, sitting along an environmental crossroads where northern and southern flora and fauna overlap, offering an incredibly rich natural diversity. Inhabited continuously for thousands of years, the state's rural heartland is today home to an increasingly dense population. Yet most who reside in the region's cities, suburbs, and smaller towns still live within reach of red-clay farmland, oak and hickory forests watered by small creeks, and rocky river valleys. These places--as they have been and as they are now--remain essential to the character of life in the South. Through his long, celebrated writing career, Bland Simpson has earned a reputation as the bard of North Carolina's coasts and sound country. Here, for the first time, he trains his attention on Clover Garden, the Piedmont community where he has lived for some fifty years. With a naturalist's eye, a storyteller's mind, and a poet's soul, Simpson guides readers into a deep engagement with the Piedmont, both as a material place and as an idea. Illustrated with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson, Clover Garden invites us to think more broadly about the natural and human history of the piedmont South. This book will be treasured by all who seek to live deeply in the places we call home.

Into the Sound Country is a story of rediscovery--of two North Carolinians returning to seek their roots in the state's eastern provinces. It is an affectionate, impressionistic, and personal portrait of the coastal plain by two natives of the region, writer Bland Simpson and photographer Ann Cary Simpson. Here Bland Simpson tours his old waterfront haunts in Elizabeth City, explores scuppernong vineyards from Hertford to Southport, tramps through Pasquotank swamps and Croatan pine savannas, and visits Roanoke River oyster bars and Core Banks fishing shanties. Ann Simpson's original photographs capture both the broad vistas of the sounds and rivers and the quieter corners of mossy creeks and country churchyards. Her selection of archival illustrations ranges from the informative to the humorous, from a turpentine scraper at work in the 1850s to a pair of little girls playing with a horseshoe crab on a Beaufort porch at the turn of the century. A memorable journey into eastern Carolina's richly varied natural world, Into the Sound Country is for anyone who would spend a while in one of America's most intriguing and underexplored areas.

Bland Simpson, the celebrated bard of North Carolina's sound country, has blended history, observation of nature, and personal narrative in many books to chronicle the people and places of eastern Carolina. Yet he has spent much of his life in the state's Piedmont, with regular travels into its western mountains. Here, for the first time, Simpson brings his distinctive voice and way of seeing to bear on the entirety of his home state, combining storytelling and travelogue to create a portrait of the Old North State with care and humor. Three of the state's finest photographers come along to guide the journey: Simpson's wife and creative partner, Ann Cary Simpson, professional photographer Scott Taylor, and writer and naturalist Tom Earnhardt. Their photos, combined with Simpson's rich narrative, will inspire readers to consider not only what North Carolina has been and what it is but also what we hope it will be. This book belongs on the shelf of longtime residents, newcomers, and visitors alike.

The extraordinary wreck of a ship, a missing crew, a message in a bottle, the lost captain's determined daughter - these are all elements of a great sea yarn. The fate of the Carroll A. Deering has remained one of the mysteries of maritime history. Simpson's chronicle keeps the story alive, a memorial to the ghost ship and its lost crew.

This memoir blends Bland Simpson's personal experience with travel narrative, oral history and natural history to create a portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people.