Little Rivers and Waterway Tales: A Carolinian's Eastern Streams

Bland Simpson regales us with new tales of coastal North Carolina’s “water-loving land,” revealing how its creeks, streams, and rivers shape the region’s geography as well as its culture. Drawing on deep family ties and coastal travels, Simpson and wife and collaborator Ann Cary Simpson tell the stories of those who have lived and worked in this country, chronicling both a distinct environment and a way of life. Whether rhapsodizing about learning to sail on the Pasquotank River or eating oysters on Ocracoke, he introduces readers to the people and communities along the watery web of myriad “little rivers” that define North Carolina’s sound country as it meets the Atlantic.

With nearly sixty of Ann Simpson’s photographs, Little Rivers joins the Simpsons’ two previous works, Into the Sound Country and The Inner Islands, in offering a rich narrative and visual document of eastern North Carolina’s particular beauty. Urging readers to take note of the poetry in “every rivulet and rill, every creek, crick, branch, run, stream, prong, fork, river, pocosin, swamp, basin, estuary, cove, bay, and sound,” the Simpsons show how the coastal plain’s river systems are in many ways the region’s heart and soul.

Bland Simpson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and pianist for the Red Clay Ramblers.

Photographer Ann Cary Simpson is a consultant with Moss + Ross of Durham and interim director of NC Catch, a nonprofit supporting fishermen and local seafood.