Bookmark This is a feature that highlights new books by College of Arts and Sciences faculty and alumni, published each month. The September featured book is Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir (UNC Press) by Bland Simpson, illustrated with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson.
Q: Can you give us a brief synopsis of your book?
A: Clover Garden is a collection of tales from my wife Ann’s and my lifetime of living in a truly lovely Piedmont North Carolina spot, just a few miles out on the edge of a metropolis, Chapel Hill-Durham-and-Raleigh, a farming community full of dairies when I moved here, more recently an area of grass-growers and cattle and horse farms. Where Ann, who did most all the photography, and I live is in deep woods, where there are wild creatures aplenty to keep up with — owls, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, songbirds galore — including our three children, Susannah, Hunter and Cary — and granddaughters Astrid and Vilja!
Q: How does this fit in with your research interests and passions?
A: The grandeur of North Carolina’s many different landscapes has always fascinated me, from our coastal areas, of which I have written a good deal, across the broad Piedmont and into the jump-up country of our mountains. Clover Garden has given Ann and me a chance to regard closely our exemplary small community and the relative wilderness of forests that close in around its farms and pastures. When bears come up the Cape Fear River to the Haw and start showing up in folks’ back yards near the river, there will be stories.
Q: What was the original idea that made you think: “There’s a book here?”
A: After reading 20,000 to 30,000 words of initial writing on this project, editor Mark Simpson-Vos of UNC Press thought we could have a solid microcosmic report of one of the many small communities that make up the broad middle portion of our state. Ever since I learned of Clover Garden having had a bona fide U.S. Post Office from 1808, Jefferson’s time, till the end of the Civil War, I had been seeing our place as even more of a piece than I had before; and when I learned from John Lawson in New Voyage to Carolina of the longtime Native American cultivation of so much territory from Saxapahaw up to Hillsborough, the Old Fields, as current Orange County Register of Deeds Mark Chilton has shown us in his histories, I wanted to honor the special place that has long been Ann’s and my home.
Q: What surprised you when researching/writing this book?
A: Just how incredibly delightful it was to go back in time and tease out stories and put my words and Ann’s pictures to so many special and happy times and places, even eerie moments (like when the coyotes sing!), and to bear witness and show our enormous gratitude for it all.
Q: Where’s your go-to writing spot, and how do you deal with writer’s block?
A: I have done so much writing and editing on the road anytime The Red Clay Ramblers have been out touring that I got acclimated to working most anywhere: the back of our stretch van, a park bench, the dressing-rooms of a Broadway theater, the dining-room table at home. The main matter is being in a place where one can concentrate, so a rock-and-roll club or a bowling alley might not be quite the ticket, though for me most everywhere else is.
Simpson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing and a pianist/lyricist/composer for the Tony Award-winning Red Clay Ramblers. He is the recipient of the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts (the state’s highest civilian honor), the N.C. Humanities Council’s John Tyler Caldwell Award in the Humanities and UNC’s Edward Kidder Graham Faculty Service Award. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2020.
“At a time when sprawling development is moving ever faster in North Carolina, this bright narrative beckons us to consider what we are losing and how simple and glorious the pleasures of this verdant landscape we must protect,” writes Georgann Eubanks, author of Saving the Wild South.
Nominate a book we should feature by emailing college-news@unc.edu.
More photos from the book:
