I Won't Say Heaven: Notes on an Outer Banks Village

I Won't Say Heaven: Notes on an Outer Banks Village is a work of narrative nonfiction that focuses on Duck, North Carolina, a rapidly changing village on the northern Outer Banks, and the people, both living and dead, who have had a stake in it. This collection includes profiles, oral history, personal essay, and reportage. It attempts to recreate the past, detail the present, and speculate on the future of this once sparsely populated neighborhood of risk takers--the seafarers, fishermen, and hunters who lived there with their families. Virtually hidden until the early 1980s, Duck enjoyed several centuries of solitude and anonymity. Only within the past two decades have eager developers transformed it into the last summer boom town in Dare County. Today, rental properties far outweigh duck blinds, and realtors far outnumber commercial duck hunters and fishermen. From May until September, there are at least a thousand tourists for every Duck native, and absentee landlords own considerably more of the village than the year-round residents. I Won't Say Heaven…endeavors to chronicle these changes, to recapture some part of a place and culture already lost, to preserve what presumably will be forgotten once Duck's few remaining "old timers" are no longer here to tell stories about this Outer Banks village themselves.