Kreis Beall founded Blackberry Farm with her husband Sandy in 1952 with an innovative strategy to combine her creative design with her gift for hospitality. Today, the award-winning farm-to-table inn and resort in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee is sought out by travelers across the country looking for unparalleled beauty, companionship, and nourishment.After Ms. Beall lost everything she holds dear in a series of tragedies, though, she began to struggle with the paradox of being nationally renowned for her achievements as a host while her own life seemed to be rupturing at the seams. At the height of her success, Kreis suffered a traumatic brain injury and devastating hearing loss, both of which were compounded by the collapse of her thirty-six year marriage to her best friend and business partner and the tragic death of her son at age thirty-nine.
Her memoir, THE GREAT BLUE HILLS OF GOD(Convergent hardcover; February 4, 2019),seeks to answer the question: how can we invite people to our table when we have lost the loved ones who usually grace it? Thus begins Kreis’ journey of faith, narrated with incredible heart and hope as she works to restore beauty to her life, to find brand-new companions in God and in her guests, and to nourish her soul. Ms. Beall demonstrates how her job expanded to include not just exterior design and creativity, but also work on building a healthy interior relationship, learning to listen not only to those who came to visit the Farm but also to herself and to God. This is, of course, not easy work: as Ms. Beall says in one of the series of quotes outlining all that she discovered in her healing process, “All it takes is all you’ve got. And it is worth it.” Ms. Beall’s memoir is one woman’s story of determination to find profound grace in profound suffering, but it is a story that will carry meaning for a wide swath of readers. The lessons interspersed with her story offer insights on everything from hosting a holiday without family to growing a garden to learning to pray, opening a door and shining a light on a place within oneself that can become home.
ABOUT KREIS BEALL:
Born with "the gift of hospitality," Kreis Beall helped create one of the South's most enchanting destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the entertaining world and on the glossy pages of popular home and design magazines.
But beautiful exteriors and glowing accolades papered over deep inner pain. At the pinnacle of her success, a brain injury left her with devastating hearing loss. That was followed by the collapse of her thirty-six-year marriage to her best friend and business partner, Sandy Beall--and a few years later, the tragic death of her son Sam, the proprietor of Blackberry Farm, at age thirty-nine.
Alone and desolate as her marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey, to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her exterior life and work, now she must begin the hardest undertaking of all: to reclaim her interior life and soul. Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into an unassuming, 300-square foot shed with peeling paint on the exterior walls "where I met myself for the first time." Out of brokenness has come reflection, re-examination, and bit by bit, healing and meaning.
By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, and warm, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who has ever searched to find genuine beauty among their own flaws and scars.
