The North Atlantic Coast : A Literary Field Guide

The first book in the Stories from Where We Live series tells about life along the shore from Nova Scotia to Delaware using stories, poems, and excerpts from journals and memoirs. For centuries, people have learned about the animals, plants, and places around them from stories passed from generation to generation. This book connects readers with estuaries and cranberry bogs, fishermen and Indians, and stories of adventure. The North Atlantic Coast inspires children to explore, observe, ponder, and protect the place they call home.

Gathering the stories of people whose lives have adapted to the unique features of the North Atlantic coast, the book moves from Wampanoag Indians to eighteenth-century seafarers to contemporary teens. Readers are invited to feel the throb and pulse of the surf as Helen Keller felt it, track an otter through a southern New Hampshire winter, harvest blueberries as the Micmac Indians once did, and join a young boy as he tries to save a lobster from the cooking pot. The lives of fishermen and women, of sailors lost in the fog, of a whale trapped in a pond in Newfoundland—all become richer and more memorable when woven into the fabric of literature. The book is divided, as are all books in the series, into four sections: Adventures, Great Places, Reapers and Sowers, and Wild Lives. The treasure trove of stories, poems, journal entries, and essays about the region is followed by a brief natural history, including a list of areas to visit to experience the wilder side of the North Atlantic Coast region.