Coming soon
An introduction to this space and an announcement about a future post you'll find here: "Doublehead's Gold: Myth is the Heat of a Dubious Truth"
This is Carp’s Bench: The Mountain Draws Itself.
That devil Forrest says…:
Welcome to Carp’s Bench
Every Southern town has a bench that collects more history than any archive ever could.
You know the one — scarred oak slats outside a bait shop or courthouse, still warm from whoever left before you, holding the smell of burnt tobacco and river wind. That’s where this publication sits.
Carp’s Bench is a seat at that long conversation: stories from the South’s backroads where folklore, faith, and fieldwork keep crossing paths. It’s where The Curse of Clyde began its slow unspooling, and where Doublehead’s Gold will surface — somewhere between gossip and gospel, myth and memory.
What This Space Is
I built this bench for stories that don’t fit neatly into categories:
Southern reportage dressed as ghost story.
Creative nonfiction that borrows from sermon and police blotter alike.
Notes from rivers, archives, and half‑believed legends.
Every post here is a kind of listening — to land, to rumor, to the strange persistence of people who refuse erasure.
What’s Next
The first new series, Doublehead’s Gold, starts soon. It threads De Soto’s lost expedition through Cherokee country and into the modern Shoals, asking what we really mean when we say something was taken — and what gold still buys us when we dig deep enough.
Subscribers get:
Essays, maps, and field notes from the investigative trips
Early transcripts from Carpicola’s reading rainbow trout
Behind‑the‑bench writings on art, addiction, and faith in place
Why the Bench
Because you can’t share a story standing up. A bench demands pause. It’s where locals trade legend for truth, then switch them back again just to see which one fits the day better.
Pull up a seat. The Bench is open.
Coming Soon: “Doublehead’s Gold”
Some stories won’t stay buried.
This spring on Carp’s Bench—the Mountain is Speaking Now, I’m unearthing the legend that threads Hernando de Soto’s lost gold to Chief Doublehead’s last breath along the Tennessee River—a myth where greed, faith, and frontier fury still glitter beneath the silt.
Part history, part haunting, “Doublehead’s Gold” traces what we inherit when legend masquerades as fact.
Stay tuned for excerpts, maps, and field notes from the Shoals country.