The Great Blue Hills of God: A Story of Facing Loss, Finding Peace, and Learning the True Meaning of Home

The creative force behind Blackberry Farm, Tennessee’s award-winning farm-to-table resort, reveals how she found herself only after losing everything in this powerful memoir of resilience.

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.