Recently in Fly Fishing Books Category

I had the pleasure of spending a lunchtime with Jerry Hubka and Rick Takahashi not too long ago. The two fly fanatics, ex-art teachers and long-time friends told me about the challenges of putting together their new 1000-plus-pattern book on midges. "It just kept growing and growing," Takahashi said. "When we started, we thought that 400 patterns would be a lot to handle." Hubka commented, "The hardest part ended up being deciding which patterns we couldn't include."

Modern Midges: Tying and Fishing the World's Most Effective Patterns
was published by Headwater Books in September and contains an enormous library of flies and recipes. If you fish or tie midges, I think the book belongs on your list.

Charlie Meyers also wrote about the book for the Denver Post: "The book on midges just completed by Fort Collins anglers Rick Takahashi and Jerry Hubka ranks among the most useful fly-tying compositions to hit the shelves in years."

Tagewahnahn (pronounced tag-a-wa-non) is a native American name for landlocked Atlantic salmon, which live only in parts of Maine, New Hampshire and the eastern Canadian provinces. If the species itself wasn't exclusive enough, imagine a book that talks only about 2.75 miles of river that is famous for its landlocks and the heritage that surrounds fishing for them. As is often the case, though, the microcosm provides a perfect perspective from which to look at fly fishing traditions as a whole, and Dennis Labare's Tagewahnahn: The Landlocked Salmon at Grand Lake Stream (www.glssalmon.com; hardcover; 216 pages; $65) does a great job of making a single location meaningful to a much larger audience than local guides and anglers.

Since Labare's book came out last year it's gotten plenty of media attention, so there's no need to heap on praise, but I will add that the book itself is very well produced and that it has added more then $5400 to the coffers of Trout Unlimited and the Grand Lake Stream Historical Society -- both good reasons to give it a closer look. A review on DownEast.com is especially worth reading, and you can find an excerpt on the Fly Rod and Reel Web site.

John Holyoke reviews Randy Spencer's new 316-page book on life and fishing around Maine's Grand Lake Stream. "Spencer never uses three words when one would do. And the result is a stunning portrait of a truly special place, illuminated by the people who live for their yearly visits to those remote Maine woods." In the Bangor Daily News.

Where Cool Waters Flow on Amazon.

This morning Keith Barton writes an extensive review of Mike Valle's new book on the history and lore of Catskill dry fly tying on Singlebarbed.com. "Considering the materials and techniques of the day, no bobbins, 3/0 silk thread held with clothes pins, the lack of genetic hackle, the paucity of blue dun - a color that permeates Catskill flies, few synthetics, and no domestic supply of fly tying items - most ordered from England, their skill, especially the Dette's and Rube Cross, is astounding."

You can also read an excerpt on the Quill Gordon from Tying Catskill Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

Any public perception of Norman Maclean's father -- who famously blurred the lines between fly fishing and religion -- was forever changed by Tom Skerritt's 1992 portrayal of the man. But look at the remarkable resemblance between Skerritt and the Rev. John Norman Maclean, and how involved the actor still is in the movie and its after-effects, and you might begin to wonder who changed who more.

The Missoula, Montana church where the elder Maclean once preached will honor him and his son with a monument to be unveiled this weekend.

"The reverend died in late 1941 at age 78. Clara, 10 years his junior and herself a remarkable leader in the church and the family, died at 79 in 1952. Both are buried in the Missoula Cemetery, as is Paul, around whose murder in Chicago in 1938 Norman constructed the plot of 'A River Runs Through It.'" Kim Briggeman of The Missoulian.

More often than not, humor provides a perfect escape. After two months of scrutinizing new fly gear and wondering how we could possibly say something intelligent about more than two hundred products, we were very happy to see Jack Ohman's new book Angler Management: The Day I Died While Fly Fishing in the mail.

We'd heard from editor Jay Nichols (Headwater Books) that it was hilarious, and after reading a good bit of it I can say that's an understatement. This week we're happy to share a chapter from the book called "Gear We Don't Use." Thankfully, we don't have to review the Myrtlewood Trout Call on MidCurrent.

Yesterday Morgan Lyle called Mike Valla's new book Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies (Headwater Books, August 2009, 534 color photos, 252 pages) a must-read for those who love fly fishing and fly tying. As Lyle says, "Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies is above all a fly-tying book, and tiers will love learning the details of how the masters plied their craft. Precisely what vises they used, what surgical instruments they used as hackle pliers, what color thread they used (you might be surprised), what they discovered when they dissected Rube Cross's flies - this stuff is priceless."

Buy Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

I'm never sure whether to call Ted Leeson the thinking fly fisher's writer or the thinking man's fly fisher. I don't suppose it matters, since he qualifies as both. His brand new book Inventing Montana (Skyhorse Publishing, August 2009, 233 pages, hardcover) only moves him further up the list of authors who see fly fishing from inside out and outside in at the same time. I've read the book twice now, and I hope to get back to it once more when the temps drop to five degrees and the mind grows sluggish. It might be even better then.

Read Leeson's chapter on flies and their fishers and I guarantee you will never look at fly selection the same way. This week we're happy to share a short excerpt from that chapter, "Patterns of Behavior," on MidCurrent.

I read Jim Casada's new Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider's Guide to a Pursuit of Passion last week in something of a state of wonder. You just don't get a lifetime of wisdom packed into most guidebooks anymore. Many of the regional guides I read are adequate but incomplete -- good enough to get you started, but hardly more than a handoff when it comes to specific stream knowledge. Casada's book is a clear exception.

His 35 guides to locations in North Carolina and Tennesse are rich with history, descriptions of local flora and fauna, access details, and local rigging, technique and fly selection advice. To top it off, he gives elevation and mileage graphs, with waypoints, for major streams, and provides a photography section at the end with some very interesting historical images. But the soul of this book is Casada's friendly, informative writing. I never felt like I was trudging through details in order to absorb the content and put the book away. More often I was delighted by some anecdote or reference that made me sense I was getting more than the full picture.

You can order the book as either a softbound paperback ($24.95) or a hardback ($37.50) from High Country Press, 1250 Yorkdale Drive, Rock Hill, SC 29730 or by calling 803-329-4354. For more info, visit Casada's Web site at www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com.

From last week's Chattanoogan.com: "Sam Venable, a long-time student of the Smokies and columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, comments that 'a detailed how-to book like this can only come from someone who has 'been there, done that' and knows how to put those experiences on paper. If your passion is trout of the Southern highlands, this book will prove as indispensable as a favorite rod and wading boots.'"

New on MidCurrent this week: a chapter from Mike Valla's brand new book on Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies. "Quill Gordon" traces the history of the famous eastern fly pattern from the those who first recognized the value of stripped peacock quill to the tiers who turned them one of the most recognized patterns of all time. Valla's insight into the personal whims of the great tiers is accompanied by images of their final product, courtesy of the Catskill Fly Fishing Museum and Center. Even for those who never plan to visit an eastern U.S. trout stream, it's a unique look at fly pattern evolution.

Buy Valla's new Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

In this morning's Denver Post, Charlie Meyers reviews Pat Dorsey's latest, Fly Fishing Tailwaters: Tactics and Patterns for Year-Round Waters. "Once Pat Dorsey gets going with this book thing, there's no stopping him, much to the delight, and benefit, of Western fly-fishermen. Dorsey, arguably the leading trout guide in the region, waited until his 43rd birthday to start spilling out in print all he had learned in a lifetime of intense angling."

Free shipping on Fly Fishing Tailwaters from MidCurrent.

"Four years sharing that trailer, then Maggi showed up on the river that summer. She lived in Billings and liked to fish. Spent some time in the shop and over at that little café across the street. She was fun, and we all liked her. But she got her eye on old Starbuck, and he fell hard." In Gray's Sporting Journal, Trigg White spins a tale about a Bighorn River guide whose escape from the river comes with a price.

D'Arcy Egan's late summer reading list begins with a humorous aside: don't forget to check your leader every once in a while to be sure there's a fly attached -- especially if you're fishing at night. "We were soon wading a gravelly beach in the middle of the night, casting small flies for big stripers. A number of times, while making a back cast in the darkness, I broke off a fly on the rocky beach. When you're waving a fly-less line, you're fishing on credit." On Cleveland.com.

The handful of truly exceptional guides I have fished with all have this in common: every day they want to learn something new. As Denny Breer once said: "Isn't it true that you want to learn as much as you can about things you love?"

It's been only eight months since Breer died while tending his pigeon coops near his beloved Green River in Utah. As a reminder of what a remarkable guide and person he was, this week we're publishing the chapter Andrew Steketee and Kirk Deeter wrote about him in their book Castwork: Reflections of Fly Fishing Guides in the American West. Deeter commented after Breer's death that the one lesson he took away from fishing with the famous guide was this: "'Time on water equals fish.' Indeed. And time on water is precious."

The last time thundering herds of elk stampeded down Paradise Valley was probably more than a couple of years ago, but thanks to Wall Street Journal writer Alexandra Alter for showing us pics of Jim Harrison's summer writing and fishing quarters. Her story about the famed author's residence includes menu lists, a slide show, and moments of envy: "Earlier this summer, Anthony Bourdain, chef and host of the Travel Channel's food show 'No Reservations,' visited Mr. Harrison's home during a trip to Livingston. Mr. Harrison cooked an elk and antelope stew and grilled about two dozen doves, washed down with several bottles of Côtes du Rhône. 'Basically, I want to be Jim when I grow up,' Mr. Bourdain said in an email." (Thanks to reader James Card for this link.)

The upcoming publication of Ernest Hemingway's "restored" A Moveable Feast by grandson Sean offers yet another example that spicy family intrigue can have a legacy all its own. The book -- a memoir of Hemingway's expatriate years in Paris -- was originally edited by Ernest's fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and published in 1964, four years after Hemingway's death. Now Sean Hemingway (who was encouraged to do the project by Pauline's son Patrick) wants to set the record straight by retelling the various aspects of Hemingway's marriages that might have made Mary uncomfortable. Apparently Scribner, who is printing 16,000 copies of the latest version, feels the minutiae of Papa's personal relationships still titillates plenty of readers.

"Patrick, 81, said he did not blame Mary, who died in 1986, for her editing. 'I think she did an excellent job, given the circumstances of the time, he said. But he speculated that Mary, who had had a falling out with Pauline, might have wanted to curry favor with Hadley, who owned the rights to a painting by Miró that Mary wanted." Motoko Rich in The New York Times.

Tom Rosenbauer's latest podcast covers reading high- and low-water conditions in trout streams, saltwater tide conditions, food availability and current flows. "When the water is really low, you want to look for the main flow in the stream, the thalweg. If you trace the main flow of water through the stream. And you can find that line by looking for a debris line or foam line -- all the bubbles that trace a line down the thalweg. So the fish are going to be closer to that current because that's where the food is."

Rosenbauer's recent revision of his classic Orvis Guide to Prospecting for Trout goes into great detail on all aspects of trout hunting.

Environmental writer Doug Peacock gives kudos to John Holt's new Yellowstone Drift (AK Press, June 2009, 275 pages), after first delivering a suberb history of "Elk River" country. Peacock says Holt was the perfect writer for this book. "Hovering over the 671-mile journey is Holt's own thunderstorm of a life; the man is not hesitant taking a stand, whether it's a rage against the livestock-centric insanity of killing free-ranging bison that wander beyond Yellowstone Park's boundary or quietly summoning the 500-year flood that would wipe out all the garish trophy homes littering the river's flood plain."

Yellowstone Drift: Floating the Past in Real Time on Amazon.

Scott Sadil's new collection features twelve stories that explore the human condition, as revealed by rivers and fishing. From "Chernobyl, Idaho," about a father-son fly fishing trip, to "All Over the Map," about personal escape and the connections between home and marriage, all of Sadil's narratives manage to braid fly fishing into observations on the human heart. Sadil's book, which comes out in July, has already received this endorsement from John Gierach: "When I read my first Scott Sadil story I decided he was the real thing. This collection confirms his status as a writer we should read."

Sadil is the author of two previous books -- the memoir Angling Baja and the novel Casting from the Edge -- and he's written for several fly fishing and outdoors magazines.

Lost in Wyoming: Stories (Barclay Creek Press, July 2009, 208 pages) on Amazon.

Saying that "Afghanistan will become again the tourist destination for Central Asia, for Americans, Europeans, for people of all the world. You can hold me to that. In five years. You can grab me by the tie and hold me to it," Prince Mostapha Zaher, head of Afghanistan's environment agency, holds out much hope for future eco-tourism, according to Peter Graff of Reuters.

Is it possible that Afghanistan could one day become a serious option for fly fishers? As Nick Mills noted last year, the potential is certainly there. "As for the origin of the brown trout, Jean-José wrote a book, La pêche à la truite en Afghanistan, in which he theorizes that the trout migrated from Europe in meltwater streams at the end of the last Ice Age."

By the way, if you care to familiarize yourself with the possibilities, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby, is regarded as a classic of adventure travel literature, and it's a great read even if you never plan to leave home.

John Larison, a former fly fishing guide and now writing instructor at Oregon State University, has a new novel coming out in July. It's Larison's second "fly fishing book," coming out about a year after The Complete Steelheader, but this one has little to teach about technique and strategy. Instead it tells the story of a troubled fishing guide in the tiny Oregon town of Ipsyniho, where artists and loggers mingle with dope growers and fly fishing guides. While I've only just gotten into the book and can vouch for Larison's ability to engage the reader, Ted Leeson says the new work is a "skillfully told story about a place unraveling under the pressures of change and betrayal." If you're looking to build a summer reading list, Northwest of Normal (Barclay Creek Press, July 2009, 240 pages) would be an excellent place to start.

"The trail continues through fish pools filled with local species and displays of what they feed on. One instructive panel shows a model of a fish brain next to that of a human. 'This is one of our little jokes,' says Ms. Ratcliffe. 'Notice the difference in size, but probably 11,000 books have been written by one on how to catch the other.'" From Ann Landy's article about the Adirondacks Wild Center in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

I'm not sure anyone ever forgets their first flailing submission to the strength of a fast-moving trout river. The most athletic swimmers are easily frightened -- as well they should be. But it's in the period afterward, when you are sitting on the bank, getting warm and reflecting on your mistakes, luck and future, that real doubts set in.

In case you've forgotten the experience, an excerpt from Scott Sadil's upcoming fiction collection Lost in Wyoming in Gray's Sporting Journal will have you losing your footing in no time at all. "At the lip of the chute, Sarah's downstream progress abruptly stops. She's spun by the current, lifted, and pulled straight and forced flat on her stomach into the surging surface before she understands that her rod or line has snagged on something. Head up, current pressed to her neck, she tightens her grip, refusing to let go of the most expensive piece of sporting equipment she's ever owned."

Lost in Wyoming: Stories (Barclay Creek Press, July 2009, 208 pages) on Amazon (pre-order).

In the Miami Herald, Susan Cocking reviews Stu Apte's memoir, which he self-published in December of last year. "Apte doesn't shy from the intimate details of his personal life, such as a recent bout with cancer; his painful divorce from his wife of 33 years that nearly caused him to take his own life; and his joy at finding new love in his late 60s."

Of Winds and Tides on Amazon.

Novelist and fly fisher T. Jefferson Parker has written some very popular books in the past several years, among them Silent Joe (Hyperion, April 2002, 416 pages), which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best Novel and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and his latest, The Renegades
(Dutton, February 2009, 352 pages). Turns out his idea of a good time is "a beautiful river full of fat trout." "In his orderly studio surrounded by things he loves, T. Jefferson Parker creates. He is now studiously working on his seventeenth novel amidst favorite art pieces, shelves of books and a square-jawed fish. It's not a real fish but a fiberglass rendering of one called a 'permit' that he caught and released in the Yucatan." Nathalie Taylor in the Fallbrook, California Village News.

Author John Gierach acquires a new custom cane rod and decides on a less-than-perfect test: fishing the slush of Colorado's South Platte. "I've repeatedly promised myself that I won't fish if it's so windy I can't keep my hat on or so cold the line freezes, but most years I end up doing both a few times anyway, sometimes by accident and occasionally on purpose, because, as Annie Dillard said, 'Tomorrow is another day only up to a point.'" In Gray's Sporting Journal.

A new collectible quarterly journal that features high-quality printing and content focused on landscapes, people, conservation and a "culture of adventure" will come to market this August, according the publishers. The Flyfish Journal -- which will have a cover price of $12.95 (US), and a basic subscription rate of $39.99 (US) -- will be less about the how-tos of fly fishing and more about unique writing, photography and people.

I spoke with managing editor Andrew Steketee yesterday and asked him how, at a time when many niche magazines are struggling to stay afloat and periodical publishing seems to be moving toward the Web, The Flyfish Journal hopes to have an impact.

"You mean, why are we getting into paper when everyone thinks it's time to get out? We don't think all paper is going away, and particularly not compelling print and design in a collectible format. The nature of mass production is devaluation at one end, and increased valuation at the other. Obviously, we think a lot of $5 magazines and dailies are going to evaporate. But we also believe a coffee-table journal devoted to the inspiration, icons and culture of fly-fishing and subsidized by dedicated subscribers and select advertising/distribution partners will stand the test of time. We think there's room in the space for a fresher publication from a content and design perspective."

Read yesterday's press release in the extended entry.

Ken Hanley's Tying Furled Flies received the first-place award in the book category from the Outdoor Writers Association of California (OWAC) at their April 19 meeting. For more info on the book visit HeadwaterBooks.com.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Writing about novelist W. D. Wetherell's new Yellowstone Autumn (University of Nebraska Press, March 2009, 178 pages), Jenny Shank recites a lesson learned in college about walking through life upright rather than being dragged along by its currents, quoting a favorite professor and T. S. Elliott: "Father Dunne would say that fly fishing, an activity that seems to bring Wetherell contemplative, quiet engagement with nature, delivers him to what T.S. Eliot called 'the still point of the turning world'--from which he can make the wisest decisions." Wetherell's new book chronicles his attempt to find insight for post-middle age during a fishing trip to the Park. In New West.

Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land (American Lives) on Amazon.

Jim DuFresne has authored an updated and expanded version of Gerth Hendrickson's series on Michigan's classic trout streams. The Angler's Guide to Ten Classic Trout Streams in Michigan, says Howard Myerson on MLive.com, is a "perfect tool for planning a fly fishing trip:" "DuFresne livens up the text and adds good maps and photos. He incorporates some delightful archival photographs of famous trout enthusiasts. Each river access point has GPS coordinates."

Ed Engle goes fishing with buddy John Gierach and has what most will recognize as typical pre-excitement fishing, where prospecting and persistence make the difference. "We dawdled at the coffee shop in Lyons, light heartedly complained about the bluebird skies and philosophized about the relative merits of reading the classics instead of modern western literature. In short, it was pretty much what we always do when we think the Blue-winged Olives will be coming off the Big Thompson River in the afternoon." In the Boulder Daily Camera.

I started my day by reading an innocent question by Esquire book reviewer Benjamin Alsup: "Would anyone still subject themselves to the embarrassments of fly-fishing if it weren't for Hemingway?." While Hemingway fished and wrote about many waters now famous for their fly fishing, he was, by many accounts, reluctant to throw a fly. (As Nick Lyons said in his intro to Hemingway on Fishing, "For a writer so beloved by fly fishermen, he shows little interest in this brand of fishing." Apparently Hemingway preferred swinging multiple wet flies through the riffles -- when he had to.) So Hemingway/fly fishing references do beg the question of whether the great literature is fading from view faster than we'd like.

Arnold Gingrich, who founded and ruled Esquire during its heyday in the 30s, 40s and 50s and was a fly fishing fanatic, probably also knew more about the sport's literature than any man of his day. He fished with Hemingway and listened to F. Scott Fitzgerald's excuses for not doing so ("I can't face Ernest again, when he's so successful and I'm such a failure"). Gingrich was one of the first -- and last -- to publish Hemingway (and Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, and Truman Capote) in a major U.S. magazine. It would be fair to say that he saw fly fishing as one of his era's "extreme" sports, one that was worth the attention of the very best writers, fly fishers or not. But Hemingway, who was writing stories like "Sailfish Off Mombasa: A Key West Letter" and "Hemingway On Being Shot. Again," and was probably glad to lend a touch of machismo to Gingrich's favored sport, was unlikely to dilly dally around with the engraved fly fisher's flask when there was a case of Jameson's Irish whiskey stashed in the bow of The Pilar.

Some better literary candidates? Negley Farson, who lived in remote British Columbia and who fly fished to put food on the table, John Gierach, who cared enough about saving fly fishing from pretension that he coined the phrase "trout bum," or the gifted Jim Harrison, whose poetry inspired by rivers has nothing at all to do with the glamour of being a celebrity sportsman.

But maybe the best choice would be Gingrich himself, who did as much as anyone to point out that fly fishing is not a sport for sissies.

Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Kinney was kind enough to send us a copy of his new book on the Martha's Vineyard annual Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby last week, and while it can't be called a fly fishing book by any stretch, it is certainly a great fishing book. Kinney explores the history of the 35-day Derby, where mania and obsession rule, and examines the many odd personalities who are evidence that being weird may actually help you catch more (and bigger) fish. Better than go into great detail about the book, though, I'll refer you to Monday's review in The Wall Street Journal, where G. Bruce Knecht says that Kinney "is a journalist who takes up his story with an enthusiasm that more closely resembles that of an embedded war correspondent." Mr. Knecht's review of the book, whose storytelling he says can be "exhausting," seems to favor the armchair fishing audience; any serious angler knows that more is better when it comes to storytelling about people who combine kooky behavior with uncanny fish sense.

The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish (Atlantic Monthly Press, April 2009, 272 pages) on Amazon.

Writer Matt Crawford asks whether, now that information is endless in supply, truly readable stories about the outdoors can hold their ground. "The long readable stories of the old timers -- Burton Spiller, let's say, on grouse hunting or even Peter H. Capstick more recently on big game, just don't seem have the juice or support to jump to the Internet. There are fewer places for that kind of writing in newspapers, too." In the Burlington Free Press.

"I've been recommending the original book to new fly anglers for 25 years. DuFresne has updated the revised version that Hendrickson brought out in 1994 and ensured that it should have a place on anglers' bookshelves for at least another 25 years." In the Detroit Free Press, Eric Sharp sings high praises for the newly revised edition of Twelve Class Trout Streams in Michigan (University of Michigan Press, March 2009, 324 pages).

Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan: A Handbook for Fly Anglers on Amazon.

Thomas McGuane celebrates hunting dogs and their enthusiams in The Wall Street Journal. "There is so much in the air suggesting that hunting is an anachronism that it's easy for a hunter to feel he is an anachronism too. An old fishing friend of mine said, as we headed home from an agreeable outing, 'I thank God I'm not a day under 80.' I'm a meat eater and have the teeth to prove it, but greatly pity the creatures in the domestic meat businesses." (Thanks to reader John DeVault for this link.)

An engaging new book -- which I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of -- just appeared on electronic shelves. Miles Nolte's The Alaska Chronicles (216 pages, hardcover) is derived from Nolte's three seasons as a guide in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, and it is a nice departure from formulaic essays of the "my experiences as a fishing guide" type, perhaps because the author's text began as entries posted live on The Drake message board. The first project out of Tosh Brown's new Departure Publishing, the book is a guileless narrative of time spent catering to the needs of destination anglers, but it's hard to tell who's more dysfunctional or entertaining -- the clients or the guides themselves. A fun read for sure.

Among the gems that turned up on Chrystal Murray's new blog for tarpon nuts is a link to a recently digitized version of A. W. Dimock's The Book of Tarpon (Frank Palmer/Red Lion Court, 1912, 228 pages). While you can download a .pdf file for printing (click "Print Details" on the right), the quality of the online version is excellent. Even paging through the book to see the photos is worth several minutes of your time.

Thanks to Delaney Press you can now also buy a paperback version of The Book Of Tarpon on Amazon. Or you can drop around $300 on a used hardback copy.

This Is Fly is "out there" again with another issue of avant-hip fly fishing media. This latest issue features an accordian-playing Russian ride a smoking pig on the cover, an interview with Frank Smethurst, an article on Felt Soul Media's upcoming film "Eastern Rises," and a typically eclectic mix of travel stories and fish tales.

The online magazine has also announced a new book of reader-submitted photography to benefit any of three conservation groups: Trout Unlimited, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, and The Center for Aquatic Nuisance Species. Download the .pdf submission form here.

In the March 30 issue of The Nation, Philip Connors writes a terrific profile of and tribute to author Norman MacLean, who didn't pick up his writer's pen until turning 70, and only then on the request of his children. In the three-page article, which is one of the deepest discussions of MacLean's writing you'll find, Connors happens to pick out of my favorite passages: "Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him, big-grained vapor rose. The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops. The spray emanating from him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo of himself. "

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of Cameron, Montana in late June this year, you may want to consider attending the Madison River Foundation's annual banquet, where Howell Raines will be the keynote speaker and a live auction will feature an original oil painting by Ennis artist Ed Totten and a custom bamboo rod made by the "Boo Boys" at Sweetgrass Rods. The event will take place June 26 on the banks of the Madison at Sun Ranch.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Last night novelist Thomas McGuane was honored by the Center for the American West with its 2009 Wallace Stegner Award. The Stegner Award is given to a "an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West." McGuane, who is a MidCurrent editorial board member, received the award at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can find a complete list of McGuane's books on his Web site.

Interestingly, at the presentation, McGuane was introduced by Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who used the occasion to remark on today's closure of the Rocky Mountain News, the oldest business in the state of Colorado. Hickenlooper commented that not having RMN around would be like living without sunrise, then said: "'On a broader scale, the Internet doesn't pay for the news rooms and gathering the news and all the things that the Fourth Estate does. Rapidly we'll see an increase in the superficiality of news coverage.' He said that he was reminded of his mother's comment when she saw the first issue of People magazine. 'This is a bad idea whose time has come,' she said." Jenny Shank in New West.

Marcus Schneck reviews the new guide to Pennsylvania hatches just out from Headwater Books. Pocketguide to Pennsylvania Hatches (January 31, 2009, 160 pages) by Charles Meck and Paul Weamer pays close attention to phenology -- the study of periodic natural occurrences, such as blossom appearance and migration -- as background to insect identification and pattern selection. "Individual entries provide essential information for each insect, such as common and Latin names, size range, time and date or emergence, descriptions of all the life stages, behavior and tactics, notes on the streams with premier hatches of that insect, the recipe of materials to use in tying the imitation, and special notes about the insect."

Pocketguide to Pennsylvania Hatches on Amazon.

Fish for tarpon long enough and you begin to realize that there is no perfect set of gear, no magic technique, no absolute level of skill. In fact the most common pitfall for tarpon anglers is lack of consistency. When we received a copy of Bill Bishop's new book on tarpon fishing, we opened it hoping that we'd finally hear someone hammer that notion home. Bishop, who spends hundreds of days fly fishing for tarpon each year, didn't disappoint. His High Rollers (Headwater/Stackpole Books, February 2009, 152 pages) is a plain-spoken guide to being able to find, fight and land tarpon based on decades of trial and error.

A tarpon's initial take and jumps rivet us, and for many anglers, it's all that matters. But Bishop likes to land fish quick and remove the hook. This week we excerpt a portion of Bishop's description of the tarpon end-game, a little-considered topic that he covers extremely well.

High Rollers: Fly Fishing for Giant Tarpon on Amazon.

"I don't fish; still, Salmon's humanity, his honesty and his obvious enchantment with his river--and all that lives in it and along it--is always present, so I was happy to follow him up and down the flow, from one deep trout-crowded pool to the next, just listening." Tim Hull reviews M. H. Salmon's new book celebrating the wildness of New Mexico's Gila River in the Tuscon Weekly.

Gila Libre!: New Mexico's Last Wild River on Amazon.

Yesterday we received an air mail package from Australia containing a copy of In Season: Tasmania (HtwoMedia, 120 pages), a beautiful book about fly fishing on that island. The book was originally released as a hardcover in 2007, but the softcover version we received is one of the most attractive pieces of print we've seen in months. The book is very cleverly laid out, divided by chapter into seasons and the experiences that an angler is likely to have during any given month. It's the brainchild of fly fishing guide Daniel Hackett and professional photographer Brad Harris, who spent months chronicling their encounters with the waters, insects and fish of Tasmania. For more info, check out the InSeasonFlyFishing.com Web site. (There are also a couple of these softcover editions available from resellers on Amazon, but I doubt they'll be around long.)

Author Rodes Fishburne, whose new novel Going to See the Elephant (Delacorte Press, 304 pages) tells the story of a young reporter who gathers brilliant story ideas from a mysterious radio, got his inspiration for the book while stuck in a fly fishing tent camp in Alaska. "Alone with a Sony Walkman that picked up only one station, Fishburne began to fall asleep one night. 'My head touches the side of this aluminum skeleton of the tent, and the headphones do, too, and that turned the tent into a giant radio antenna. I got stations from Russia, South America, Miami, New York and Chicago.'" Ben Fong-Torres in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Going to See the Elephant on Amazon.

Perhaps someone should be writing a screenplay of the story behind the first movie adaptation of The River Why. In the February issue of Outside magazine, Abe Streep explains how, despite ongoing disagreement between the producers and author David James Duncan, the first movie to capture a naked woman landing a steelhead was completed and made ready for its upcoming premiere this March. "Thomas Cohen bought the rights from Duncan's publisher, Sierra Club Books, in 1984, hoping the project would launch his filmmaking career. Cohen asked Duncan to write the script. 'Tom said he'd pay me $6,000 to write the screenplay,' says Duncan, now 57. 'I said, Oh, great. I can write a screenplay for a guy I don't want to work with and impoverish my family. That was the end of that.'"

In the London Times, Brian Clarke writes about a large job made monumental by the constant flow of memories contained in a book collection. "Now sorting old books, like sorting old photographs, ought to be easy and quick: we decide the order we want them in and then put them into it. That is the theory. The practice is that many books, like many old photographs, cannot simply be picked up and put down again."

"Well, until man is redeemed, he will always take a fly rod too far back ... Then, since it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace, he whips the line back and forth making it whistle each way, and sometimes even snapping off the fly from the leader, but the power that was going to transport the little fly across the river somehow gets diverted into building a bird's nest of line, leader and fly that falls out of the air into the water about ten feet in front of the fisherman." As Norman Maclean's Presbyterian-minister father said in A River Runs Through It, it's "closer to twelve than to two," but for the most part the ten-to-two rule is a pretty reliable simplification for teaching new fly casters the sport. In the Concord New Hampshire Monitor, John Corrigan writes about how casting strokes have been changed by the introduction of new materials and the instructors who adopted their use.

In Canada's Globe and Mail, Paul Quarrington revisits what he calls the best fishing novel ever written, Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two In the Shade. "Every page of Ninety-two in the Shade offers at least one immaculately turned phrase. On page 99 (in the Vintage Contemporaries Edition), he describes a heavy drinker as 'spavined in the morals,' an exemplary McGuane-ism, as it combines fussy word choice with a winking affection for the liquor-whipped."

Ninety-two in the Shade on Amazon.

I'm not quite finished reading Kathy Scott's new Changing Planes (Alder Creek Publishing, 2008, 225 pages), probably because I'm hoping it won't end. After a series of previous reads that can best be described as "fish stories," I've been entranced by Scott's prose. In fact her writing isn't perfect in a classic sense: fragments and quirky punctuation interrupt the flow fairly often. But after only a few pages I found myself wanting to slow down and take it all in, especially her brief meditations on simple things.

Here she is talking about gathering kindling: "I pined for wild skating while I picked up boughs for kindling, and Kodiak nosed about. The branches cracked and snapped with little effort in the cold. The pond had been singing with cold all week, long whomps in the night as loons sing songs of summer. Maybe there were pressure cracks, anyway. I was lost in dreams of ice and the raven-like joy of soaring across great distances effortlessly, the closest thing to flying I can do."

Changing Planes tells the story of crafting a bamboo rod in a family workshop in Maine. But as in most good fishing writing the object is simply a glue for larger ideas. Scott manages to convince us that her daily observation of the Maine woods and its animals is a necessary part of crafting beautiful fishing rod. She feels herself to be a part of long traditions. And almost everything she does benefits from the good friendship of the people around her.

If you want a "feel good" book for a winter day, this is one that won't disappoint, whether or not you can appreciate the enormous detail it provides in describing cane rod building.

You can order Changing Planes, as well as Scott's earlier books, from the Alder Creek Publishing Web site.

Looking for signs of a thawing in Cuban-U.S. relations? The thousands of documents that Cuba has digitized and plans to make available to scholars worldwide will find a U.S. home at the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston. (If you miss the irony here, catch "The Missiles of October".) "Most of the papers have never been published and will give new insight into the 21 years Hemingway spent at Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula where he wrote some of his greatest works, said Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of Museo Ernest Hemingway." From Reuters, via FishingJones.com.

At a time when major publishing houses are forgetting all but the "blockbusters" (see yesterday's Wall Street Journal article), I noticed yesterday that Copper Canyon Press will be publishing Jim Harrison's latest book of poetry, In Search of Small Gods, in April. From the book: "Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . ."

In Search of Small Gods on Amazon.

For Backcast author Lou Ureneck, the notion of having his new cabin ready for the beginning of trout season is reason enough to don the flannels and boots and head into the Maine winter with hammer in hand. "The light is bright and clear as a polished lens, the air is a tonic touched by the scent of balsam, and the snow, falling from the boughs of shaken fir trees, glitters like tiny crystals thrown in celebration. I love the way the snow, caught like a spinnaker in the wind, unlocks the colors of the white winter light, creating micro-bursts of red and blue." In The New York Times.

Read a chapter from Ureneck's latest book on MidCurrent.

"I never know what to do about some of my antique obsessions. I bird hunt, and a woman in Portland asked me, 'Must you hunt?' And I said, 'Well, maybe I am just less evolved than you are.'"

On the Lannan Foundation Web site, Jim Harrison entertains a Sante Fe, New Mexico audience with readings of poems that he has never read aloud before. Many consider Harrison one of the great modern American poets, even though he is said to have turned to novels and screenplays as a way to earn a living. This recording was made in 2002. (First seen on Fishing Jones.)

Author Alan Liere writes about doing whatever it takes to get permission to fish a farmer's private stream. "'Dwayne wants to kiss you,' the lady said. 'See how he's cocking his head. Just stick your face over the fence, mister, and I'll bet you can kiss him.' 'I'm trying to quit,' I mumbled. Nevertheless, I knew the rules of permission- seeking, so I closed my eyes and stuck my face over the fence. Dwayne snorted, lassoing my eyebrows and nose with a great gob of hog slobber." Excerpted on the Spokesman Review from Liere's new book Fish Tales (Stackpole Books, January 2009, 176 pages).

Fish Tales: A Collection of Humorous Fishing Stories on Amazon.

Just because we wander daily through a fog of electrons doesn't mean that those of us who love books must remain lost in the haze. Chad Pastotnik's Deep Wood Press, mentioned in northern Michigan's Record-Eagle this morning, has been producing fine books for more than 15 years now, using linotype presses, with handmade paper and binding folios by hand. One of their more popular books, A Trout In Winter (2000, verse by Jerry Dennis, intaglio engraving by Glenn Wolff) has sold all but one of the one of the sixty books printed -- and that at the price of $500 per book. Having watched my first book project being typeset by a master craftsman more than thirty years ago, I've never lost my love for paper -- especially when it reveals the talents of publishers who know the subtleties of fine type, engraving and binding. Check out Jodee Taylor's coverage of the Pastotnik's latest project.

In the Los Angeles Times, Art Winslow, a former literary and executive editor of The Nation, takes a closer look at the lesser-known works of author Norman Maclean, as revealed in The Norman Maclean Reader (University of Chicago Press, November 2008, 304 pages). Few know that Maclean struggled to write a book about the battle of the Little Bighorn, or that he drew parallels to the battle in other works like "Young Men and Fire," about the 1949 death of 13 smokejumpers in Montana. "On the humorous side, he reports witnessing a mother and son in front of a display case in the museum at the battlefield. In it was the cadet uniform that Custer had worn at West Point (where he finished last in his class), and the mother 'whispers to her son that he must study hard in school if he expects to get anywhere in life.'"

Ian Botham, former (and somewhat controversial) Test cricketeer and now commenter for British SKY Sports, recently published Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, October 2008, 240 pages), offering his perspectives on fly fishing, coarse fishing and sea fishing. The Guardian's Jamie Jackson excerpts some of the new book this morning: "In January 2001 I opened the Scottish salmon fishing season in a tiny village called Kenmore, which is situated where the river emerges from Loch Tay. It was freezing in the Highlands - they'd had one of the heaviest frosts for a long time and there was ice on parts of the water, so I definitely needed the traditional quaich [Scottish cup] of whisky, which is drunk at the opening."

Bothan received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. (See Botham's Wikipedia entry.)

Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly on Amazon.

Ed Engle is yet another devoted fan of "Why Fly Fishing," a film by Miracle Productions and Jeffrey M. Pill. Engle notes that while you can always watch a stack of DVDs on how-to, where-to and what-to, this video succeeds where others have not -- in communicating the sport's appeal to a wide variety of audiences. "I picked up 'Why Fly Fishing' on the recommendation of a friend. It's just 31 minutes long, and I'll admit to thinking that maybe it was directed more toward people just getting into the sport than old fly-fishing grouches like myself, but I was wrong. What makes this DVD different from the others is that everyone you see on the screen is honestly passionate about fly-fishing." Engle also recommends Charlie Craven's Basic Fly Tying (Headwater Books, 264 pages).

"Why Fly Fishing" is available from The Book Mailer. Charlie Craven's Basic Fly Tying can be purchased on Amazon.

Author and fly fisher Peter Matthiessen received the National Book Award for fiction last night, almost three decades after winning his first for the non-fiction The Snow Leopard (1979). The award was given for Matthiessen's Shadow Country (Modern Library, April 2008, 912 pages), a reworked trilogy of novels from the 1990s that includes a retelling of Lost Man's River. "Matthiessen, a world traveler, naturalist and founder of the Paris Review, is one of the great names in modern letters, but few -- including Matthissen -- expected to see him nominated this year. His novel, neither new nor old, condenses and deepens his previous work about a ruthless landowner from the Florida Everglades."

Shadow Country (Modern Library) on Amazon.

In the Chicago Daily Herald, Mike Jackson sings the praises of Muskie On the Fly, one of those sleeper titles that he thinks might not be getting the attention it deserves. "Tomes preaches a different mantra. He's as committed to 'de-snobbing' fly fishing as I am, as well as convincing a novice fly caster that thrills are not limited to just a largemouth bass attacking a surface plug and then taking to the air."

For a taste of what Tomes's new book is all about, read our excerpt on "Top-Water Retrieves."

Muskie on the Fly (Masters on the Fly series) on Amazon.

Frank Amato Publications recently released a limited-edition compilation of short stories, essays and photos entitled The Creel: North Umpqua Edition. Edited by Bob Wethern, the book is another in a series belonging to "The Creel" publications by the Fly Fishers Club of Oregon. "'The stories are those of who fished the river for the past 110 years ... their feelings and observations of the river. As far as fly fisher publications, this is the pinnacle. It's not going to be matched. This is the story of the North Umpqua.'" Craig Reed on NRToday.com.

As a writer enjoying a re-birth in popularity, David Rhodes is about as unlikely as they come. Before his 1977 motorcycle crash, which left him paralyzed from the waist down, he was considered one of the country's most promising young writers. His new book is notable not only for the praise it has achieved, but because it takes place in another forgotten corner of the U.S. -- the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, an area that many local fly fishers would prefer to keep secret. "The region's peculiar terrain is due to its having escaped glaciation during the last glacial period. The term 'driftless' indicates a lack of glacial drift, the material left behind by retreating continental glaciers - something of a subtle and elaborate metaphor for the novel where people are relatively unmoved by the passage of time, the progression of modern society that seems to roll along all around them but never directly contacts their lives." John Holt writes about Driftless (Milkweed Editions, September 2008, 352 pages) in the California Literary Review.

Driftless on Amazon.

"It's been a dismal eight years for the U.S. Forest Service. When the Bush administration took office, it immediately suspended a popular measure to protect 58 million acres of backcountry public forests from new roads. Instead, the agency became consumed by firefighting. Since 2001, stopping fire has grown from about 15 percent of the agency's budget to nearly 50 percent today." In the Denver Post, Chris Wood makes a compelling argument that the U.S. Forest Service has gone way off track but still holds great promise as a vehicle for "reconnecting people, children and communities to the landscapes that provide their food, energy resources."

If you're feeling the least bit inspired by last night's presidential election to begin contributing to government again, start by lending your insights as a fly fisher to your community and especially to youth. A good start can be found in one of the great books available for teaching kids about nature.

There are more than two or three wonderful quotes from Holly Morris's 1997 essay on fly fishing literature in The New York Times, but this may be my favorite: "While baseball is among the sports (some might include golf here) that inspire a certain devotion, even fanaticism, fly-fishing leads its lovers into fundamental connections, inviting a slow dance with the whimsy of the natural world, a love affair with line and rhythm and simplicity. Angling delivers the wily spiritual satisfactions that come with giving yourself to something that offers only intangible payback." The next time someone asks you "Why fly fishing?," send them this link and suggest they buy a copy of the Jeffrey Pill/AMFF DVD. If those won't hook them, nothing will.

In this week's New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes about the quirky correspondence of poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in the mid-twentieth century. "Staying at the home of Pauline Hemingway in Key West and deep in what she called her 'female Hemingway' phase, Bishop wrote of catching amberjack and jewfish. Lowell, fresh from charming William Carlos Williams's ninety-one-year-old mother, responded that he had once 'tried swimming' but 'was nearly drowned and murdered by children with foot-flippers and helmets and a ferocious mother doing the crawl.'"

If you're a poetry fan, Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," published in 1947, is a wonderful escape to the northeast U.S. coast and to a fast-fading picture of what commercial fishing once was.

Graham Hall recounts a life of trying to balance between the siren call of fish and the enticements of his wife. "Every day of our honeymoon, I fished. Every day, she also fished; precisely at noon, she donned a fishnet bikini, toss her gleaming black hair down her back and walk barefoot to the river. I, too, was in that river, chest deep, casting my line far downstream. She always managed to lure me to shore." On Beliefnet.com.

From Chicken Soup for the Fisherman's Soul: Fish Tales to Hook Your Spirit and Snag Your Funny Bone (Chicken Soup for the Soul) (HCI, May 2004, 384 pages).

This morning, Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg talks about the recently released DVD "Tarpon" in the paper's Weekend Journal section. Trachtenberg begins, "A recently restored film featuring a trio of writers fishing for tarpon in the early 1970s has started attracting attention in literary and fly fishing circles."

You can read the full article and watch an outtake here.

Idaho-based novelist Kim Barnes, whose new novel A Country Called Home (Alfred A. Knopf, 271 pages) includes a main character who shirks family responsibilities to go fishing (a tragic hero?), talks about her idea of bliss: 'I definitely have that impulse, and I spend almost the whole summer with my husband fly-fishing in a wilderness area on a river and living in a tent, and I'm never happier."

Jenny Shank also offers this review on New West.

A Country Called Home on Amazon.

I often find myself referring to a 1998 Salon interview with Jim Harrison -- who at the time was on a book tour for his novel The Road Home -- because interviewer Jonathan Miles gets the jumper cables so firmly attached to the novelist's battery. "We met slightly prior to Harrison's strict 4 o'clock cocktail hour -- the only pinch of discipline, he says, that he regularly upholds. A few minutes into the discussion, however, Harrison ordered a glass of Côtes du Rhône."

Harrison's latest novel The English Major (Grove Press, 304 pages), just out in October, involves a 60-year-old protagonist who sets out to rename all the states and official state birds to something more meaningful. As Publisher's Weekly says, "In Harrison's funny, spirited latest, Cliff, a 60-year-old former Michigan high school teacher, bids adieu to his inherited family farm (lost in a shady real estate deal); his wife, Vivian, of 38 years (who has been cheating on him and orchestrated the deal) and dear departed dog Lola (the truest woman in my life); and sets off on a yearlong, countrywide jag."

The English Major: A Novel on Amazon.

In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Rago reviews the new collection edited by O. Alan Weltzien of the University of Montana and notes: "The action in Maclean's autobiography-infused fiction is outwardly simple, rich in suggestion. The prose derives its power from words and their sounds and cadences: Meaning is unstated but nonetheless intensely felt. Nothing much happens, in other words, except everything."

The Norman Maclean Reader on Amazon.

The framed and matted original cover art for Gary LaFontaine's Dry Fly: New Angles -- including a shadow-boxed fly tied by the author himself -- is up for auction at The Book Mailer Web site. The art has been in the home of the artist, Gretchen Grayum, for eighteen years. Grayum said of her "assignments" for LaFontaine: "After getting an illustrating assignment, it became quite normal to find myself crawling around river banks trying to find nymphs emerging [which I managed to find!] ... so that I could better illustrate that sequence for Gary. He would talk in depth to me about the different water patterns which occur as a fish jumps or surfaces to take a fly. I was continually amazed by the complexity of Gary's observations of the natural world, and the microscopic perception they would encompass." Bidding closes in a week, and the top bid currently stands at $500.

Syndicated political cartoonist Jack Ohman's delightful new book of drawings and light-hearted satire is a perfect example of how so often an enormous talent from outside the world of fly fishing enriches our sport with something of permanent value. An Inconvenient Trout (Headwater Books, September 2008, 128 pages) manages to be both penetratingly observant and hilarious -- the kind of thing that helps you forget about any personal or angling shortcomings and focus on the stuff that really matters: laughter. There isn't a page that didn't make me smile in this book, but a few of Ohman's "favorite Web sites" from the Age of the Internets are worth mentioning:

www.orvishasmylifesavings.com
www.guidesIwanttoslug.com/hitmen
www.drivefourhourstoseeonerise.com
www.ijustspentseventybucksonchickenfeathers.com/mark-up

The real magic, of course, is in Ohman's witty cartoons. If incessant political pendantry and the collapsing economy are getting you down, do yourself a favor and buy this little book today.

An Inconvenient Trout on Amazon.

This morning Roger Phillips does terrific interview with world-famous photographer Charles Lindsay, who did the photographs for one of my favorite fly fishing books, Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American West (Aperture, 2000, 96 pages). "I would love to see art from bass fishing or catfish fishing, and I predict it will arrive. Hopefully in technicolor, and I don't mean the Velvet Elvis corner at Cabela's. There is a lot of work produced and sold in the name of fly fishing which is just crap. I can only hope my work rises above that." (In the Idaho Statesman.) If you haven't seen this book, put it on your seasonal gift list, either for yourself or a good friend. In addition to Lindsay's startling black and white images, the book contains fine essays by Thomas McGuane.

Upstream: Fly-Fishing in the American West on Amazon.

Skyhorse Publishing -- owned by Nick Lyons's son Tony -- will publish Lefty Kreh's memoirs in October. I've read My Life Was This Big (Skyhorse Publishing, 6 October 2008, 288 pages) and have to agree with Eric Sharp that it is a real page-turner, especially if you are not familiar with the larger-than-life character that Kreh has become in the half-century or so that he's been fly fishing. The book is co-written by Chris Millard, who has ghost-written lots of other books by sports celebrities, including Jack Nicklaus and NASCAR's Bill Elliot.

My Life Was This Big: And Other True Fishing Tales on Amazon.

Dizzying Heights author Bruce Ducker has just released a new collection of 16 short stories about fly fishing. Home Pool: Stories of Fly Fishing and Lesser Passions (Stackpole Books, August 2008, 192 pages) uses a variety of characters -- from a cantankerous old man to a fish-savvy housewife to a Hassidic scholar with incredible beginner's luck -- to illustrate human relationships.

We picked up on a story this morning by Janet Urquhart, who offers this bit on Ducker's writing history: "Ducker's fishing stories have appeared in sporting publications, but he calls most of his work -- unrelated to angling -- 'serious, somber pieces' that appear in various literary journals. He has also authored eight novels, including 'Dizzying Heights,' a comic novel set in Aspen, where he previously owned a home." In the Aspen Times.

Home Pool: Stories of Fly Fishing and Lesser Passions on Amazon.

Lefty Kreh once said, "You haven't lived until you've caught a catfish on a cane pole." Well, if you have caught a catfish or two on a cane pole, what you might consider next is catching a 50-inch northern pike, or even a monster muskie, on a fly rod. And do it with a topwater fly.

This week Robert Tomes shares an article on the techniques for doing just that from his upcoming book Muskie on the Fly. "The Muskie Top-Water Retrieve" will tell you everything you need to know about the sweep-and-strip retrieves that work magic on big muskies (and other big freshwater fish).

A first of its kind, Ken Hanley's new book on tying furled flies -- really tying flies with furled bodies -- takes the author's impressions of what the best tiers have considered the keys to their success, observation and application, and applies them to some unique construction techniques. Hanley, a Californian who is the author of six books and a contributor to two instructional DVDs, set about designing flies that were both more durable and did a better job of imitating mayflies, caddisflies, even dragonflies and alevin. All the while he suggests that furled flies do a better job of addressing an overlooked part of fly presentation -- keeping the fly in the fish's mouth:

"Texture is an often-overlooked element of design, but it is one of the most important features in my work. I strive to create patterns that reinforce what the natural food item might feel like to the fish. Examples include meaty, soft, chewy, and crunchy on the outside -- all represent textures that would provide an extra positive reaction to your fly. Most of the patterns in the book emphasize a meaty and chewy texture. If the fish hold onto the fly longer because of a positive reaction to texture, you will have a longer chance to set the hook."

In addition to more than 500 photos of the steps for tying the 21 patterns in the book (about half of those are color variations), Hanley offers tips for presenting and fishing them properly. The writing is clear and informative, and the photos are top-notch. This is another book from Jay Nichols's new Headwater Books publishing house, which seems to be bringing an extra level of attention to fly fishing books this year.

Buy Tying Furled Flies: Patterns for Trout, Bass, and Steelhead (Headwater Books, 144 pages, softcover, September 2008) on Amazon.

John Berry reports that FFF affiliate Mid-South Fly Fishers in Memphis has just come out with latest edition of their indispensable guide book Home Waters, which covers Arkansas and Tennessee. Besides listing all accesses and directions for how to get there, the book includes details on how to fish each location, written by seasoned guides and veteran anglers. "Another feature that will appeal to the traveling angler is the accommodations matrix. It lists all of the accommodations available near the streams in the guide and provides contact information. It includes a lot of data concerning extras (fireplaces, kitchens, pets and adjacent restaurants), fishing facilities and boat rentals. There is also a listing of guide services and fly shops by area with contact information." The 192-page book is available from local fly shops for $34. In the Baxter Bulletin.

No one learns the importance of knot strength until it really matters. In my case, that was after chasing permit with a client for three days, seeing him finally hook a fish -- and then watching my poor excuse for a Clinch Knot fail. Twenty-three years later, it still hurts. Now I can just about tie a triple Surgeon's Loop with my eyes closed, but it's that miserable moment that reminds me to re-tie any knot that is even slightly suspect.

Fortunately there are tippet-to-fly loop knots that are less awkward to tie than a triple Surgeon's and just as strong. An important one is Lefty Kreh's variation of the Mono Non-Slip Loop. This week we show his demonstration of the normal Non-Slip Loop -- already a close-to-one-hundred-percent knot -- and then the slight modification that makes the knot even stronger.

Morgan Lyle describes Paul Weamer's 2007 guide to fishing the classic streams of the upper Delaware as a sometimes dull read that is nonetheless "brilliant" as a guide. "There are some anglers -- not to mention guides -- who don't like to give away their hard-earned knowledge of a river and its secrets, and resent others who do. I don't know if Weamer has gotten any flak from Delaware regulars, but he's done a great service for those of us with limited time who live a good distance away from the rivers." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper Delaware River on Amazon.

Publisher's Weekly highlights a new anthology of Norman Maclean writings collected and edited by O. Alan Weltzien. "The book includes six previously unpublished pieces, five of them chapters from his uncompleted book on Custer, written between 1959 and 1963. Another standout piece is a 1986 interview in which Maclean ranges widely from the rhythms of prose, his own influences and his native state of Montana to creative writing, fly-fishing and publishers who rejected A River Runs Through It."

The Norman Maclean Reader on Amazon.

John Gierach's latest book seems to have split the angling literature crowd in two: half think it is the work of an fishing writer in his finest form, and the other half think it is tired and not quite up to the standard set by Trout Bum. John Corrigan offers his opinion in the Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor. "Longtime Gierach readers will understand why I penned 'wow' in the margin where the author announces that the last four rods he bought were graphite. He clearly revels in the contradictory role of a hard-core bamboo lover who has discovered new lines of graphite rods described as 'affordable even by modern standards.'"

We mentioned the new book by Van Gorman Egan on Roderick Haig-Brown a couple of weeks ago (see "New Limited Edition Tribute to Roderick Haig-Brown"), but since then a couple of stories have popped up about the book and about how Haig-Brown, who originally intended to settle in Washington state, ended up in B.C. In the Times Colonist, Jack Knox writes that being unable to renew his U.S. visa let him to cross the border into Canada: "Roderick Haig-Brown came out from Britain at age 17, toiling in Washington state as a logger and weekend prizefighter before an expired visa chased him north to Vancouver Island's Nimpkish River in 1927. Still only 19, he worked in the woods again, but it was writing that got him fired up."

By the way, if you hanker to experience a little literary history first-hand, you can actually stay in the house formerly owned by Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown on the banks of the Campbell River.

Roderick Haig-Brown on Wikipedia.

In The New York Times, in March of 2004, Nick Lyons describes the rewards of reading about fishing. "Angling writing mingles biology and the architectonics of minute feathered concoctions, midlife crises and family bonding and a search for one's true self, or any self, and friendship, adventure, cunning, triumph and abject failure at the pleasure of a creature with a brain the size of a pea."

The plot of John Galligan's forthcoming mystery, after his well-received The Nail Knot and The Blood Knot, revolves around a murdered cow girl and the tortured fly-fishing protagonist Ned Oglivie (aka Dog). Publisher's Weekly says "At the outset of Galligan's stunning third Montana-set fly-fishing mystery (after 2005's The Blood Knot), Ned 'Dog' Oglivie, a self-described 'traveling drunk' and 'trout hound' who lives out of his asthmatic 1984 Cruise Master RV, has befriended a jailed bull rider's daughter, Jesse Ringer, and her black boyfriend, D'Ontario Sneed."

The Clinch Knot on Amazon.

Rangeley-Wilson suggests an even mixture of titles by U.S. and U.K. authors in his list of the top ten fishing books. Beyond his inclusion of a couple of excellent non-fly-fishing books -- The Secret Carp by Chris Yates and I Know a Good Place by Clive Gammon -- I'm pleased to see that he mentions fly fishing books by James Babb, Ted Leeson and Negley Farson. "A foreign correspondent between the wars, Farson worked all over the world, accompanied by a typewriter and his fishing rods. Where there was water, he fished, and in spare and vivid prose, he brought to life his adventures in revolutionary Russia, on horseback in the Caucasus, or living hand to mouth in British Columbia." In the U.K.'s Guardian.

GUY DE LA VALDENE is a mystery to most fly fishers. If his name is known widely, it is because he hung out with Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Russell Chatham and Jimmy Buffet in Key West in the late sixties and early seventies. He is also, of course, an author of two books on game birds and a novel, and the co-producer of "Tarpon," the cult classic that was finally released on DVD this summer. But de la Valdene is, by almost all accounts, a recluse. In fact, when we finished our four-hour interview with him, he said, "I don't think I've ever talked this much."

Our conversation transported us back to the post-war "boom" in destination fly fishing, the era of the pioneering Florida Keys guides, Parisian film studios, and to the days when de la Valdene and his friends enjoyed a heady mixture of talent, freedom and experimentation that blurred the lines between fishing and life.

Long-time Haig-Brown friend Van Gorman Egan has just published Shadows of the Western Angler, about Roderick Haig-Brown and his visionary writing and conservation efforts. From the description by Mark Hume in Canada's Globe and Mail, this book sounds like much more than a simple tribute. "He writes of first meeting Mr. Haig-Brown on the river, of swapping flies and fishing stories - and he touchingly includes, tucked into a pocket inside the back cover - two hand-drawn maps his friend gave him, with X's on the river to mark the spots where the trout lie." There were only 1000 of the books printed, and they can be ordered only direct from the publisher, Campbell River Courier-Islander (email: editor@courierislander.com).

This seems to be the year of the Lefty Kreh book, with the arrival of at least three titles by or about the most recognizable name in fly fishing. The first, All the Best (Collector's Cover, July 2008, 215 pages), which just arrived in the mail, is a voluminous tribute in words and photographs written and compiled by Flip Pallot. The images themselves provide a history lesson on the many notable anglers Kreh has fished with, and personal written contributions by Lefty's many friends make up almost a third of the book. In the Washington Times, Gene Mueller mentions one error in the book but readily gives the title two thumbs up: "The many color plates alone are worth the price of the book and Pallot's text is thoughtful, alive, interesting and a well-deserved salute to one of the great names in sport fishing."

All The Best - Celebrating Lefty Kreh ** Signed ** Brand New on Amazon.

Seven years ago in The New York Times, Nick Lyons wrote a short essay in which he asked, in response to be forced into the computer age by his kids, "Is faster better?" "I liked its responsiveness to my touch, even the pain it bred in my shoulders when I typed for too many hours. I liked to correct my words by hand and even retype a slew of pages, whereby I often found more that I wanted to be corrected. Didn't the heart, not the machine -- to paraphrase Quintilian -- make the eloquence? I wanted less speed, not more."

If you ever happen to meet Jim Lepage, you'll quickly learn that he is good at a lot of things. Just as an example, the vice president of rods and tackle at Orvis, who came up with the Helios fly rod design, is a mushroom expert and cook. Lepage is the co-author, with Paul Fersen (manager of the company's retail outdoor division), of the new Guide to Great Sporting Lodge Cuisine (Thomas Nelson, April 2008, 232 pages), which contains 140 recipes from 42 sporting lodges around north America. John Waller writes about the book in this morning's Bennington Banner. "Lepage said some of the recipes are more difficult to recreate than others, but even a novice chef can make the lobster thermidor served at the Shoal Grass Lodge and Conference Center in Aransas Pass, Texas, if they follow the directions carefully. 'We tried to edit the recipes in a way that would make it easy to do the cooking,' he said."

The Orvis Guide to Great Sporting Lodge Cuisine on Amazon.

I just finished reading Michael Dahlie's new debut novel about a guileless New York fly fisher who is hamstrung by his inability to see around the corner at the things life is throwing his way. It's a very relaxing read -- perfect beach reading and a nice change of pace for those of us tired of reading how we're doing everything wrong when it comes to fly selection and arm motion.

Janet Maslin reviews A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living (W. W. Norton & Company, 281 pages) in The New York Times this morning, describing it as a fine first first start for an author who seems to have just stepped out of a New Yorker cartoon: "Michael Dahlie's fictitious Maidenhead Grange is a beloved Catskills fly-fishing lodge that is home to the Hanover Street Fly Casters, an exclusive group founded by 12 Manhattan financiers in 1878. The group named the lodge during a fit of boozy Anglophilia. Membership is hereditary. And each man's room is strictly his own, filled with a lifetime's worth of irreplaceable mementos."

A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living: A Novel on Amazon.

Jack Ohman did a fine interview with John Gierach when the author was in Portland, Oregon, recently. In it, Gierach says some suprising -- and not surprising -- things about how and why he writes. "'I wish I could say that I had seen this cultural opening in fly fishing. And I wish I could say I saw the moment for a manifesto and wrote it. I didn't. I just wrote the book I felt like writing. And it slowly, very slowly, but steadily got more popular. To this day, I think I wrote too quickly after "Trout Bum." And for better or worse, it made me. I have great affection for that book. But I don't think it's my best book, by a long shot.'" In the Oregonian.

No, it's a not a fly fishing novel. Rather it's the latest book from the author best known for his Dave Robicheaux mystery series. But Jeff Bredenberg's review, and particularly one passage in which Burke quotes Steinbeck, make me want to go out and buy it:

"In his fiction, Burke uses place - terrain, vegetation, weather, architecture, culture and local history - the way a carpenter uses wood. Place for him is not just a decorative element, it's the underpinning of the story, the supporting structure. Here's a sample, as the author describes the river country where western Montana meets Idaho:

The riparian topography of those particular waterways is probably as good as the earth gets. The cottonwoods and aspens along the banks, the steep orange and pink cliffs that drop straight into eddying pools where the river bends, the pebbled shallows where the current flows as clear as green Jell-O across the tops of your tennis shoes, all seem to be the stuff of idyllic poems, except in this case it's real and, as John Steinbeck suggested, the introduction to a lifetime love affair rather than a geographical experience."

Swan Peak: A Dave Robicheaux Novel on Amazon.

On July 10, all three authors will come to their alma mater's Wharton Center's Pasant Theatre for an authors' event moderated by Bill Castanier, who writes this very detailed piece on the authors' connections. "For more than 40 years, authors, friends and Michigan State University alumni Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane have exchanged letters, documenting a trove of their trials, tribulations and careers. The letters reside in sealed boxes in university archives; McGuane's at MSU and Harrison's at Grand Valley State University. The letters may be signed and delivered, but as of now remain sealed from public view, and they probably will stay that way for some time." In the Lansing, Michigan City Pulse.

Alice Munroe, author of the best seller The Beach House and of the new book Time Is a River, says fly fishing isn't just about catching fish. It's about feeling life. "Monroe says she is taken with the spiritual and intellectual aspect of fly-fishing, just as her character Mia is. 'You'll experience it today,' Monroe says to a fly-fishing novice. 'You'll feel life. You'll study the fish, what they're doing. It's what brings you back every time, trying to figure it all out. It's all about doing the dance with the fish.'" Craig Wilson interviews the author for USAToday.

Paul Weamer's new book gets rave reviews from Mark Sturtevant, who says his only criticism may be how much information the book contains: "Weamer breaks down the rivers by section relative to the coldwater influence of the New York City reservoirs that ultimately shape the character of the trout and the insects they feed upon. He offers detailed descriptions and directions to the public access points, and certain private access areas traditionally open to public use." On InYork.com.

Outfitter and author Patrick Straub has a new book out detailing just about everything you'll need to know for taking a Montana fly fishing trip. "This comprehensive guide provides everything an angler will need to plan a trip to Montana: how to find a guide or outfitter if you want one, how to pick your destination and directions for how to get there, angling etiquette, and selective listings for where to stay and eat while you're out there. Also includes an informative chapter about threatened fish species, invasive plant species, and other serious biological considerations. 50 black & white photographs, 16 maps." (From the Amazon editorial summary.)

Montana on the Fly: An Angler's Guide on Amazon.

It's been a long time coming -- thirty-four and a half years, to be exact -- but UYA Films has finally released the commercial version of the film "Tarpon." The re-mastered and color-corrected film is out on DVD, and having watched a bootleg copy of the original about 100 times, I was surprised by the quality of the new digitized version. Sure, there are a few "newsreel" scratches in the opening frames, but the scenes that matter most to me -- the young Tom McGuane talking with Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison sitting in a hammock "coming to terms" with the fish, and especially the magnificent tarpon jumps -- are even more mesmerizing.

Some quick backstory for those who've never heard of the film: "Tarpon" was filmed by Christian Odasso and Guy de la Valdene in Key West in 1974. They were inspired by the top guides of the era -- Woody Sexton, Gil Drake, Steve Huff and others -- to make a statement about what fly fishing for tarpon was really like and at the same time illustrate what threatened the fish and their habitat. The result was what Carl Hiaasen calls "a work of art."

But the best way to get a sense of what the film is all about is to watch the trailer, which we're happy to be able to show for the first time this week.

Yesterday I spoke with Tom Pero, editor of Fish & Fly magazine, who said that the current Tackle and Travel issue, almost in the hands of subscribers, will be the last for the publication under Turnstile Publishing. Turnstile, which owns the magazine, also shut down Master's Athlete today and laid off 15 employees. This continues a series of shutdowns of periodicals by the company, which has been hurt by the decline in their golf magazine business following an editorial debacle last winter, when a cover of their flagship Golfweek magazine carried a hangman's noose to illustrate a story on a comment made by a Golf TV announcer regarding Tiger Woods. Apparently large investments in in-house video capabilities also did not pay off. Turnstile and Pero are now working to find another publisher to take over the title and its circulation of approximately 20,000.

But it seems to me that the demise of Fish & Fly -- which more than any other fly fishing periodical in recent years took editorial chances, with longer, more detailed articles, more photographs, and harder-hitting gear reviews -- says more about the state of the fly fishing magazine business than it does about Tom Pero's editorial leadership, which I think was inspired. We've all heard complaints about milquetoast journalism in fly fishing, and F&F wasn't it. Pero chose to focus on in-depth content, and he believed that the readers and advertisers would pay for it. As it was, periodicals that spent more resources on becoming effective direct mail engines survived him. Even the fact that the latest issue of F&F is packed with advertising becomes a footnote when magazine publishers in general are experiencing lower subscription renewal rates, higher production and postal costs, and a shift in younger readers to the Internet.

What does that say about the future of fly fishing periodicals? I wonder. Maybe advertisers will be happy to have their choices narrowed on the print side of the business. But they lose out when an audience that is willing to pay for substance and a distinct voice is absorbed into the crowd. Personally I hope that other print publishers will take the example of Fish & Fly and improve on it by lowering their frequency and upping their production quality, but especially by spending more money on authors' and photographers' work. Pero's publication is evidence enough that is not editorial costs that will sink the ship. Indeed, if the inside story on Turnstile's failed attempt to move into video proves anything, it's that magazines should do what they do best. Print needs to adapt: not to compete with the Web, but to complement it. Nothing delivers high-resolution like print, and nothing appeals more to the human desire to hold information in our hands -- at least not yet.

Anyone desiring more information about Fish & Fly can contact Tom Pero at tom@wildriverpress.com.

One of my favorite fishing books of all time is Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American West. In it, Charles Lindsay's startlingly ethereal black and white photographs are interleaved between passages of Thomas McGuane's writing -- writing which comes as close to poetry as anything McGuane as published.

This morning's New York Times features the Rensselaerville, N.Y. home of photographers Catherine Chalmers and Charles Lindsay, which Chalmers, who is noted for her images of insects and small animals, describes as "where the head beast lives."

Upstream: Fly-Fishing in the American West on Amazon.

Robin Carey writes about a return to a childhood dream, of hunting garnets and catching cutthroats, in Gray's Sporting Journal. "A tad off center, along the crystalline axes, shone the star. So the star was there, as the cutthroat had been, but the facets were gone, and the right creek ran in another drainage."

This week on MidCurrent, Tom Helgeson offers his take on John Gierach's 16th book, Fool's Paradise. Gierach's new collection of essays hit bookstores only a couple of weeks ago, and we hear that some sellers are already having to re-order.

But does Fool's Paradise have the energy and wit of classics like Trout Bum and The View From Rat Lake? As Helgeson says in his review, "This is a nice, often humorous collection of stories carried on a soft, steady current by a good man who is thoughtful about his fishing and writing."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's D'Arcy Egan interviews John Gierach and talks about the author's latest book, Fool's Paradise, which recently arrived on store shelves. "'I love fishing and I love writing,' said Gierach by telephone from his rural Colorado home. 'I don't know which one I'd ever give up. Charles Waterman, who is one of my favorite authors, once said that writing about fishing can be more fun than actually fishing.'"

This morning's reading turned up a little gem from Charlotte Observer staff writer Bob Simpson, who shines a light on the facets of the addicted fly fisher. "To a truly addicted fly fisherman, and this may hold true for all fully addicted fishermen, fishing is terribly important, primarily because he is positive that most of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant."

Place this one firmly in the category of history's ironies: Zane Grey, who became so passionate about the Oregon's upper Rogue River that he bought a mining claim there, may see his property added to the National Register of Historic Places. That would probably strike the famous angler-author as quite a twist of fate. Why? Grey bought the mining claim as a last resort, since all the land around the river was owned by the federal government in 1926. The Trust for Public Land bought the land from the Haas family, who owned it, and then sold to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. That's the same BLM who is fighting conservationists all over the U.S. west for more drilling access in unspoiled wilderness. Hmmm....

John Gierach's first book in three years arrives in readers' hands May 16. Fly fishers can hardly wait, and there are plenty of non-angling adherents of the Gierach view of life waiting for the UPS truck to arrive.

This week on MidCurrent you can watch and listen to Gierach as he draws the connections between fly fishing writing and the sport itself. As far as we know this segment, from the "Why Fly Fishing" DVD, is the only time Gierach has ever appeared in film. "We who fly fish," Gierach says, "think it's deeply meaningful until we try to explain why it's meaningful, and then suddenly it's just fishing again."

For his upcoming new edition of Spey Flies and Dee Flies: Their History and Construction, Oregonian John Shewey traveled to northern Scotland in search of flies tied by the legendary ghillie Geordie Shaw. He found them, after years of searching, hanging on the wall of the Craigellachie Hotel.

John Shewey's Spey Flies and Dee Flies: Their History & Construction on Amazon.

When the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Carl Hiassen's new book The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport, I couldn't help but once again notice the similarities that might compel a fly fisher to play golf, and vice-versa.

WSJ: Have you played golf since finishing your book?
Hiaasen: I actually played yesterday. I hadn't played in a month. I disgraced myself completely. A lot of the strategy in golf involves getting your excuses lined up. This time there were no alibis, it wasn't windy, there were no snakes on the course. I shot an abominable 97." We don't have many snakes on saltwater flats, but we do have rays. And more than one beaver has spoiled a perfect drift of the fly.

By the way, you won't see Hiaasen fishing "like a putz." He's recognized as one of the top bonefishers around. You can see his fly box on MidCurrent.

If you hadn't heard yet, John Gierach's first book in three years -- Fool's Paradise -- is being published this month. Jeffrey Mayor recently landed an interview with him and got Gierach to talk about how his style has changed in the 20 years he's been writing best-sellers. "'The first couple of books were written by a kid. I'm in my 60s now, I hope I've learned something. Hopefully the style has matured. I have people still come up to me and tell me their favorite is "Trout Bum" (published in 1988). That was written more than 20 years ago by a kid I hardly remember. As I get older I take a longer view.'" In the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune.

By the way, this coming Wednesday MidCurrent will be publishing a video interview with Gierach that is part of the new DVD "Why Fly Fishing." To be among the first to see it, subscribe to the MidCurrent fly fishing newsletter.

Author John Gierach and guide, artist and illustrator Bob White will mark their 100th column together in Fly Rod & Reel's July/October issue. Their first collaboration was in July of 1988, when Bob illustrated John's article, "East Big Fish." After Lee Wulff's death in 1991, the editors at Rod & Reel asked John to take over the assignment of writing the magazine's closing column, and Bob was asked to illustrate it. Their first regular column together, "The Sporting Life," was published in March of 1992. The illustration for the 100th column is a painting of John fishing his home water, and is titled "Close To Home." The accompanying image has yet to be released and will be unveiled in the 100th issue.

Bob has produced a set of limited edition prints from the paintings that illustrate the 1st and 100th "Sporting Life" columns, and Fly Rod & Reel will be giving two of these sets away in a sweepstakes that is described on Fly Rod & Reel's website at www.flyrodreel.com. In addition to the prints, the grand-prize winner will receive a new Boron II-MX rod courtesy of the R. L. Winston Rod Co.

To check out more of Bob's fine artwork visit his Web site at www.whitefishstudio.com. You can also see his work represented on MidCurrent's Fly Fishing Artists page.

If you are familiar with the life of poet and children's writer Ted Hughes, who was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998 and who was married to Sylvia Plath, you might expect a quirky and highly personal take on fly fishing. And that is what you get, from the new Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber, 756 pages), edited by Christopher Reid. "His letters reveal a Waltonesque obsession with angling: 'Dry Fly Fishing is a psychologically determined activity -- making slight understatements at the surface in the hope of interesting the organic mysteries and terrors in the depth ...' But for him, it was a dangerous activity; it could put you off your work: '... the whole motive of writing finds perfect and satisfying expression in fishing. Fishing is a substitute for symbolic activity that simply short-circuits the need to write.'"

More about Hughes on Wikipedia.

Verlyn Klinkenborg's entertaining thoughts on specialized vocabulary in The New York Times are a reminder of how peculiar our response to words can be. I consider myself tolerant of those who don't "speak the language," and I love a good malapropism, but if someone asks for a "rope" (instead of a line) or a "map" (instead of a chart) on my boat, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Then again, my seven-year-old's favorite trick when driving the skiff is to try to hit all of the "boobies" (crab pot buoys), a terminology saved from age three because he knows it will make me laugh and reach for the steering wheel. And I'll sigh deeply and loudly over any kind of pontification, given that it is usually filled with errors of fact and judgment. Truth is, every nomenclature can help define expertise, but set it loose in common conversation and it becomes pretentious bilgewater. It's OK for fly rod designers to argue "spine" versus "spline," but lord save me from a room full of rodbuilders frozen in disagreement over the same.

"I realize that I’ve spent most of my life happily sailing into fogbanks of specialized language. Some, like the vocabularies of philosophy and literary theory, never lost their slightly foggy quality, thanks to their inherent abstraction. But others, like the languages of fly-fishing and hog-raising and horse-riding, cleared up just as soon as I laid hands on the objects they named."

Led Leeson has written some of the most beautiful essays in fly fishing (witness The Habit of Rivers and Jerusalem Creek), but lately he has become quite adept at observance of the sport itself, and especially how we adapt to the accelerating pace of change. In this month's Gray's Sporting Journal, he creates a long and rich list of the good and the bad. "When we don’t view the past in sepia tints through a Vaseline-smeared lens, we are apt, as the Stones say, 'to paint it black.' But Dickens was right: Human experience is equivocal. The Dark Ages had their bright spots, and the good ol’ days weren’t really all that good. From the French Revolution to fly fishing, history happens in shades of gray."

Read a longer sample of Leeson's writing in "A Moveable Feast" on MidCurrent.

John Holt reviews Taylor Streit's new book Man vs Fish: The Fly Fisherman’s Eternal Struggle for the California Literary Review. "I didn’t give Man vs Fish five stars because it’s written as well as say Trout Madness or Trout Magic by Robert Traver or anything by Roderick Haig Brown, though I suspect that as Streit progresses as a writer he will approach these two in delivery. The book received the top rating because of its honest, humble approach to something I care deeply about. A rare thing these days."

An unsuspecting angler might pick up Richard Brautigan's 1967 book Trout Fishing in America and guess wrongly that he was about to read a guide to the country's cold water fisheries. In fact, the book has almost nothing to do with trout fishing but provides a condemnation of a cultural turn away from nature.

Interestingly, Brautigan was also featured in the UYA production of "Tarpon," made in 1974, and coined the phrase "fishing on the ragged edge" in the movie: further evidence that some of the roots of counter-culture literature in the U.S. are closely entwined with fly fishing.

This from the Wikipedia entry on Brautigan: "To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, 'As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.'"

This little gem of a quote is hidden in a retrospective by popular Irish sports writer Con Houlihan in Ireland's Independent: "Local fame is like a name carved on a tree destined for the sawmill. Anglers, despite popular belief, are not liars. Such strange things happen on the water that if they told the truth, nobody would believe them. And so they tell lies in an attempt to capture the truth." Read the whole piece; there's some really fine writing here.

"The recipes for flies and descriptions of baits includes anything and everything: eels, parrotfishes, needlefishes, segmented worms, sea urchins, you name it. And the text is loaded with valuable tips ready to be applied. You'll learn what makes a fly good for fish wary of stripping action, where and why a ChilliPepper fly is a good bet for bonefish, and what about a Gray Squirrel Bendback make it functional in sea grass white spots or areas with current." Jordan Kahn reviews the new saltwater fly patterns book by Aaron Adams, a Mote Marine scientist who is also the operations director of Bonefish & Tarpon Unlimited. In the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Fly Fisherman's Guide to Saltwater Prey on Amazon.

As further proof that even a backwards-looking Web has a place in current culture, this 1989 NYT review by Nelson Bryant of Tom Rosenbauer's Reading Trout Streams reminds us that half-life of good fishing writing is very long indeed. (Then again, in Bryant's second review, Poul Jorgensen's tip that ''the best half-hitch tool you can use is a ball point pen with the ink cartridge removed'' might leave us wandering the aisle of Staples for hours. But Poul Jorgensen's Book Of Fly Tying became an instant favorite in its own right.)

"Rosenbauer covers everything from brawling rivers to brooks, including beaver impoundments on the latter, and reminds one to pay attention to pocket water that at first glance seems uninviting. He notes the importance of observing bubble lines in small streams: ''Watch the bubbles. Watch the debris. The fish will be right under their cafeteria line. . . . If the bubbles are skewed toward the right side of the tail of the pool, don't bother with the left -- until you're satisfied that the trout on the right are either spooked or not eating.'''

Check out Rosenbauer's later writing on the subject in "Reading the Water" and "Rich and Poor Trout Streams" on MidCurrent.

On his "Reports from Dark Acres" blog, Bill Vaughn writes entertainingly about how the Great Daylight Fireball of 1972 -- which raced from Montana to Washington state on the morning of February 19 that year -- saved a giant brown trout from becoming his victim. "First, I’d been caught up in the drugs, high drama and copious sex of the antiwar movement. Then, maybe as punishment, the army drafted me. However, a couple days before I was supposed to report to Fort Lewis, Washington, for boot camp I was informed that my government didn’t want to use me for cannon fodder after all because Richard Nixon had decided to turn over the war to the Vietnamese."

Bob Edwards interviewed author, fly fisher and cutting horse devotee Thomas McGuane on XMRadio on his January 31 show. Even if you don't have XMRadio, you can listen to a portion (and purchase the rest) of the podcast on ITunes (just go to "Podcasts" and search for McGuane), or you can buy it from Audible.com for $2.95. In the interview McGuane talks about the eastern literary establishment, writers who live in "flyover country," and how getting bitten by a rattlesnake feels like getting whacked with a stick.

You can also read samples of McGuane's writing on MidCurrent: "The Longest Silence" and "Foundationless Opinions" are examples of what Nick Lyons has said is some of the best fishing literature ever written.

We received a copy of Jay Nichols's collection of expert fly fishing tips in the mail last week and were impressed by the amount of ground this handy little book covers. 1001 Fly Fishing Tips: Expert Advice, Hints and Shortcuts from the World's Leading Fly Fishers (Headwater Books, January 2008, 209 pages) is exactly what it says it is: a compendium of top suggestions from many of the recognized masters of the sport. Gary Garth reviews the book in this morning's Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal: "'1001 Fly Fishing Tips' is loaded with practical information, most of which is baseline. The text is simple and easy to understand. The book is divided into four parts: Technique and Presentation; Equipment; Hatches and Seasons; and Travel Destinations and Species other than Trout. It's nicely illustrated with 200 line drawings."

1001 Fly-fishing Tips: Expert Advice, Hints, and Shortcuts from the World's Leading Fly-fishers on Amazon.

They're delightful, they're entertaining, and they contain an important message for kids: respect our resources. Kirk Werner's two new books arrived in the mail last week and we were simply amazed by the talent they display. No only are the books -- Olive, The Little Woolly Bugger, and Olive and the Big Stream (both around 40 pages and published by Swimming Kangaroo Books) -- beautifully illustrated and written, they show great imagination and real knack for storytelling.

MidCurrent's own crack team of children's book critics began reviewing the books last Thursday night. Their balanced opinion (one is a 7-year-old boy, the other a 5-year-old girl) is that the books are "the best." Of course we didn't let the reviewers get away with such a simple critique, and when pressed both mentioned the "great story" and repeated several examples of engaging plot twists. But perhaps the most telling praise of all was an eagerness to return to the task on subsequent evenings, and even a willingness to forgo Spongebob.

If you have or know children of reading age who like a good book, we highly recommend Mr. Werner's new titles. Not only the books great reads, their sales will result in a contribution to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital via Hooked On a Cure.

You can purchase both books through the Olive Web site (where you can also find some pretty cool t-shirts).

If you hadn't noticed by now, we like fly fishing art. We also like good writing. This week's excerpt of a book by Ed Gray and Arthur Shilstone exemplifies the best of both. Gray, as you may know, was the founder of Gray's Sporting Journal. Shilstone has achieved worldwide fame as a watercolor artist, and his paintings grace many corporate and private collections.

See a sample of their work from a collaborative effort called Flashes in the River (Willow Creek Press, April 1996, 127 pages). In it Gray talks about Alaskan fly fishing, its awesome beauty and its incredible fish, and Shilstone shows what a great watercolorist sees in big rivers.

Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis author Howell Raines will write for the new upscale Conde Nast business magazine, reports CNNMoney.com.

If you are in any familiar with Ernest Schwiebert's Nymphs II, published posthumously in 2007 as the continuation of his classic Nymphs, you know that it was an enormous undertaking, not just on the part of the author, but by the editors and publishers as well. It's hard not to be impressed by Schwiebert's erudition, but some reviewers, like this one, take serious exception to the author's delivery. "Schwiebert’s hyper-inflated ego is reflected in his foppish writing style. He is an inveterate name-dropper. This form of self-puffery does not boost his status because, like most egocentric name-droppers, he fails to distinguish between individuals possessing minor outdoor celebrity (e.g., former Winchester public relations executive Jim Rikhoff) and true angling expertise (e.g., famed British river-keeper Frank Sawyer)." James Phillips on FWDailyNews.com.

If you'd prefer to reach your own conclusions, you can see a large excerpt from Nymphs II on Google Books.

Drift Boats and River Dories:Their History, Design, Construction, and Use (Stackpole Books, July 2007, 304 pages) came out in July and has since gained quite a following among boat builders and fly fishers interested in the lore surrounding the evolution of wooden western drift boats. Author Rodger L. Fletcher, along with illustrator Samuel F. Manning, created an enduring testament to the value of handcrafted fishing vessels and got admiring praise from reviewers like James Babb and Ted Leeson. This morning Roy Gault writes extensively about the recent book in the Oregon Statesman-Journal. "Fletcher first determined the original lines of each boat, drew a pattern, then built the boats as models, scaled one inch to a foot. His intention never was to build every one of the 11 boats himself, full sized. But his book does contain every angle for every cut, every measurement, every ounce of information necessary to build each of the boats. 'I break out in a cold sweat over that, afraid something will be a sixteenth of an inch off,' he said."

Drift Boats and River Dories on Amazon.

There's almost nothing more enjoyable on a cold winter's day than paging through coffee-table fly fishing books, especially if they combine art and biography. We received Diane Inman's new The Fine Art of Angling (Di Les Books, 205 pages, December 2007) earlier this week and I took a couple of hours perusing its wide-format pages, taking in the perspective of ten notable fly fishing artists. This is a very nicely done book. While the publisher's choices for featured artists all share a kind of classic sobriety -- most of them claim Winslow Homer as an inspiration -- bringing them together like this makes for an interesting comparison. The lengthy biographies that accompany the reproductions of art by Thomas Aquinas Daly, Eldridge Hardie, Chet Reneson and others are well crafted and reveal a common spirit among these more traditional artists: great fishing art is about being humble in the midst of majesty, about the fly fisher disappearing into the landscape. In some of our favorite pieces here, the angler is almost unnoticeable.

Beyond the generalizations though, there is some terrific stuff here from the individual artists. Here's Reneson on his choice to be representational: "Good abstract art is more real than realism. You're taking the essence and taking all the gooey, dooey stuff out of it." And Daly: "One reassuring thread of consistency in our often schizoid lives is nature's adherence to its own quiet and eternal laws."

For a nice glimpse of the book, check out the designer's preview.

The Fine Art of Angling on Amazon.

Described as a "dashboard guide" rather than a coffee-table book, a new publication from Brushy Mountain Publishing offers a detailed look at important fly fishing waters in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. The Western North Carolina Fly Guide's author is J.E.B. Hall, a fly fishing guide for Davidson River Outfitters. "The guide divides WNC and eastern Tennessee into seven regions, offering more than 70 quick, easily digestible stream entries that show the water, tell how to get there and offer tips for which flies to use during various times of the year. The book bills itself as the definitive WNC guide to fly-fishing for trout, bass and musky." Johnny Buck writes about the book in North Carolina's Citizen-Times.

Some of the most evocative fly fishing books -- at least in our library -- combine fine and inventive writing with raw but eloquent photographs. One example is Thomas McGuane's and Charles Lindsay's Upstream. Two more would be Andrew Steketee's and Kirk Deeter's books about fly fishing guides. We excerpted their saltwater book in late summer. Now we're happy to be able to show you a chapter of their book about trout guides, Castwork, illustrated with photographs by Liz Steketee.

"Rusty Vorous" is one of many remarkably insightful profiles in the book, but we picked it because we've had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of Rusty's quotable observations and brilliant instruction. The words and images capture not just the man but the land and water that have shaped his unique personality.

Most anglers associate Vincent Marinaro with his seminal A Modern Dry-Fly Code, written in the 1950s about the behavior of insects and feeding trout and championing streamside observation for dry-fly fishers. But Thomas Whittle and Bill Harms also knew him as a great practitioner and teacher of bamboo rod building and have just released a book about their mentor entitled Split & Glued By Vincent C. Marinaro, echoing the inscription Marinaro placed on each of his rods. "The book is a precise examination of the technical expertise developed by one of Pennsylvania's most influential fly fishermen and authors, an exploration of his life and times and a journey through the lore of his home trout waters in the Cumberland Valley. Prepared in cooperation with the Pennsylvania Fly Fishing Museum Association, which will receive a portion of the proceeds, the 300-page, full-color book includes 225 photos, 50 drawings, 11 original paintings and charts of all of Marinaro's rod tapers." Marcus Schneck on Penn-Live.com.

The book can be purchased directly from the the authors at www.stonycreekrods.com.

Listen to the author of the new book Backcast talk about moving 17 times as a child -- often skipping out on the rent, learning about the outdoors, and as an adult having to deal with divorce, an event he had promised himself he would never experience. If you've already read the book, the interview reveals a rather heart-warming epilogue: the author's son writes a letter from Peru telling his dad "you'll never lose me."

Also, Chuck Leddy reviews Ureneck's book on Boston.com.

Subtitled "The Fly Fisherman's Eternal Struggle," this new book by New Mexico guide Taylor Streit is really a large collection of stories -- most of them quite entertaining -- about this fly fishing veteran's many experiences fishing not just New Mexico and the Rio Grande, but the Bahamas, Patagonia and Mexico. There are even a couple of hunting stories here, rounding out a fairly large picture of how the author has spent his last forty years in the out of doors. As with his earlier book Instinctive Fly Fishing (see MidCurrent's review), you won't find a lot of lofty language or pretension here, but there are plenty of lyrical moments.

Man vs. Fish on Amazon.

We just received a copy of Rickey Noel Mitchell's new book The Orvis Guide to Personal Fishing Craft (The Lyons Press, December 2007, 99 pages, softcover). The book covers float tubes, pontoon boats, canoes, and kayaks and offers instruction on fishing from each craft (of course), safety and accessories. Mitchell is a writer and kayak fly-fishing guide out of Fresno, California, and apparently has plenty of field experience to back up his advice. Here he talks about fighting an invisible leviathan in Monterey Bay: "Fortunately my bow was pointed in the right direction and I tie a decent Bimini knot when I build a fly line, because the creature on the end of my line yanked me out of my teaching circle almost capsizing a couple of kayakers as it did so. Pushing the fighting butt of the rod into my gut, my PFD gave me the perfect cushioning and acted as a fighting belt. The mysterious fish was towing my kayak so fast the stern threw up a wake."

"Backcast plays out like the long and splendid arc of a fly line, unfurling on an Alaskan river trip that Lou Ureneck has arranged to re-connect with his son. As the trip progresses, Ureneck reflects back on his own life while adroitly capturing the sometimes hilarious and sometimes serious interactions between himself and his son. The result is a realistic and heartwarming story of a father and his son -- and a work of outdoor literature of the highest order. "

You can read an excerpt from Backcast on MidCurrent.

A new book out from British publisher Constable & Robinson traces the history and mystique of giant salmon in pictures and words. Sounding like a great seasonal gift for those who like to both gawk and dream, the 400-page, five-pound Domesday Book of Giant Salmon is, according to review David Profumo, a "highly enjoyable volume." "Organised into several categories fly-caught fish, any-method monsters in excess of 60lb, even ones that got away there is a discursive account of the circumstances of each leviathan's capture, ranging from detailed (and sometimes contradictory) first-hand narratives to the sketchiest of historical anecdotes." On CountryLife.co.uk.

The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon on Amazon.

Rich Murphy's new 445-page opus on fly fishing for stripers has me wondering -- as did Dec Hogan's steelhead book last year -- where folks find the time and resources to put together such giant compendiums. Fly Fishing for Striped Bass (Wild River Press, October 2007, 445 pages) is divided in to nine long chapters that cover everything from fish biology to flies and tackle, but the emphasis is, as it should be, on technique and strategy. This is a large format book with a ton of photographs and illustrations. The pre-release reviewers -- Lefty Kreh and Rip Cunningham among them -- seem to think this is the best book yet written on the subject.

Fly Fishing for Striped Bass on Amazon.

It has been said that a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting. When a good writer writes about something as close and intricate as the stream of influences running from father to son, though, we should expect more than just an entertaining story. Lou Ureneck delivers it in his new book Backcast (St. Martin's Press, September 2007, 304 pages, hardcover), which we excerpt this week on MidCurrent.

This caught our eye because of a recipe that originated in a frying pan made from an old Maytag washing machine lid, but it also shows what a bunch of folks who love the Yellowstone backcountry can do with fresh trout and assorted camp-style ingredients. "Recipes in the cookbook ($19.95, Riverbend Publishing) run the gamut, from Cross' simple yet elegant Chocolate Pecan Rum Pie, to Superintendent Suzanne Lewis' old-fashioned Brunswick Stew, to an energy-boosting, grilled peanut-butter and chocolate-chip sandwich recipe submitted by Old Faithful Inn bellhop Walter Voeller." Karen Ronnow in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

Yellowstone National Park Cookbook on Amazon.

Not all knots are created equal, as anyone who has taught knot tying can attest. First, you have to consider the variability in both the performance and characteristics of materials. Then you have think of -- among other things -- the wire thickness of hook eyes, the diameter of connecting lines, the affect of connections on the way the fly drifts or is pulled, the balance between strength and complexity, the sensitivity of the fish to knot size, and ... well, you get the picture.

The thing that most novice knot tiers don't get is that how a knot is tied is the most important variable of all. The highest-strength knot tied by an unskilled angler is weaker than a "60% knot" tied expertly. That's why it's worth learning knots from the best source possible, and why improving on knot instruction itself is a worthwhile pursuit.

This week we review Lefty Kreh's new book Fishing Knots, which aims once again to help knot tiers stop pigtails before they happen.

What does this morning's news have to do with fly fishing? Well, for one, fly fishers like to write. Second, getting published is not what it used to be, and even less so than in 1984 when, to prove a point, the already-famous Doris Lessing wrote two novels under a pen name and was rejected by her long-time British publisher. So the next time you are feeling "frankly but faintly malicious" toward a reluctant publisher, remember that their rejection is not always the best comment on the quality of your work.

When I finished Lou Ureneck's new Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but take a hard look at my relationship with my son. That's the kind of effect Ureneck achieves with precise writing and intense introspection (ever note how rarely these two things coexist?). According to this review by David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, however, his intention in writing Backcast was simply to help himself get over a nasty divorce. To the book's credit, the author doesn't wallow in a winless study of the reasons why he and his wife split, but instead chooses his relationships with his own parents and the evolution of his love for his son as his focus. "The book relates the history of Ureneck's childhood, marriage, and divorce, but its narrative spine is the adventure on the river. Dropped off by float-plane at the source of the Kanektok, father and son inflate and load up a raft and start inexorably downstream through the dramatic landscape."

At the end of last week three new fly fishing books landed in our office: a new book on knots by Lefty Kreh, John Barr's book on his flies and how to fish them, and Charles Meck's Fishing Tandem Flies (Headwater Books, September 10, 2007, 128 pages). Since they are all important books, we'll talk a little about each this week, starting with Meck's handy little manual on droppers, which qualifies as a must-read for any serious trout angler. Meck covers all the combinations: one dry and one wet, one dry and two wets, two dries, two wets, three wets, etc. and talks connections, casting and delivery for a variety of conditions. There is a surprising amount of info in these 128 pages, much of it based on Meck's considerable practical experience. In short, if you've been looking for an excuse to learn about fishing multi-fly rigs, this is a great place to start.

Fishing Tandem Flies on Amazon.

The Yale Anglers Journal, started by James Prosek and Joseph Furia, is a small publication with a long reach. Ten years after its founding, it is publishing a collection of its best essays entitled Tight Lines. "The journal is an undergraduate publication, with a tiny circulation of about 1,000, but it has big-time connections, and it has drawn essays from people like former President Jimmy Carter, former Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, the Yale professor and poet John Hollander, and author Christopher Buckley." Steve Grant in the Hartford, Connecticut Courant.

"He almost never wrote about it but, for the last 20 years of his life, Ernest Hemingway made his home in the rugged Idaho mountain town of Ketchum in a 1950s-era house made of poured concrete and painted to make it look like wood." Leonard Doyle writes about the local controversies surrounding attempts to open the scene of Hemingway's death to the hoi polloi. In the U.K.'s The Independent.

With the inspiration of Kerouac's frenetic On the Road and a classic excerpt from Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, Rex Turner explores the ways a good book can heighten enjoyment of the outdoors. "He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic." In Maine's Kennebec Journal.

"I learned a lot from fishing. A good fisherman looks for patterns. When there are changes, good fishing or bad, he seeks the explanatory variable: Is the water low, cold or cloudy? Is the sun bright? Are insects rising from the surface? Are green worms falling from the trees? Does the bait work best when stationary or retrieved? Fast retrieve or slow retrieve? Fishing gave me lessons in the value of observation, experience and practical memory. I was abstract and dreamy in the rest of my life, sometimes dangerously so, but as a fisherman I was an empiricist, grounded in fact." Lou Ureneck, author of the excellent new Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska (St. Martin's, September 2007, 304 pages), recounts a fishing childhood in The New York Times.

The head of Boston University's journalism department has authored a book that tells the story of regaining a son's trust while fly fishing in the wilds of Alaska. Out on September 18, Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska (St. Martin's, 304 pages, hardback) recounts Ureneck's "own fatherless childhood, the influence of his mother’s boyfriend who helped him learn to fish, and the realization that he himself had done the one thing he always promised himself he would not do: He ended his marriage in divorce."

Preorder Backcast on Amazon.

When Bill Curtis began guiding in south Florida in the middle of the last century, there wasn't anyone around for him to follow, or to imitate, or to dislike. He made a lot of stuff up as he went, stuff that later became doctrine for flats guides. He got tired of standing on his engine, so he came up with the first poling platform. He introduced the Bimini Twist to south Florida. He probably did dozens of other things that he never got credit for, and as with so many pioneering saltwater guides he wore a take-me-as-I-am countenance with him wherever he went.

This week we're happy to publish an excerpt from Tideline, an easily overlooked but beautiful book that came out of Willow Creek Press in 2004. The first chapter is a profile of Bill, and it contains extraordinary photographs of Captain Curtis in his last years of guiding. The writing, by Andrew Steketee and Kirk Deeter, is awfully good too.

"As any fly-fisherman who hasn't had his head in a bucket the last 20 years knows full well, Barr is the most successful designer of commercially distributed flies in the world. His Copper John, and its variations, is the most widely distributed fly in the contract tyer market, among a couple dozen other creations listed in the catalog of Umpqua Feather Merchants, the nation's leading fly distributor." Charlie Meyers writes about John Barr's new book, Barr Flies (Stackpole Books, August 2007, 188 pages), in the Denver Post.

Barr Flies on Amazon.

Bartender-gearhead-fly-fishing guide Ryan Friel and writer Brian Schott live and ski in Whitefish, Montana, a once-unsullied logging town in the western part of the state. Apparently no one got the word out there that literary journals don't work, so they decided to start publishing the "Whitefish Review," a "decidedly lowbrow" collection of writing from an eclectic community. "Let's call up retired NFL quarterback and sometimes Whitefish resident Drew Bledsoe and talk about the art of football. Then let's sandwich the interview between solid bookends - powerhouse Tim Cahill up front, Missoula's own William Kitteredge out back." Michael Jamison in The Missoulian.

Simon Gawesworth began teaching casting on the River Torridge, in Devon, England, but he lives and works now in Idaho, where he designs fly lines for RIO Products. We just got a copy of his new edition of Spey Casting and are happy to see the addition of Skagit casting to the chapter list. If you cast two-handed rods and hadn't seen the first edition, you've been missing out on what we think is the best-written book on the subject, not to mention the best-illustrated. Spey Casting, Second Edition on Amazon.

Also, if you're a two-hand practitioner or thinking you might give it a try, listen to Gawesworth talk about the techniques he teaches in our podcast.

At least part of the inspiration for MidCurrent was a desire to see more good fishing writing reach the Web, and it's been satisfying to watch newer and better writing appear year after year. The latest is Gillraker, which was brought to our attention yesterday. Gillraker could be called a blog, but on the other hand it is obviously more concerned with fine writing than with entry-making. I spent about an hour there yesterday and read writing by author Andrew Steketee (Tidelines), novelist Robert Abel (Ghost Traps), author Greg Keeler, and William Comstock (a 19th century whaler). The Gillraker filter is drawing out some very good stuff so far, most of it thought-provoking, like Steketee's take on fly tying in "Tying Inappropriate Flies:"

"Appreciating images of Dan Fink’s fly-tying nihilism (rattlesnake anatomy, hunting rounds, political hyperbole, etc. appended to fish hooks), I’ve concluded the fly-tying universe has missed the point around imagination. Not some compromised blend of utility, biology, and inspiration, but tying for tying’s sake — flies that sound less like the Fray, and more like Wilco or The Cold War Kids when played … DanBob’s Diamondback, Worm Ball, the Greedy George."

Here's a fascinating story about the discovery of "organic pollution" created by the harvesting of watercress on the famous Bourne tributary of the River Test. Discovering that mustard oil released by watercress reduced biodiversity in part of the stream, the company cultivating the plant changed its process for filtering released water. "The Bourne Rivulet, a tributary of the River Test near Andover in Hampshire, is the idyllic spot which inspired Harry Plunket Greene to write Where the Bright Waters Meet. The Victorian opera singer and key figure in English music, was also a keen fisherman who caught three fat, wild brown trout in the crystal-clear waters of the little chalk stream on August 29 1904." Paul Eccleston in the U.K. Telegraph.

"Charles R. Meck's supervisor at Penn State thought Meck was crazy when he retired in 1987 after only 25 years with the university. 'I quit the day I received my retirement health care benefits,' said Meck, who lives in Pennsylvania Furnace. 'My vice president asked me, "What are you going to do?" " Eric Smith profiles author Charles Meck, whose extraordinary knowledge of Pennsylvania hatches and trout techniques led to a second career in writing, for Pennyslvania's CentreDaily.com. Smith mentions Meck's new book, Fishing Tandem Flies: Tactics, Techniques, and Rigs to Catch More Trout, coming out in August.

Fishing Tandem Flies: Tactics, Techniques, and Rigs to Catch More Trout on Amazon.

"I am a fly-fisher and a sucker for the feel-good philosophy of fishing books. When they're done well, they speak to a bigger world than the water and fish they pretend to examine. When they're written badly, I just pass and go fishing." Pete Warzel rates Jeff Hull's new Streams of Consciousness (Lyons Press, January 2007, 208 pages) "superb" in this review on RockyMountainNews.com.

Streams of Consciousness: Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life on Amazon.

Author Charles Meck has a new book -- co-authored with Dave Hall -- coming out in September: Fishing Tandem Flies (Headwaters Press). Meanwhile he is giving Deborah Weisberg the scoop on all of the prime hatches that are about to occur in central Pennsylvania. "'The Green Drake [hatch] starts on Yellow Creek, usually around May 24, then comes to the Little Juniata and Penn's Creek about four days later,' Meck said. 'The last good Green Drake hatch is on Big Fishing Creek around June 10.'"

Fishing Tandem Flies: Tactics, Techniques, and Rigs to Catch More Trout on Amazon.

How to Catch the Biggest Trout of Your Life, by Landon Mayer (Wild River Press, February 2007, 188 pages) seems to have a few clues that Ed Dentry likes in it, including "walking the dog" and "creating 'the dotted line,' a mental image of how any current will affect the delivery of his flies to a big trout." In the Rocky Mountain News.

How to Catch the Biggest Trout of Your Life on Amazon.

"There's a short, but practical, section on fly-fishing from a kayak, as well as advice on something that a lot of new fishing paddlers learn they should have given more thought to -- picking the right seat." Eric Sharp mentions a new book, Kayak Fishing: The Ultimate Guide (Heliconia Press, July 2007, 160 pages), in the Detroit Free Press.

Kayak Fishing: The Ultimate Guide on Amazon.

"The New York Times has happily devoted a regular column to hunting and fishing since before the Second World War. Originally called Wood, Field and Stream, the column has since morphed into something more apropos for the time -- Outdoors." Times editorial writer Steven Soutner has assembled his favorites of the column in a new book called Upriver and Downstream: The Best Fly-Fishing and Angling Adventures from the New York Times (Harmony, April 2007, 304 pages). Mike Gillespie of the CanWest news service.

Upriver and Downstream on Amazon.

Bob Scammell writes in Canada's Brooks Bulletin about the good old days when fly fishing suppliers weren't afraid to tout virtually every one of their products as "The Best" or "The Only." He mentions the House of Hardy, Herter's, and R&R Feather Merchants of Rough and Ready, Californian, then notes that one company -- a mail-order book business started by Gary LaFontaine, still delivers the goods. "All this nostalgia came buzzing out of a Pandora’s box of half a dozen books I had ordered when I found the real treasure tucked inside: the latest copy of one of the quirkiest and best of the 'anti-catalogs,' the 'Book Mailer,' from Helena, Montana."

U.K. journalist Keith Elliott offers an entertaining profile of James Babb, who has been editor of Gray's Sporting Journal for ten years now, in The Independent. "An accomplished artist, he once made his wife a set of 52 'Get Out Of Sex Free' cards as a seasonal gift. 'She's nearly used 'em all up,' he says in the hometown Tennessee drawl he switches into effortlessly when he's probably joking."

You can read a sample of Babb's witticisms and anti-purist style on MidCurrent in an excerpt from his most recent book, Fly Fishin' Fool.

"While the nor'easter hovered over Maine earlier in the week, a copy of Trout Eyes by New Hampshire author William G. Tapply arrived at my home, a superb collection of 28 fishing essays. What a merry twist of fate to have an excellent read for such a foul week of weather, one of those books that ended far too soon." Ken Allen reviews William Tapply's most recent book on MaineToday.com.

You can read an excerpt from Trout Eyes on MidCurrent. Trout Eyes on Amazon.

We came across a wonderful line by contemporary Irish poet Michael Longley in Laurel Maury's review of his new Collected Poems. Longley's sonnets are rich in natural wonder, as evidenced in these lines from "The Eel-Trap:"

I lie awake and my mind goes out to the otter

That might be drowning in the eel-trap:

your breathing

Falters as I follow you to the other lake

Below sleep, the brown trout sipping at the stars.

In the Los Angeles Times.

"The new book is an exhaustive, nearly day-by-day account of where to go, what conditions to expect and which flies to carry on the Au Sable system, which is really three rivers -- the main stream, the South Branch and the North Branch." In his glowing review of Gates's new study of the Au Sable, Eric Sharp also mentions Mayflies of Michigan Trout Streams by Justin. W. Leonard and Fannie A. Leonard, published in 1962, considered the definite Michigan mayfly guide. In the Detroit Free Press.

Seasons on the Au Sable on Amazon.

"We suffer through serial spring storms waiting to get out there to see if the great miracle of the rise of a trout to a dry fly is ever going to be repeated this year. The perfect antidote is Paul Schullery’s latest book, 'The Rise,' which shows and tells amazing things about that miracle all fly fishers seek." Bob Scammell writes an extensive review of Paul Schullery's latest book, The Rise, for Alberta's BrooksBulletin.com.

You can read a portion of Schullery's observations on reading rises on MidCurrent in "Reading the Rise."

The Rise on Amazon.

"In "Hunter's Moon," White has outdone himself -- the plot is so far-fetched that it is suitable only for readers with a highly evolved ability to suspend disbelief. The wife of a former American president is dead, killed when her plane crashed during a humanitarian flight to deliver medical supplies to Central America." The Associated Press's Bruce DeSilva reviews Randy Wayne White's latest in the continuation of the Doc Ford series.

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road (Knopf, September 2006, 256 pages) and though this book is about as far from fly fishing reverie as one can get, it does end with one of the more remarkable descriptions of brook trout we've ever read. I thought we should share:

You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were the vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back.

Readers will find it remarkable that the author is able to render hope from a storyline that is possibly one of the bleakest ever written. McCarthy fans, however, will probably think this is his finest book since Blook Meridian, and it holds enormous poignancy for parents. The Road on Amazon.

Prior to reading George Black's Casting a Spell, the idea of owning a bamboo rod resided in the same brain space as notions of a new Lamborghini in the garage -- a fanciful reach for someone of my circumstance, and certainly not worth the energy to explore. But whether because Black came to bamboo as a complete neophyte or because he applied the same well-researched storytelling that marks his writing about everything from human rights to Chilean dam construction, by the end of his book my conversion had begun.

The pivot-point of the story in Casting a Spell is Eustis Edwards, who built some of the finest bamboo rods in the world in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Edwards typified the plight of cane rod craftsmen who endure Faustian bargains while preserving the spirit of the craft -- before finally saying "Enough is enough." In "The Rod That Won the West," Black follows Mark Twain, Eli Whitney, Rexall Drugs and Winchester Rifles along a single thread and uncovers the origins of one of the finest bamboo rods -- or I should say fly rods -- ever made. New on MidCurrent.

"A short chapter on casting tips has beautifully detailed pictures and explanations on how to pick-up and cast weighted flies. No mean feat, even for accomplished casters. The chapter on presentation shows in great detail casting and fishing techniques that apply to any flowing-water fishing, including trout." Jim Heim reviews Bob Clouser's newest book, Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth in Rivers and Streams (Stackpole, January 2007, 226 pages), which includes flies, equipment, strategies and even commentary from other expert smallmouth anglers. In the Frederick [Maryland] News-Post.

Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth on Amazon.

Author Jeff Hull, whose first book, Pale Morning Done, gathered spring creeks, water rights, romance and fly-fishing nuance into a very well received first novel. David James Duncan called it "beautifully realized." Hull's second book takes an entirely different tack, collecting sixteen essay on topics as varied as knots, blue sharks and camping on Slough Creek. Streams of Consciousness (The Lyons Press, January 2007, 208 pages), subtitled "Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life," gives Hull a chance to speak unguardedly about the things that have mattered most to him: adventure, clarity of vision, and respect for the opportunities given to us as anglers.

Interestingly, Streams of Consciousness slipped into bookstores in January without much fanfare, but it deserves attention, because Hull is one of the most observant and skilled new angling writers around. Here's an example from the chapter entitled "Knots:"

There was a time when I experienced my whole existence as a slow-tightening knot. It felt like coils of life backing over each other and tangling, then slicing into their own surfaces a little as they gripped and refused to back off. I've done a lot of work to loosen some of those coils, and these days generally try to keep my line straight. At least, when I feel a little wind knot, I don't keep casting.

On Amazon: Streams of Consciousness; Pale Morning Done

"One evening on that trip, the master compared fishing to mystery novels. 'Why read a book if you already know the ending?' Lescroart asked. 'Fishing is like that. You can be the greatest fisherman in the world, but you still don't know the ending.'" Tom Stienstra spends time with author John Lescroart (pronounced Less-Quaw), whose recent mystery about a west coast outdoors writer accused of murder has been on the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller lists for four weeks. The Suspect on Amazon.

Pull up a chair and take a listen to George Black talking about his recently released book about the history of bamboo rod making in the U.S. An interview conducted by Daniel Hinerfield for OnEarth magazine examines what the author brings to the study of the craft from long journalistic experience. Making a bamboo fly rod is like making a cross between a shotgun and a violin, says Black, and "the extraordinary character of the people who make these things" is mostly what Casting a Spell is about. Ultimately Black was inspired by the ownership of one of Eustis Edwards's Perfection rods, by a man who represented integrity, both attractive and melancholic, in resisting the corporate influences that might dilute his talent with mass marketing.

All-American author and eater indeed. Jim Harrison is profiled in The New York Times by Charles McGrath, who notes that the author, who writes in a rustic shack rented from his Arizona neighbor, is more prolific than ever. "'My mind can’t stop running fictively,' he said, explaining that he was turning out books these days faster than his publisher could cope with them.''But that’s O.K. Maybe I’ll just write some novels and leave them to my daughters, so they’ll have something when I cack.'” A wonderful interview with insight into one of the U.S.'s most underappreciated authors. Harrison's latest novel is Returning to Earth (Grove Press, November 2006, 272 pages). (Thanks to reader Chris Miller for this link.)

"From Ron Ahlers' Yellow Breeches Orange to Kathy Weigl's Herb's Zebra Shrimp, the 53 patterns were born of experience on some of trout fishing's most challenging and revered waters, such as Letort Spring Run, the Yellow Breeches, Big Spring Creek, Falling Springs and other midstate spring creeks and freestone streams." Marcus Schneck reports on PennLive.com that the Cumberland Valley (Pennsylvania) Chapter of Trout Unlimited has published a new 86-page, spiral-bound book of new and classic favorite member patterns. If you have thoughts of fishing central Pennsylvania's classic waters, CVTU's Favorite Flies - Fifty-three Productive Fly Patterns from Cumberland Valley Trout Unlimited is worth a look. The book is available for purchase via the CVTU Web site.

Probably best known for his many mysteries about Boston lawyer Brady Coyne, William Tapply is also one of the most prolific fly fishing authors alive. Although he specializes in mystery fiction (he wrote the well-regarded handbook The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit), Tapply has also written close to a thousand articles for Field & Stream, American Angler, and a host of other periodicals. So we were very happy to hear that the protagonist of his new series, Stoney Calhoun, is a Maine fly-fishing guide -- at least when he is not beset with glimpses of an enigmatic personal past that was zapped from his brain by a bolt of lightning.

This week we're happy to share the first chapter of Tapply's new book, Gray Ghost, which will arrive on store shelves on March 6. Any fly fisher who doesn't already read mysteries will want to give this one a spin. We read an advance copy of the book recently and couldn't put it down.

That's how Howard Meyerson describes Buck Peterson's Complete Guide to Fishing (Ten Speed Press, September 2006, 191 pages), which pokes fun at just about every fishing technique, and especially at cultures of bass fishing and fly fishing: "When comparing fly fishing to bait casting, Peterson's pluck is at its peak. He writes: 'If you are a died-in-the-wool catch-and-release activist, remote lodge owners and equally remote masters of the art form will welcome you into a world filled with warmed Cognac and hand-rolled cigars. Fly fishing marine biologists are discussing such issues as whether bait casting is a birth defect and whether women who bear tournament fisherman should be sterilized ...'" In the Grand Rapids Press. On Amazon.

For those who missed the initial airing of Charles Rangeley-Wilson's "The Accidental Angler" on British television over the past few weeks, it turns out that the show's narrative is available in book form. Theo Pike reviews the book on the U.K.'s FishandFly.com Web site: "Here in 'The Accidental Angler,' at the confluence of the writer’s craft and the film-maker’s art, it’s gripping to discover so many details that the camera didn’t catch -- the ones that only the author saw. In chapter 4, 'The Curse of Shiva',' he blesses us with a much-expanded account of the crew’s brain-boiling, bum-numbing circumventions of the mahseer on the Kaveri River in India." You can buy the book via FishandFly or on Amazon.

Perhaps whether a book makes you get up and go fishing is indeed the best measure of its quality. Richard Stevens reviews 49 Trout Streams of New Mexico by William Frangos and Raymond Shewnack (University of New Mexico Press, September 2006, 128 pages). "The book is a tease, a call to waters. It is a siren who tugs on a fisherman's soul with 49 reasons to fish. It reminds you of the beauty and serenity of flowing waters to be found somewhere other than the couch." In the Albuquerque Tribune. (On Amazon.)

Sacramento Bee writer Allen Pierleoni suggests that if you fish northern California, you owe it to yourself to read Amato's Northern California River Maps & Fishing Guide (November 2006, 48 pages, 35 maps). "It offers straightforward, detailed information on trout fishing on 35 rivers -- 18 coastal rivers, six northern inland and 11 in the Valley. Plus: color drawings of 13 freshwater sportfish, the months of various insect hatches, techniques for gear fishing and fly fishing, how-to guides for knots, and other handy advice."

Fly fishing publishers are in high gear in December and January. We were just at a book signing by Norm Zeigler, who's new book Snook on a Fly (Stackpole Books, 109 pages) is one of the first efforts anyone has made to address snook as a fly fishing quarry. Nick Lyons said the book is "the best introduction I know to a great saltwater gamefish and how best to fly-fish for it." (On Amazon.)

Meanwhile we received notice that Tom Rosenbauer's revision of the classic Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide (The Lyons Press, 288 pages) is still on track for a January 1 release. Tom's books are sleepers -- incredibly detailed and well-considered, they are essential to complete any reading list. The new edition has over 400 new color photographs and illustrations. (On Amazon.)

And the Sun-Sentinel reviews Pat Ford's The Best Fly-Fishing Trips Money Can Buy (Stackpole Books, 148 pages), which came out this July: "Ford either wrote or edited all of the chapters -- Andy Mill did the chapter on tarpon, Billy Pate wrote about billfish and Capt. Rick Murphy wrote about baby tarpon, snook and redfish -- which also cover bonefish, permit, sharks, tuna and peacock bass in South Florida, trout in Montana and Arizona, salmon in Alaska, golden dorado in Argentina and Bolivia and tigerfish in Africa." (On Amazon.)

John Betts will be signing copies of his interesting new book at the Denver Fly Fishing Show January 5 thru 7. The book covers sounds truly unique in both topic and production effort: "The format of the book perhaps is as remarkable as the keen instructional detail. An accomplished artist, Betts produced the ring-bound work in flowing hand-written script. Along with his own illustrations, this is reproduced on manuscript paper to form a collector's item rarely seen in publishing." From the Denver Post.

Paul Goetz reviews nine-year-old Tyler Befus's new book in the Salida, Colorado Mountain Mail. "A Kid's Guide to Fly-fishing is a great reference and a fun read for young and old. Illustrations, including drawings of different trout species and photos are beautifully presented in full color. Befus arranged the book with introductions into fly-fishing, fish, fish habitat, gear, methods, fish food and his personal experiences in fly-fishing circles."

Polly Campbell profiles Frank and Nick Amato via a look at the 40-year-old magazine Salmon Trout Steelheader, which Frank started in his parents' basement while working in a Portland, Oregon grocery store. "The company releases 15 to 20 new books a year -- more than 500 over the company's 40-year history -- and sells about 200,000 copies a year of the new releases and previously published volumes, several of which are considered definitive guides for specific fishing techniques." In The Oregonian.

Chicago Tribune reviewer Lew Freedman lists his favorite outdoors books of 2006, among them Howell Raines's The One That Got Away, Russell Annabel's Adventure Is In My Blood, The Last Expedition by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson, and Eric Newby's memoir of traveling in Afghanistan: "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby, is regarded as a classic of adventure travel literature. In 1956, Newby quit his career in fashion, and joined a British Foreign Service friend for a harsh trek and climb in Afghanistan. Newby is an understated, droll writer, with a thorough sense of self-deprecation."

We just got our hands on the newly released second edition of Dave Whitlock's L.L. Bean Fly-Fishing Handbook, which was first published ten years ago, and it improves on one of the best introductions to fly fishing ever produced. If you're not familiar with the first edition, it covered the gamut: tackle, casting, tactics, biology, foods and fly tying. The new edition adds more on saltwater fly fishing, ethics, and fishing from boats and float-tubes. Whitlock is a surprisingly good illustrator and of course an excellent teacher, and there is an enormous amount of insight and guidance packed into 192 pages. Our only quibbles with the book are minor: the knots chapter seems somewhat incomplete without the inclusion of some newer knots, and the appendix listing publications is missing some important new titles. L.L. Bean Fly-Fishing Handbook, Second Edition on Amazon.

Tyler Befus's new book, A Kid's Guide to Fly Fishing (Johnson Books, 95 pages, illustrated by the author), is just one of many fly fishing projects the precocious young fly fisher is involved in these days. Besides being the youngest member of Whiting Farms, Rio Products, and Ross Reels pro staff teams, he's creating DVDs and contributing to television series. "'I really like fly-fishing and I think others should too,' he said. “'t’s a lot cooler than watching TV. And kids that do that, I want them to get off the couch and go outdoors and learn about bugs, nature and spend time with their family.'” Kati O'Hare in the Montrose [Colorado] Daily Press.

Tyler Befus comes from good stock, as they say. HIs dad, Brad Befus, sales manager for Ross Reels, is also co-author of Basic Techniques for Successful Fly Tying and Carp on the Fly.

"I now understand that I was a weirdly underdeveloped human being for my age, ripe for just the sort of encounter that I had with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, 'Stop staring at people!'” A naive young medical student reflects on growing up near Livingston, Montana and the events surrounding his involvement with a rare-prints assistant. If you haven't yet read Gallatin County, this story may help convince you that McGuane is one of the finest short story writers going.

We're just beginning to read Dec Hogan's new steelhead book, the first title to be published by Tom Pero's Wild River Press, and admit to being in a mild rapture about it. We'll be excerpting the book on MidCurrent in the near future, but meanwhile you can read Mark Yuasa's short intro, as well as his mention of River Girls: Flyfishing for Young Women ($20, Johnson Books) by author Cecilia Kleinkauf on his outdoor gift list in the Seattle Times.

Artist Flick Ford and writer Dean Travis Clarke combined talents to produce the recently released FISH: 77 Great Fish of North America (The Greenwich Workshop Press, October 2006, 208 pages), a portfolio of watercolor paintings and text that tells the story of many of the important fish of North America, both fresh- and saltwater. Barbara Livingston Nackman writes about Flick Ford and the book for the Westchester, New York Journal News: "Fishing is a 'blood sport,' [Ford] said, explaining that it is part of the hunter-gatherer cycle of life and connects us to our food. 'In order to live, something must die,' he said. 'I keep it honest and believe you have to not exploit nature, be thankful for its offerings and not take more than you need.'" FISH: 77 Great Fish of North America on Amazon.

Tom Chandler over at Trout Underground ("Annie Proulx Fan? Read On") uncovered a piece in New West magazine about Annie Proulx, who most know as the author of "Brokeback Mountain" and The Shipping News. Jenny Shank atttended Proulx's recent talk on Wyoming' fast-disappearing resources and writes: "The Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist revealed that she hasn't written any fiction for three years. Instead, she has been collaborating with a group of Wyoming scientists and historians to produce a forthcoming book on the state's Red Desert."

Preserving the Rogue river in photographs was an idea that began as a commercial venture but became a labor of love for Roger Dorband, whose book The Rogue: Portrait of a River was recently published by Raven Studios. Paul Fattig writes about the book in the southern Oregon Mail Tribune. "His parents, Al and Alice Dorband, first moved to Grants Pass in 1939 after his father retired from the Navy to fish for the Rogue River steelhead that famed Western writer Zane Grey had written about in his book, Tales of Fresh Water Fishing." The Rogue: Portrait of a River on Amazon.

One of the more intriguing facts about fly fishing literature is that the good stuff rarely goes out of style. Witness three books reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times in 1982. Datus Proper's What The Trout Said is called by some one of the most underrated fly fishing books of all time. And Art Lee's Fishing Dry Flies for Trout on Rivers and Streams is an acknowledged classic. "Datus C. Proper, an American Foreign Service officer who has fished all over the world, is a bit more sophisticated than Mr. Lee, at least as a writer. But his message is essentially the same: let us forget all the fancy stuff and listen to what the trout says. 'The trout and I do not share enough knowledge to sustain a good conversation on most subjects,' Mr. Proper writes in his impish manner."

Pete Warzel interviews the author of The Milagro Beanfield War at his home in Taos, New Mexico and uncovers a rather practical take on fly fishing. "Q: Except John, I know that way down deep you desire a $2,500 Winston bamboo fly rod. A: No. I could give a...you know somebody once gave me a bamboo fly rod; they gave it to me, and I took it down to the Rio Grande and within 15minutes, I broke it. And that was my little lesson." In the Rocky Mountain News.

"Black explores one of the last untrammeled corners of the fly fishing world with wit, thoroughness and passion. But Casting A Spell is much more than a niche effort destined to gather dust in the fly fishing section of local libraries. As Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, says, 'This is not just a fishing tale, it is a finely wrought investigation of the major battle of our time: efficiency’s assault on beauty.'” John Holt reviews George Black's most recent book, Casting a Spell (Random House, August 2006, 272 pages) for the California Literary Review.

A wonderful analogy emerges from this interview with Hoagy B. Carmichael, son of the legendary composer and author of the recently released first volume of a history of the Grand Cascapedia. It ties together qualities that mark both great writers and accomplished anglers: optimism and a willingness to see patterns where others hardly look. "Hoagy's father had always told him that if you look at a piano; there all kinds of new songs waiting there right on the keys ... you just have to find them." Living on Earth producer Bob Carty talks with the author about the river that has produced three quarters of North America's largest Atlantic salmon.

John Motoviloff, author of Fly Fisher's Guide to Wisconsin, Driftless Stories, talks about wild foods, the Remington Arms cookbook, and shopping around his new novel about a lesbian boatbuilder with David Madaris on The Isthmus Daily.

"Of particular note is the way Fuller de-mystifies the more than 1,200 species of caddis lies by dealing with them in three main categories of families and genera, rather than at the species level, making identification and imitation infinitely easier." Melissa Katz describes Tom Fuller's most recent book, which the author himself describes as "a bug book." The Complete Guide to Eastern Hatches: What Flies to Fish, When, and Where (264 pages, hardcover) was published by Countryman Press in March of 2006.

Jon Rounds, formerly an editor at Stackpole Books, has come out with an introduction to fly fishing that does about a good a job at elucidating the basics as any book we've seen. The book is just very well written and illustrated. But Rounds made other good choices: an oversized format, a well-thought-out section on flies for various species at the end, and a unique binding that allows it to lie flat when open but that looks good on a bookshelf. The only possible quibble we had was with the recommendation of the improved clinch knot for beginners. Lefty Kreh was an advisor on the book's details. Basic Fly Fishing: All the Skills and Gear You Need to Get Started is 120 pages and was published by Stackpole Books at the end of September.

Chris Santella, author of Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die, has a new book coming out on October 1. Fifty Favorite Fly-Fishing Tales: Expert Fly Anglers Share Stories from the Sea and Stream (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, October 2006, 224 pages) contains 50 stories from celebrated anglers. According to the editorial review, the book "tells of Ralph Cutter casting in complete darkness for blind catfish in the caves of Borneo, J. W. Smith boxing grizzlies to protect his tent camp in Alaska, and George Anderson fly fishing for saltwater crocodiles in Cuba."

"Casting A Spell is a very readable and interesting example of the singular-subject nonfiction genre. Black has the tenacity of an investigative reporter, coupled with a narrative that follows a few distinct paths: fly-fishing in America, the rod builders and their legacy, and his own autobiographical account." Leigh Montgomery reviews George Black's recent book on bamboo fly rods in The Christian Science Monitor. Casting a Spell on Amazon.

If Redford's single film foray into fly fishing excited interest among the unwashed (or overwashed, depending on your take) masses, John Gierach's Trout Bum inspired a modern ethos among the sport's addicts. His most famous book, which has never been out of print, told practitioners that there was no room for B.S., only for individualized practice and dedication beyond comfort.

Bob Scammell reviews the 20th anniversary edition of Trout Bum (Pruett Publishing Company, April 2006, 256 pages), which he notes is highlighted with commentaries by various friends and authors. Of Gierach's new intro, Scammel says "Gierach’s edge is still there: 'But then those are just two more things that haven’t changed in twenty years: political correctness still poses as fisheries management and the people in charge still don’t seem quite human. The trick to sanity is to keep your secrets, defend what you can, and go fishing.'” In the Brooks [Alberta] Bulletin.

The New York Times Book Review is going to feature Thomas McGuane's new collection of short stories, Gallatin Canyon, on this Sunday's front page. Our sources say that it is going to be a very favorable review. Meanwhile, it was our primary entertainment (besides rubbing elbows with all our fellow bloggers) at the Fly Fishing Retailer show in Denver. While not a fly fishing book per se, Gallatin Canyon (Knopf, July 2006, 240 pages) is written by one of the best fishing writers we have, and whether or not you are a Tom McGuane fan, you owe it to yourself to read this one. It is McGuane's best writing to date, and it confirms that he is a brilliant short story writer.

"After World War II, fiberglass and an embargo of the world's best Chinese cane threatened to wipe out the tiny American industry. A few die-hards hung on, however, using old and/or circuitously acquired bamboo. Surprisingly, when cheap graphite rods seemed to answer a need for affordable entry-level equipment in the 1960s, they also 'helped to spark a traditionalist backlash from bamboo addicts.'" Irene Black reviews Casting a Spell: The Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection in the Seattle Times.

Jeff Baker reviews Thomas McGuane's latest book in The Oregonian today. "'The Refugee,' a novella that anchors the second half of the book, is a slow-builder with an abrupt payoff. Set in Key West, it's full of enough nautical details to make Robert Stone seasick but has a classic McGuane hero, a good man who washes away memory with drink and can't make peace with himself. Escape is impossible, even on the open ocean, and redemption has a price that must be paid by hand."

Gallatin Canyon on Amazon.

"This is the story, as the author admits, of the worm in the bud: the age-old battle between perfectionism and economics. On the one hand a clique of craftsmen, handing down through small workshops the knowledge of how to make something slight, exquisite and precious, and on the other the combined forces of wealthy uncaring customers and wealthy uncaring owners." The Economist reviews George Black's latest book.

As we mentioned last week, Random House has just released George Black's new book of fly fishing essays centered around bamboo rod culture. Casting a Spell (Random House, August 2006, 272 pages) gets reviewed by Ron Wynn of the Nashville City Newspaper today: "Black’s essays on fishing venture into many other areas, among them economics, technology and global political concerns. But this never lapses into a detached, dry, or pedantic study."

Dennis Anderson visits author, angler and cutting horse man Tom McGuane in Big Timber and on the Boulder River. "On his horse, Tom was helping another cutter. This was a long way from Los Angeles, where he once wrote for the movies, and about the same distance from New York, from which delicately constructed reviews of his book will soon appear, some from writers who know well enough where Montana is. But aren't quite sure what it is. Or why anyone would live there."

A timely reminder that McGuane's new book of short stories is out: Gallatin Canyon (Knopf, July 2006, 240 pages).

Coming August 8 from Random House, this new history of bamboo rods in the U.S. promises to be good reading for split cane rod anglers and craftsmen. Casting a Spell: The Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection (hardcover, 272 pages) is by George Black, who also wrote The Trout Pool Paradox (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 336 pages), a history of Connecticut's Housatonic and its tributaries.

One could describe poet and author Jim Harrison as a master of obsessive behavior, but the neo-Victorians among us are sure to misinterpret: Harrison has lifted his obsessions to a fine art and done as much to vindicate them as anyone of his generation. New West writer Allen Jones gives us more of a good thing with his interview of Harrison, who in the opinion of many -- anglers and non-anglers, writers and non-writers -- is as gifted a writer as we have. "He likes his things. Four shelves in his writing shed are devoted to mementoes, including a garish, ceramic human skull (something maybe from Mexico's festival of the dead) as well as an array of gourd rattles. A jawbone. Photos. He handed me an antique bronze metal tag, stamped with a number and the words, Bureau of Indian Affairs. He said, 'That was a body tag. I guess they liked to keep track of the people they killed.'"

Son Erik Schwiebert and editor Scott Bowen have confirmed with MidCurrent that Ernest Schwiebert's last book, a complete update and revision of his 1973 classic, Nymphs, will be published in two volumes by The Lyons Press in the spring and summer of 2007: Vol. 1 The Mayflies, and Vol. 2 Caddisflies, Stoneflies, Midges, and Others. This new two-part edition will contain a number of new illustrations by the author, which he completed shortly before his death in December 2005.

Hal Herring interiewed Thomas McGuane for New West, which has, in our minds, become one of the most insightful online rags out there (it was started by Jonathan Weber, who founded the meteoric The Industry Standard which some may remember from the Dot.com years).

From the interview: "'There was a time, about ten years, where I didn't do anything but work. One day Russell Chatham came over and stood around, finally said, "I could never live like this," and left. And that was not a particularly productive time for me. This year, I've already been tarpon fishing twice. So many of my friends have gotten old and just fish for a little while and they're ready to head in. I still like to fish from, as my rancher friend Buster Welch in Texas would say ‘from can't see to can't see.'"

"'You must understand that "Russell The Personality" is a wholly separate character from the life of Russell Chatham the painter, though at the same time they are inseparable,' says William Randolph Hearst III, one of Chatham’s closest friends. 'No matter what he does, his adventure with it becomes larger than life.'" Todd Wilkinson pens probably the best potrait yet of fly fishing author and noted painter Russell Chatham on NewWest.net. For those who appreciate Chatham's writing or painting, there are some interesting details of how Chatham's artistic vision grew out of learning to adapt to the vast expanses of Montana.

Seems everyone want to offer their opinion on Howell Raines's latest book, The One That Got Away. The Philadelphia Inquirer is late to the party but quite positive about the new title. "Whatever else one might say about Howell Raines, the truest thing about the erstwhile editor of the New York Times is that he is one heck of a writer." Review by Frank Wilson.

Ivan Doig doesn't write fly fishing novels, but he is a favorite of fly fishers who read, perhaps because of his ability to write with such great skill about Montana and its unique personality. "The Whistling Season does what Doig does best: evoke the past and create a landscape and characters worth caring about. Set on the Montana prairie, it's a story any good teacher, or anyone who appreciates learning, should love. It's about a one-room school and the several kinds of education found in and out of the classroom." Bob Minzesheimer reviews The Whistling Season (Harcourt, June 2006, 352 pages), in USA Today.

Certain social predicaments seem to arise naturally among anglers. Consider, for example, the passing of a bit of good advice from one angler to another -- it's an act of generosity that is often quickly and conveniently forgotten once the hot tip is put into play.

This week South African trout preserve owner and author Wolf Avni shares the hilarious perspective of a guide caught in a grating exchange between erstwhile angling partners, a pompous classicist and an unrefined, but repentant, "coarse" fisherman. It's a nice change of literary pace excerpted from Avni's eccentric and entertaining book A Mean-Mouthed Hook-Jawed Bad-News Son-of-a-Fish.

Styling itself as "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias," Newsbusters.com offers some tasty quotes from Howell Raines's recent book The One That Got Away as further proof of conspiracy. "'Fox Television showed us the future -- outright lies and paranoid opinions packaged as news under the oversight of Rupert [Murdoch], a flagrant pirate, and Roger Ailes, an unprincipled Nixon thug who had assumed a journalistic disguise in much the same way that the intergalactic insect in Men in Black shrugged into the borrowed skin of a hapless hillbilly.'"

Beneath a quick review of Manstealing for Fat Girls, StyleWeekly.com's Valley Haggard mentions two new fly fishing books out from the University Press of Virginia. "James Barilla’s West With the Rise: Fly-fishing Across America (University Press of Virginia, $27.95) and Fishing the Greenbrier Valley: An Angler’s Guide (University Press of Virginia, $12.95) by Mike W. Smith don’t have to swim too far upstream to find their way into your tackle box."

Hal Espen, former editor of Outside magazine, lets fly on Howell Raines's new book The One That Got Away in this extensive review on the International Herald Tribune Web site. "Raines probably should have resisted this double-twined, back-and-forth approach, which tends, on the one hand, to retroactively burden fishing trips with premonitions of professional failure and loss, and on the other, to import a jarring note of sportive insouciance into the deadly serious matter of what befell him at The Times."

Carl Richards, who along with Doug Swisher authored Selective Trout (1971) and Fly Fishing Strategy (1975), died of cancer and heart failure on Memorial Day at the age of 73. Noted by Ross Purnell on OutdoorsBest Forums.

"'I realized I could spend the rest of my life thinking about ways that I might have handled the Jayson Blair scandal rather than ordering the publication of the 7,400-word story that I read while John McPhee cast his fly tirelessly from the bow of Mike Padua's boat. ... '" From his new book, that's part of Howell Raines's summary retrospective on the scandal that ended his career at the NYT. Reviewer Elizabeth Spears suggests that Howell Raines might have put more effort into emotional richness.

British newspaperman Sir Jocelyn Stevens is selling one of the most complete collections of fine classic angling books ever to be put on the market. "One star item in Stevens’s angling library, which Bonhams believes will fetch upwards of £600,000 in total, is the fisherman’s bible – a first edition of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler published in 1653. There is also the world’s first ever printed book on fishing, Oppianus’ Halieutica, published in 1478, and printed in French." Ian Watson on London's TheBusinessOnline.com.

Howell Raines, out promoting his new book The One That Got Away, is interviewed by fellow journalist David Andelman of Forbes magazine. Apparently Raines is working on a Civil War novel and fished every day in April that the weather was good. There are links to video segments of the interview, but unfortunately Forbes is much better at delivering ads than they are video online.

Robert Streeter reviews Great Lakes Steelhead, A Guided Tour for Fly-Anglers, by Bob Linsenman and Steve Nevala, The Complete Guide to Eastern Hatches, by Tom Fuller, and Fishbugs by Thomas Ames Jr. "[Fishbugs] is primarily a photo journal documenting the various species with full-size color close-ups of each stage in the lives of the various trout stream insects. "Fishbugs" is a pleasurable journey through a year on an eastern trout water, and is stunning in its photographic appeal." In the Albany, New York Times-Union.

If the editorial copy on Darrel Martin's new book is correct, The Fly-Fisher's Craft : The Art and History of Fly Tying (The Lyons Press, April 2006, 296 pages) hand-holds the reader through the use of various techniques from the past for constructing flies. Darrel Martin is also the author of the excellent reference book The Fly Fisher's Illustrated Dictionary.

Brian Clarke has seen fly tying realist Paul Whillock's new self-published book and remarks on the particular philosophies that guide Whillock's techniques. "'I try to include only details that regularly act as genuine "trigger factors" — those small additions to a fly that just seem to "turn on" a trout,' he says. He lists these essentials, in order, as silhouette — by which he presumably means overall shape — antennae and tails, eyes and legs." In the London Times. You can read more about Flies As Art -- and see some extraordinary examples of ultra-realists flies -- on Whillock's attractive Web site.

Richard Twarog's interest in fly fishing grew after he spent time photographing sweaters in the Peruvian Andes. Turns out the indigenous people there thought $800 was plenty of money to last for the rest of their lives and stopped working once they had earned that amount. Which led Twarog to think about his own priorities.

"San Juan River is a lush portrait -- a combination love story and professional photo album -- of the river carved out of the rough-hewn desert. It's also a story about the people who love the river, from fishing guides and restaurant owners to longtime anglers and proprietors of hole-in-the-wall fly shops." Henry Miller in the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal.

On Amazon...

Charles Kuralt, the inveterate American travel journalist, once said: "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." Traveling fly fishers have all experienced what I'll call the Star Trek Transporter Effect: you spend weeks trying to gather your thoughts about an upcoming trip, then suddenly you are rematerialized in some far-flung place where everything is at least partly different than you imagined. We don't, if the truth be told, spend enough time getting to where we are going.

We didn't cross paths with Norm Zeigler's Rivers of Shadow, Rivers of Sun, which came out in 2004, until last year. But it immediately reminded us of Negley Farson's 1942 classic Going Fishing: part autobiography, part ethnography, and part travelogue, as much about the getting there as the ultimate arrival. This week's excerpt, "Monte Perdido," reveals the end-story of Zeigler's experiments in Pyrenean gorge fishing.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, here is part two of Howell Raines's story about hooking a large blue marlin on a fly rod. In Field & Stream.

"At that precise moment, an astonishing blue-and-silver creation came out of the top of a Pacific wave that loomed above our puny boat like a hillock of cerulean jelly. There is something impressive about looking uphill at a fish that seems half as long as your boat." Howell Raines tells the tale of a big saltwater streamer trolled from the back a Christmas Island skiff and the blue phantasm that decided it was good enough to eat. This is the first half of a story that will be continued tomorrow in the online edition of Field & Stream.

Finlay Wilson counts the wild, loch-bound brown trout as one of Scotland's national treasures, and Stan Headley's new book The Loch Fisher's Bible (Robert Hale & Company, December 2005, 272 pages) as a must read. "By his admission, he is a fisherman who needs to write, not a writer in search of a subject, and this is certainly not prose in the vein of Negley Farson or Thomas McGuane. But what does leap from the pages is Headley's passion for his chosen speciality and his deep appreciation for wild trout, the lochs where they have lived for millennia, and for Scotland." In The Scotsman.

"Recalling that Vladimir Nabokov, whom I once accompanied on a butterfly chase in Arizona, maintained that Salvador Dali was Norman Rockwell's twin brother, who had been kidnapped by Gypsies, I decided to write a facetious article stating that Joyce and Jennings had been separated at birth." Robert Boyle postulates that James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake was, after all, mostly about fly fishing. Funny stuff. From the Web site of the Finnegan's Wake Society of New York. (Link via MoldyChum.com.)

"'Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper,' wrote Melville, 'till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.'" James Babb and fly fishing friends are dragged out of bed to experience what may be the death throes of a famous pastime: codfishing off of Maine's coast. In Gray's Sporting Journal.

"Of one Times editor who criticized him in public but was friendly in private, Raines writes, 'What is it about this place that has given this good man the soul of a bushwhacker?'" Associated Press writer David Caruso previews Howell Raines's new book, which includes a revelation about Raines's departure from The New York Times: he didn't resign, but was fired. Nonetheless, the book is almost entirely about fishing, according to Caruso.

Here's more about the new book in The Book Standard: "Raines also tosses off asides on everything from baseball to the Bushes. Whether writing about fishing near Christmas Island or in Russia, he always returns to issues of pain, gain and loss, probity and mendaciousness, friendship and love."

It's not all bad for Mr. Raines, who, besides apparently having a team of highly skilled publicists at work, just sold a $3.5 million townhouse on West 11th Street in New York City.

What David Foster of Morris magazines says about confidence in fly fishing — specifically believing that you will catch fish — is readily applied to shooting or a multitude of other pursuits. We'll choose a modest fishing companion any day of the week, but spend lots of time with lots of different fisherman and you will also find that folks who lay the groundwork for failure almost never have spectacular days. As Foster notes, "As in every other human pursuit, confidence is the primary ingredient for hunting and fishing success. It may be clichéd, but if you believe you will succeed, and you combine this confidence with your knowledge and experience, then you likely will succeed." In Gray's Sporting Journal.

"Johnson climbs, hikes and forces his way up isolated canyons catching trout – tiny and large – as he goes with his fly rod and ragged flies that he’s tied himself. Along the way he encounters numerous locals who offer him and his curious collection of companions food, shelter, advice, local knowledge and even guided trips on horseback far up to the heights of the timbered mountains and down to the depths of the rocky canyons to fish what each of them, in turn, calls 'the best' of the trout streams." The California Literary Review talks about Rex Johnson's 2005 book The Quiet Mountains – A Ten-Year Search for the Last Wild Trout of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental (University of New Mexico Press, 224 pages). Johnson is also the author of Fly Fishing in Southern New Mexico (1998) and Arizona Trout: A Fly Fishing Guide (1999). (Thanks to MoldyChum.com for digging up this link.)

Tom Chandler reviews a new book by southern Appalachian guides Ian and Charity Rutter: "While photo and essay oriented fly fishing books are hardly an endangered species, many recent efforts have been more 'concept' than actual book; you invent a catchy title, populate it with photographs from one of several leading outdoor photographers, and push it as the ideal gift for fly fishers. If it sells, you turn around and apply the same concept to golf." Read more...

"The pictures in Upon a River Bank are splendidly amateur, which is no criticism at all; photographs of Mills grinning like a fiend holding a 31/2 lb brown trout caught on a Peter Ross fly in Iceland or maybe it's Greenland (he's caught fish everywhere); four sea-run charr and seven spring-run salmon from the Brora." Alistair Robertson reviews Derek Mills's Upon a River Bank in The Scotsman.

Richard Chiappone writes a poem about releasing fish that is published in Gray's Sporting Journal, then discovers that the words of poet Billy Collins seem a little too familiar. "'You may not be surprised to learn that I decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt. Call it relativism if you like, but in an age of false memoirs and clever best-selling novels that “re-imagine” characters from Melville and Austen, my sloppy use of a few lines of stolen imagery in a fishing poem seemed on a par with a defense contractor putting a phony quarter in a Pentagon parking meter - or so I told myself.'" From the Anchorage Press.

"Local watercraft preservation specialist Dana Hewson and members of the Boston-based Hemingway Preservation Foundation are heading to Finca Vigia, Hemingway's estate in Cuba, where he will photograph and examine the Pilar." (Via FishingJones.)

Here's an interesting story about Stackpole Books and a current cinema release. Turns out that Adolf Hitler's lawyers were making life difficult for Stackpole back in 1940 when the book publisher came out with John Fante's novel Ask the Dust, now in theaters as a movie by Robert Towne. "The suit was over its unauthorized publication of the first unabridged English translation of Mein Kampf. Stackpole had to cut back everywhere to pay the legal judgment, according to a biography of Fante by Stephen Cooper." Dave DeKok in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Times Leader.

A long-anticipated Howell Raines memoir is set for release May 9, according to publisher Scribners. "It is called 'The One That Got Away,' which may be taken as a reference to Raines exiting the Times after the Jayson Blair scandal, but which actually (or also) concerns fishing." You can read more about the book and an early Booklist review in Editor & Publisher.

"The five little gems in "Cover Girl & Other Stories of Fly-Fishermen in Maine" will appeal to just about anyone who likes good fiction. Hall's stories are poignant, insightful - and wildly funny." Lloyd Ferriss gives high grades to J. H. Hall's recent Cover Girl & Other Stories of Fly-Fishermen in Maine on MaineToday.com.

Nick Lyons made as permanent a mark on fly fishing literature as anyone in history, constantly publishing new titles and reviving old ones and creating a powerful list of must-read authors over more than three decades of effort. Now Montana State University in Bozeman will preserve his publishing records. "The records of Lyons' publishing and writing career were acquired from his son, Tony, in 2005. Cataloging was recently completed of the 5,000 letters, records and other miscellanea." Tracy Ellig on the MSU Web site.