“Instead of insight, maybe all we get is the strength to wander for a while. An inheritance of wonder, and nothing more.” ~William Least Heat Moon Summertime. If ever there was a time to bail out from the world, it’s this season. Even if only with a great read in your hands. Decades ago, Audrey […]

Good writing offers the reader a vicarious experience. When that experience involves fishing water I’ve never fished, that for me is possibly the most enjoyable kind of reading. Malachy Tallack’s essay collection, Illuminated by Water (Pegasus Books, 2022), fits the bill perfectly. These essays on fish and fishing are mostly set in Tallack’s home of […]

Recently, I took a trip to Missoula to give a talk at the University of Montana. My hosts put me up at the Doubletree Edgewater, right on the river—guest rooms literally steps away from the currents of the Clark Fork. It had been many years since I spent time next to a western river, and […]

WHENEVER I NOTICE A NEW BOOK about flyfishing, I’m always curious to see how the author balances writing about fishing with the necessity for it all to somehow be art. If you flyfish and you’ve ever had someone say to you, “Ohhhhh, flyfishing: it’s so artistic!” then you know what I mean. There’s a strange […]

SOMEWHERE IN RURAL IDAHO a salmon is nailed to a cross draped in powerlines. It’s one of the most poignant images from journalist and filmmaker Kris Millgate’s book My Place Among Fish: Misadventures on the River (Tight Line Media, 2021). The book follows Millgate’s journey documenting another journey, the 850-mile migration of Chinook salmon from […]

It’s no secret that when the stresses of life reach a breaking point, fishing is the one activity capable of returning us to a state of equilibrium.  If nothing else, Reuters journalist Eric M. Johnson’s debut novel, “Whenever a Happy Thing Falls” (Cloud Hands Press, March 2021), is a testament to that fact. While flyfishing […]

It only takes a morning and a couple cups of coffee to read through Cameron Keller Scott’s recent poetry collection, “Watershed” (Alice Greene & Co., 2019), which checks in at 35 pages. That is, it only takes a morning if you’re able to read it straight through without constantly being arrested by lines like these: […]

Flyfishers are, by the nature of their sport, collectors. Whether it’s rods, reels, flies or fishing stories, they are in a near-constant state of aggregation. Then there are those who don’t just collect: they curate. Steve Woit, fly angler of 40 years and collector for 30, took it upon himself to interview these curators and […]

STEPHEN SAUTNER’S MOST RECENT BOOK, A CAST IN THE WOODS, was published by Lyons Press in 2018. The book—an excerpt of which, “The Joys of Fishing and Fracking,” was published in Volume 10.1 of The Flyfish Journal—documents Sautner’s purchase of a small cabin in New York state, and the fishing, battles with pests and moments […]

On the outside, Stilt Houses of Texas, a new book project from author Michael J. Medrano and photographer Tim Romano, doesn’t seem like a fishing book. And it isn’t really. Its about place, residence and resilience. But the marshes these stilt houses are built on, elevated from the water and waves, also happen to be […]