Books
A Review of “River Songs: Moments of Wild Wonder in Fly Fishing” by Steve Duda
If you’re a long-time reader of The Flyfish Journal, you’re likely familiar with several of the stories included in Steve Duda’s debut essay collection, River Songs: Moments of Wild Wonder in Fly Fishing. Many of the essays collected here appeared both before and during Duda’s seven-year tenure as the Journal’s editor. Among my favorites—which have been revised and updated for this new iteration—are “Make the Sky Better,” Duda’s poetic meditation on cliff swallows; and “Legendary Rivers I Didn’t Fish,” his tale of passing by river after river—the Test, the Tweed, the Spey—during a band tour in the UK that precluded any chance of wetting a line.
Sprinkled among the 14 longer essays are several more abbreviated pieces, some previously unpublished, that showcase Duda’s deft hand where conciseness is concerned. I’ve long been a firm believer that the ability to write a tight, sub-500 word essay, absent unnecessary flourishes, is one of the hallmarks of a great writer. Duda provides a masterclass in the form.
It should be said that Steve Duda is a friend of mine, as well as something of a mentor, guide and, at one time, editor. And so I’ll admit that this is less a review of River Songs than it is a simple endorsement. But it’s an endorsement because these stories deserve to be read, over and over; your life will be richer and your flyfishing more informed for the experience.
Take, for example, the heartfelt wonder at the fragility of a small cliff swallow at the heart of “Make the Sky Better.” I once heard Duda read this piece in a flyfishing shop, and can honestly say I’ve never seen an assembled crowd at a literary reading hanging so desperately on the reader’s every word. “To a swallow,” Duda writes, “the earth is a mere springboard. The wind is for tricking. The water is for teasing. Swallows are not content to just swim through the sky; they swim through the sky to make the sky better.” If there are finer words written about birds—whether in a flyfishing book or otherwise—I’d love to hear them. Those four sentences alone are worth the price of admission.
That Duda can see-saw so deftly between the pathos of a fly-hooked swallow and some of the more comedic work on display here is a testament to his range. The title of the book’s fifth essay, “Sir Longballs,” is likely enough to make most of us who still retain a bit of juvenility crack a smile. That this is the title of a flyfishing essay that can be found in a book made of ink and paper is all the proof we need that print is not dead and that flyfishing writing has plenty more frontiers left unexplored.
The point is, this is the kind of writing—the kind of flyfishing writing, especially—that you simply will not find anywhere else, for the simple reason that no one can tell a story the way that Steve Duda tells a story. Whether built on observation or an idea, whether springing from an experience or simply a hunch as to how the world works behind the scenes, they are stories that teem with the titular “wonder.” It’s been a long time coming, but this debut collection was well worth the wait.
I recently spent some time on the road with Duda with the Writers on the Fly tour, and in introducing some of his readings he would recite some advice he heard from someone, somewhere. That advice was something to the effect of: “When in Rome, write shit down.” Thankfully for us, Duda finds Rome everywhere, and he’s done just that.