Phil Yearout
"...sixty years of car fenders and barbed wire,
riding muzzle-down against the pickup seat;
sixty years of lunches spent leaning against trees and fence posts,
then nestled in an elbow’s crook..."
"Gary smiled at the idea. It proved one of his favorite theories of fishing: confidence is the most important thing. Anglers on Center Lake expected little, and that was what they got."
Phil Yearout
"...bare trees on the far, flat horizon,
branches spreading like hairline cracks
across a slim, peeled slice of moon."
"Now that he knew what to look for, Cal found several more large scallops in the creekbank where, he presumed, other large trees had stood, grown, and fallen. Of course they had—what else would they do? Some of the cottonwoods were fifteen feet around, and they leaned out over the stream on massive interwoven exposed complexes of roots. Some day they would fall; they all would fall. It was stupid to try to change it whether you could, or thought you could, or not."
"He was looking at just such a riffle when suddenly the mink was there, as brown and still and smooth as a river stone, so still that the boy could see the reflection of the moving current in the deep, sleek black glass of its eyes."
Quinn Grover
The car raced a blur down the slope of the fat cable to the middle,
where it would pace back and die if not
pulled up the other side by my grandfather’s huge,
calloused hands and the corded muscles of his arms and back...
It's amazing (more)
Steven Bird
The ridges beyond the river bluffs are strange with the loss of their soft, sleeping-mammal profiles, the tree lines abruptly broken with obtuse mechanical angles of the clear-cut logging jobs and fire trails.
...
The trout, right there and in the mood, pounces the fly and whangs the line like a wrathful dog abruptly hitting the end of its rope, and busts off taking the fly with it.
...
The Fly Fishing Papers
"There is no direct evidence that the Downies ordered the expurgation of the fly-fishing reference from Hawthorne’s work. However, as we have seen, there is a considerable depth of circumstantial evidence that the Downies were behind it."
Read "Introduction: The Fly Fishing Papers"
Essay:
...if Long Lake were 60 meters deep, the current would bend as much as 180°--that is, it would flow against the wind. Current isn’t just water flowing downhill.
July Featured Poem
by Anthony Naples
Essay:
All of the usual stuff happened. I lost the hat, got splashed, and bunted my son in the ear with the butt of the flyrod. The fish jumped like an animated masonry block and zoomed around and got wired up in elodea and coontail and tripled the seven-weight over and required hasty pedaling ahead and abaft....
Story:
It’s a healthy person’s game--physically healthy, anyway. Probably why we don’t catch many sick fish--the sick fish aren’t biting, and the sick folks aren’t fishing.
Nostalgia
The Gage Page: Using the USGS Gages
April Featured Poem Crow with Straw
The Fly Fishing Papers
The Catcher in the Rye from Chapter 5 by JD Salinger
MARCH FEATURED POEM:
Why Brown Trout Get So Yellow In The Late Fall
Quinn Grover
What I am reading:
JANUARY FEATURED STORY:
Steven Bird
With each awakening he found himself closer to surrender, strangely calm, like the time he put his skiff onto an offshore boiler rock, and the rock punched a splintered hole in the bottom of the boat, and he was sinking, there was nothing he could do about it, a warm calm enfolded him, and he watched the event go down like a scene from somebody else’s life while he went through the motions of survival without thinking.
A StoryArc Exclusive:
"Angling used to be a constant motif in American fiction. Beginning in the early 20th century, references to fishing--especially fly fishing--were systematically expunged from our greatest art. Sound fantastic? I thought so too. But evidence is evidence, and non-fiction does not lie."
--James Frey, author, "A Million Little Pieces"
Cyran and Ajax Downy’s real assault: a systematic effort to purge any mention of fly-fishing from Western Literature. Apparently encouraged by his father’s dismantling of Cullen, Ajax continued to flex his literary muscle and his sense of vengeance until he died atop his fifth wife in 1966 at the age of 98. Using his power of punctuation, Downy the younger empowered a cadre of editorial henchmen who redacted, revised, and expurgated everything they could reach and nearly eliminated all mention of fly fishing from the Canon.
Until now.
DECEMBER FEATURED STORY:
Dave Motes
Cal slogged up next to him, dread backing up in his throat. It is a peculiarity of our understanding of others that we can comprehend broken bones and bloody cuts and dazed concussions, but when confronted with invisible injury we panic and fold.
NOVEMBER FEATURED STORY:
Steven Bird
Sometimes we’d lay on our beds in the dark, bodies ringing with the perfect
exhaustion that comes after running across mountains all day with a sixty-pound bag of
trees strapped to your body, running to get them planted, straining with all your might to
get lighter, bending, running and bending every eight feet, swinging that hodag, working
that hoe a thousand plunges a day or more; the full blade breaking open a yellow smile of
mineral earth to receive the dripping root, then the blade again, then the boot, and you would be one tree lighter...
Dave Motes
“'You will become the best flyfisherman on the planet. No one will outcast you. No hatch will elude you. Latin names will curl off your tongue. Your dubbing will always hold. Your casts will be undefinable in their excellence, beyond the cleverest metaphor. You will tie better than A.K, cast cleaner than Lefty. You will catch bonefish in the wind. You will catch rainbows on the San Juan on a Royal Coachman. They’ll name a pool on the Miramichi after you. You will win the Bassmasters Classic. You will release world records with cavalier indifference. You will never nymph again. You will become a legend.'
" 'Better than Lefty?' I asked.
" 'Better than Lefty. Either hand.'
Scott Carles
He bends into the current,
casts about forgotten water thickened by rains.
Dave Motes
too skeined and dark for finding
what might but hope not isn't there.
StoryArc is a cooperative nonprofit publication of fiction writers, poets, photographers, and artists with a focus on the outdoors, conservation, nature, and wildlife. Its mission is to present quality work to a discerning readership.