May featured 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
New from "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
It's amazing (more)
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.