Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers

December 9, 2019
In this charming collection of original essays, Gierach (Fly-Fishing in the High Country), a Redstone Review columnist, reflects on what casting a line, waiting for bites beside a stream, or searching for good fishing spots can reveal about human nature. Pondering the power of place, he reflects on the pleasures of fishing close to home, where “some of the things you know operate beneath the level of full consciousness.” While sharing an amusingly self-deprecating story of almost landing a muskie, Gierach observes that the one that got away is the “stuff of sleeplessly staring at a dark bedroom ceiling” while wondering why one didn’t stay home. Gierach also discusses how anglers measure success and failure, the pleasures of fishing with friends, and the frustrations of encountering those who don’t adhere to accepted fly-fishing etiquette. There are three kinds of people who fish, he proposes: those who read and obey the rules, those who read the rules so as to get away with breaking them, and those who ignore the rules entirely, out of a “pioneer’s sense of entitlement.” Gierach’s inviting, down-to-earth, and humorous work shares a deep love of fly-fishing and the ways that it can be a metaphor for life. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary.

February 15, 2020
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer. As in his previous books--from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars--Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, "it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility." Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman's equivalent of writer's block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, "I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I'd have rather been--something anyone who fishes will understand." Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled "Up in Michigan," a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, "I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful." Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to "sit in the sun and think things over until it's time for hospice." In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.

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