New Event!
SUNDAY BRUNCH
WRITING SEMINAR
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Sunday, July 20, 2014Mount Vernon Country Club
(25 minutes west of Denver)
Golden, Colorado
Early Registration
ends July 7
Yummy details!Register.Come hungry!
Leave inspired!
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Cusco, Pisac, Sacred Valley,
Machu Picchu, and more.
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Featured Writer
TED CONOVER
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I first met Ted Conover in 2001 when we co-presented at an Adventure Writing Symposium in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Ted's book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a Pulitzer finalist, New York Times Notable Book, and on several "best books of 2000" lists. Our paths crossed years later in Aspen, Colorado.
Ted's latest article Rolling Nowhere (Outside Magazine, July 2014) is a "quasi-legal, father-son mission to train-hop through the changing American West." I think you'll enjoy it. Here's Ted explaining to his 18-year-old son, Asa, how he hoped this whole "hopping a freight train" scenario in Denver would unfold...
I sketched it out in the Starbucks that is part of the REI store that has since been built about 200 yards from where those hoboes camped back in the eighties, we would stalk a train at rest. We would sneak up on it, find a vulnerable spot, and hide ourselves there before it moved, thereby avoiding the loss of our legs. "Seriously?" asked Asa.
Read more. |
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My father fished like he wrote - with simple equipment. A Big Chief tablet and a pencil, an old bamboo rod, an old fishing vest with the same set of clippers hanging from it, maybe a few nymphs and wooly worms (or whatever was hatching), the same old creel, same old green net.
But as far as I knew, my father had never fished Japanese tenkara style, at least not since a boy fishing with stick and string.
Gierach, in his new book All Fishermen Are Liars, describes this traditional method as "the soul of simplicity." A light rod, a fixed line attached at the end, a single fly with a simple pattern. The tenkara purist doesn't ask in the way of tackle, "How much do I need?" but "How little can I get away with?"
As a writer, I should be asking myself the same thing:
How little can I get away with? How few words? How pure a story?  Do we really need more than a stick and string? More than basic human yearning tugging at the undercurrent of life? I delve into this question more deeply in my latest post at All Things Literary. All Things Natural.
Wishing you a summer filled with quiet pools and rippling streams. Page
To learn more about the photo of the Japanese fisherman, please go to Tenkara USA.
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Featured Novel
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BOLETO, by Alyson HagyAlyson Hagy's prose has the same simple elegance as the tenkara style of fishing. Boleto, her3rd novel (2012, Graywolf Press) tells the story of Will, a young soft-spoken Wyoming cowboy, and a young filly so finely put together that Don Enrique, the Mexican aristocrat who owns the finest polo horses in California, must have her.  Some reviewers say young Will is looking for a way out. I disagree. I think he is looking for a way to more deeply inhabit the landscape he loves, despite the fact that both he and the filly may forever be severed from it. Boleto is a coming-of-age story and Alyson Hagy tells it straight, casting intuitively into its heart, pulling the reader along despite the dark shadows that tell us all does not end well. I loved this book, and I loved the fact that Hagy helps us to know a different, but just as true, story of man and horse.
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CAN YOU TEACH A HORSE TO FISH?
This is the story of Anne Vandewalle, an optimistic fly fisherman and cowgirl, who believes she can teach horses to fish. "I'm raising funds for a documentary that will film me creating a program to train ho rses to stand in a stream and let disabled people fish without leaving the saddle."
Anne's dream began when she was sitting by a river, seeking its healing waters, but she discovered that the real focus of the dream is to help the disabled, including veterans, illness survivors and children, create partnership with horses so that they can bush whack to a remote stream, stand in a lake, or climb a mountain to get to where the real fish are." WATCH THE VIDEO
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