The Best Fly Fishing is Everywhere - 09.12.2025
Ramblings & Readings, Creativity & Conservation, Happenings & Hope
My Fishy Friends,
Before bed recently, I’ve been stumbling, oh-so-slowly, through a Barry Lopez collection of essays. Between my fatigue at that hour and Lopez’s dense and descriptive prose, some nights it feels like I make it through a single page before I nod off and awake again, mid-sentence. What I need to do is take this book off my nightstand and read it in daylight, but I also find some of the images make their way into my dreams, which is a very interesting way to ‘read’ a book. Maybe I’ll do both.
Cheers,
Jesse
Banner photo: The lower, lower river, as accessed from downstream.
Dial 1-800-BEATDOWN
I read Greg Fitz’s “1-800-BEATDOWN” when it came out in The Flyfish Journal years ago, but, as has happened to me many times now, hearing him read it aloud in person made it real and cemented it to memory. With some steelheading in my calendar, it came to mind recently. Part cultural documentation, part love letter, part tongue-in-cheek, the essay resonates and puts the ego in check.
Photo: Copi Vojta
Simplicity
Just out from Patagonia Books is Pheasant Tail Simplicity, co-authored by Yvon Chouinard, Craig Mathews, and Mauro Mazzo. While I haven’t seen a copy yet, I suspect the book is in the same vein as Chouinard’s essay “Lessons from a Simple Fly,” which ran in Fly Fisherman Magazine almost a decade ago, and serves in-part as a follow-up to this trio’s previous fly fishing book Simple Fly Fishing, which I have read, and highly recommend. Click here for a video introduction to the new book.
Wild & Core Texts
A while back I came to find Krissy Kludt & J. Drew Lanham’s Writing the Wild, an eight-month long online writing workshop filled with author-instructors that I’m willing to bed you’re familiar with, and whose books you may even own. Applications are now open for their ‘25 — ‘26 cohort and they also just released their ‘core texts’ for the workshop, which are certainly worth a look; a few of these books are already on my shelf, and a few more are soon-to-be!
Deal ‘em
When it comes to après-fishing card games, cribbage must be the finest: easily taught and learned, involving mild strategy, benefiting the numerically-inclined, allowing for financial loss or gain, yet susceptible to hunches and whims, and encouraging of healthy banter. For a while now, I’ve had my eye on a few decks with fishy references, all primed for inclusion in your next game of crib: Lakes River Streams’ cards deck, RIO Products’ fly playing cards, and artist James Prosek’s Trout of North America card deck. Now choose your cribbage board!
A Drop of Water
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
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