Brook Trout & the Writing Life: The Intermingling of Fishing and Writing in a Novelist's Life - Softcover

Craig Nova's sensitive and vivid memoir . . . records events--but he's casting for a larger catch: what swims at mysterious depths. His brilliant prose spars with experience, pulling in the line closer and closer to the quick of life. --Frances Mayes

This is an unusual fishing book, in that it isn't much about fishing for trophies or food or enlightenment, and unusual, too, in its quiet elegance. In Mr. Nova's hands, fishing reveals a life in which fishing connects the parts . . . a means of getting at qualities of the natural world that consciousness grasps but can't quite express . . . A short book that gives long, lingering pleasure. --Tracy Kidder

In this memoir, novelist Craig Nova explores the interconnections between his work as a writer, his personal life, and his passion for fly fishing. Nova leads the reader into his courtship, marriage, the birth of his children, and his life as a father, husband, writer, friend, citizen, and angler. Just as the author observes the life of the elusive and beautiful brook trout in the tea-colored streams, he finds interconnections to his daily life--he teaches his daughter to build an igloo; he deals with the disappointment of a very public mean-spirited review of his much-anticipated novel; he gazes at his wife-to-be in her hammock by a stream; he finds himself the victim of a random blackmailer. Unpredictable and keenly observed, Nova leads us through the terrain of the life of an artist. The constants are the stream and the brook trout whic offer both respite from the demands of his life and a wellspring of inspiration and strength. It is a paean to nature and the beauty of the brook trout.

This autobiography is a reprint and expansion of Nova's highly regarded memoir originally published in 1999. This new edition includes substantial sections of new work and an introduction by Ann Beattie.