Fly-Fishing Schaberg

March 112 pages, 3 illustrations, 5”x7” paper, 978-1-4780-1936-7 $15.95tr/£13.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1672-4 $84.95/£76.00

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

Fly-Fishing

CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG

“Fly-Fishing is about what Schaberg calls small-fishing—the kind done close to home for species that don’t necessarily make the glamour list. But like this deceptively simple pursuit, the book itself is much deeper and more layered than the humble title might indicate. With beautiful descriptive language and plenty of introspection, Schaberg’s story is about more than just fishing—it’s about time, the world, and our place in both.”—DYLAN TOMINE, author of Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman

“Fusing memoir and reflection, Schaberg’s lovely book meanders like a treasured northwoods stream through themes of friendship, loss, and wonder. Here, often hipdeep with the narrator in a hidden lake surrounded by cattails, we become tuned ‘into things beyond [us]—and not to master them but to merely coexist here.’” —CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water

“[A] short but sweet meditation on the art of fly-fishing. [Schaberg’s] musings are episodic and sharp. . . . This roving outing lands.”—Publishers Weekly

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

PRACTICES A series edited by Margret Grebowicz

From Fly-Fishing It takes me six minutes to walk to Bayou St. John, near my home in Mid-City New Orleans. I walk there to fish the end of the bayou, a cement-lined channel about thirty feet across, greenish water and occasional birdlife in residence: mangy blue herons, a solitary sandpiper, a roving pelican, sometimes an osprey. Among these creatures I scout for small fish in the murky shallows, casting surface bugs and darting streamers when I see signs of fish. . . . The whole practice is at once heightened and deemphasized, focused and decentered. Coming off my Michigan summer, though, and teaching through an ongoing pandemic, this daily hour-long pursuit has kept me sane. . . . When I fish in Michigan, I look for structure: reeds, submerged logs, lily pads. Here I find myself targeting the floating forms of face masks, pill bottles, and deflated soccer balls. I cast toward murky shapes in four feet of water, and the edge of the sloped cement embankment, where fish hang out. Adjust to your environs.