| Opening Days
A Flyfisherman Writes
Richard Chiappone
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With this eclectic collection of essays, short stories, and poems, Richard Chiappone elongates the fishing-writing genre like a perfect backcast, suggesting that he finds almost anything a fisherman does interesting—anything but the actual fishing.
In all the personal essays, he describes only one sport fish landed—a late season Alaskan steelhead—too cold to put up a fuss about being hooked. In another piece, he never gets any farther than his own back yard, standing in a midwinter snow bank, casting to house cats. With humor and self-skewering wit, Chiappone admits he can’t cast very well, ties some of the ugliest flies in the world, and has come to understand that he will never catch a permit. The essays, both funny and touching, reveal him as a writer of stark contradictions: a man who despises winter and loves living in Alaska, who thinks that the Clean Water Act ruined as much as it fixed, who knows that a man can flirt with a beautiful female bartender and simultaneously be thankful he is too old and too married to have to act on it. Lifting his gaze past the end of the rod tip, and beyond the river and the fish all the way into his own heart, he examines everything from a sentimental memory of his mother to his doubts about the adequacy of his grief over a dead daughter.
Similarly, conflict is at the heart of the sometimes hilarious, sometimes dark, short stories—conflict, not between angler and fish, but between men and women, and husbands and wives; conflict among preteen boys trying to figure out what it means to be men, and conflict between grown men who wish they were once again just boys fishing; the conflict between a mature man and his need to feel relevant as he enters the later years of his life.
The poems consider the lives of sea birds, the larcenous hearts of children, bad weather in paradise, and what we can learn from a blind man in a boat.
At the heart of these writings is one fisherman's curiosity about how others might think and feel, and the real quarry Chiappone is casting about for is always empathy.
Praise for Opening Days
You expect a skilled essayist and angler to deftly dissect the weird world of fly fishing, a talented short-story writer to shine fresh light on the human condition, a sensitive and insightful poet to reveal the invisible. What you don’t expect is one writer to do it all—brilliantly, beautifully, with wit, pathos, and surprise on every dog-eared page.
— James R. Babb, Editor, Gray’s Sporting Journal
Rich Chiappone is one of the very few writers whose work I always want to read. He’s among the best there is. This collection—funny, thoughtful, poignant, and self-deprecating—is something everyone who cares about good writing will enjoy.
— Pete Fromm, author of As Cool As I Am, Blood Knot, and Indian Creek Chronicles
Opening Days—a symphony to fish in three movements—is destined to be carried in backpacks and dry bags, stuffed under the seats of drift boats and old pickups, and kept spine-down on the nightstands of those who spend winters waiting for the river to break and practice-casting to cats.
— Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Sight Hound, and Waltzing the Cat
I loved Rich Chiappone’s collection of essays, stories, and poems—Opening Days—which is pretty weird coming from a lesbian feminist nature writer. In the genre of fishing stories macho men have dominated, but what makes Chiappone’s work worth reading is that while it honors everything that is good and right about the conventional male fishing story, it gives the genre a much needed twist in the direction of self-awareness through emotional honesty and smart humor.
— Gretchen Legler, author of On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica, and All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman's Notebook
Reading Rich Chiappone is like listening to tales told around a campfire after a day's fishing. A master storyteller with a precise ear for the rhythms of speech and a knack for finding the significant and the sublime in just about anything, he'll give you a little something to think about and a lot of laughs.
— Krestia DeGeorge, Editor, The Anchorage Press
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| The Author
Richard Chiappone, a recipient of the Robert Traver Award, is the author of the story collection Water of an Undetermined Depth. His writing has appeared in anthologies and national publications including Playboy, the Sun, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. His story, Raccoon, was made into an award winning short film, and his work has been featured on BBC Radio. A thirty-year Alaskan, Chiappone lives with his wife, Lin, and several Siamese cats on a steelhead river near Anchor Point, the westernmost point on the contiguous highway system of North America. He teaches writing for the University of Alaska and serves on the faculty of the annual Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference in the town of Homer.
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Available June 2010
$24.95 | Hardcover | 232 pages | 6x9 | © 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-936008-04-9
ISBN-10: 1-936008-04-1
Published by Barclay Creek Press
Distributed by Stackpole Books
Individuals can order from your local bookstore, Stackpole, or Amazon
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