Check out issue five of mojo – what an honor to be alongside the other writers in there. In particular I like how Meagan Cass gets in the mind of the first victim of Jaws:
I hope you enjoy it. The goal was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
I thought I’d give some (kinda disorganized) thoughts from the underside of the iceberg.
***N.B. To do so will necessitate spoilers. So read the story first.***
I am a poor fly-fisherman. Don’t get me wrong, I love the activity, but I think in the past 40 logged hours on the river, I haven’t felt the slightest bite. And this is in water that has allegedly been stocked with trout.
I have this theory about writing: it retroactively makes your life meaningful. You do all this stuff that is completely mundane and then later on, one of those random details returns to provide the perfect motivation for a story you’re writing. So, all those hours spent on the river without a bite, all those hours untangling fly line from trees, all that money spent on flies and gear that I’m too inchoate to use properly have all been completely justified in my mind now that I have a story about fly fishing published.
Still, I do enjoy just standing out in the middle of a river with a hypnotic, soothing motion. Fish or no fish, just being able to cast properly is a victory after you spend forty minutes untangling a knot.
And the crazy thing about fly-fishing is I’ve never encountered an activity that demanded so much prerequisite knowledge. You have to know how to cast, where to cast, how to read the stream, what flies to cast and at what time of year to cast them. Then there’s this whole realm of tying your own flies. Any one of those variables is challenging enough to be a lifelong pursuit.
If you’ve read my other stuff, you know I end up writing figures who try to achieve some kind of intellectual or spiritual transcendence, whether for egotistical reasons or out of despair (let’s just brush aside what Freud might say, shall we?). With all its intricacy, fly-fishing synced with that type of aspiration.
The weird thing I noticed about fly-fishing publications is this bizzaro high-church ritualistic sentiment with regard to fly-fishing versus other types of fishing. It is the Mozart whereas noodling would be something like David Hasselhoff’s Christmas album.
The other thing about fly-fishing magazines and books: their rhetoric is all about awareness. The fish are out there and catchable if you are aware of and manipulate all the variables. One element not considered is the difference between catching a slew and not getting a nip. The implication here is that the fish not biting means that somehow you’re not in tune enough.
So I wanted a character who was consumed by the notion of awareness. Thus, Tyler’s desire to “feel all there was to be felt in a moment.”
But that notion, if you take it seriously, is both absurd and ironic. It’s absurd because, you know, where do you stop? Awareness of what insects are hatching? Awareness of their scientific names? Awareness of the rotation of quarks that make up the protons that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the cells that make up the structure of the insect’s wing? Puberty clicking in the brain of a random boy walking down the river? The connection to that boy’s hunger and affinity for pro-wrestling? To the fact that somewhere Sheryl Crow is playing on the radio?
The image of the stunned fish dumped by the DNR came from a conversation with a colleague. Apparently that really happened to him: he was out trying to fly-fish and this dude came out of the woods and pulled fish out of the water with his bare hands.
The story went through what I call five drafts. I wrote it by hand, typed it on the computer, and printed it. Then I crossed everything out and wrote in the margins. I love a page that is typed on one side and then re-written in pencil on the back. Then you re-type and re-print. I did that five times. The whole process took a couple of months.
Thanks for reading.
Ps — I actually do kind of like Hasselhoff’s album.