Brook Trout and the Writing Life: The Intermingling of Fishing and Writing in a Novelist's Life [Paperback]

Craig Nova (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Craig Nova, one of the most distinctive voices and visionaries in American fiction, works close to the bone, but never forgets to see things from afar." --Ann Beattie

"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. When a salmon takes the fly with a 'tock' sound, Nova muses that the sound is like 'knocking a knuckle against a violin' or 'knocking on the coffin one will occupy one day.' Such metaphoric associations free the prose to absorb levels and levels of connection. Brook Trout, over and over, takes you there where elusive and slippery meaning might almost arc into the net." --Francis Mayes

"This is an unusual fishing book, in that it isn't 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

About the Author

Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including The Good Son, Cruisers, and his latest novel, The Informer. His work has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, and Men's Journal. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Eno Publishers; Rev Exp edition (May 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982077149
• ISBN-13: 978-0982077146
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #272,711 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His latest novel is THE INFORMER, a literary thriller set in 1930s Berlin.

Nova's writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

"Craig Nova is a fine writer, one of our best," writes Jonathan Yardley, book critic for the Washington Post. "If you haven't read him, the loss is yours." "He's a novelist who has yet to write a supermarket bestseller...but he has written at least two American classics that will likely resonate after his death, the way the poor-selling 'Great Gatsby' did for poor ol' F. Scott Fitzgerald," writes David Bowman of Salon.com.

Nova's life has been a plethora of experience, almost like something straight out of Hollywood -- where Nova, coincidence or not, was raised. From rebellious and alienated youth in the Hollywood Hills to graduation from University of California at Berkeley during the turbulent 1960s; from starving artist years in New York City to a placid and content writing life in more rustic parts, Nova's rich experience has made him "an artist in full command," as Yardley says.

Raised during the Golden Age of Hollywood, Nova was unfazed by the star-studded environment of his childhood. "Like all kids, I thought that my immediate surroundings were perfectly natural and that the whole world was just like Hollywood," says Nova. "In fact, I think my entire life has been spent correcting this misperception, or at least realizing that there is a difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.

"I remember playing with Jayne Mansfield's daughter when I was about eight, and racing Steve McQueen on Mulholland when I was 16," recounts Nova. As a teenager, he attended the famed and celebrity saturated Hollywood High. There he, with most of the Mouseketeers as classmates, lived out his share of youthful rebellion.

Nova made up for those minor transgressions by being a diligent student at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated just weeks before the Summer of Love. "When I was there, someone in the state senate stood up and said, 'A course at Berkeley is a course in sex, drugs, and treason.' I have to say he was damn right."

After graduation, Nova moved to New York City and attended Columbia University, where his writing ambitions flourished. There at Columbia, he met Jean Stafford, a profound influence who introduced him to "the writing life." Upon publishing his first book, Turkey Hash in 1975, Nova won the Harper Saxton prize, putting him in the ranks of such esteemed writers as Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin. "I assumed that when it was published, it would change my life," he says, "Of course, not a lot happened. I ended up driving a taxicab in New York."

The years between Nova's first and third novel found him struggling, not only to write, but also to survive. He worked a variety of odd jobs constantly balancing attempts to support himself with his writing endeavors. In addition to driving a cab, his diverse experiences included carpentering in SoHo and managing a small real estate empire. "There were some very hard times here, going hungry, ending up on the street, broke," Nova recollects. "I find it hard to remember the will it took to go on writing under those circumstances."

During Nova's early years in New York City, he met his wife Christina at a party. Describing their first encounter in his memoir Brook Trout and the Writing Life, Nova writes, "Like all chance meetings that turn out differently than one supposes, I almost did not go to this party." To get away from the city, he and Christina would venture up to her small house in the country on weekends with increasing frequency. Christina gave him his first fly rod, with which he caught a brook trout during one of their escapades to the house. The brook trout, then merely a fish, would go on to reappear throughout Nova's life, serving as a powerful link between intimate events and, eventually, giving the title to his memoir. Of his and Christina's decision to wed, he writes, "We planned to get married, and then we did."

Nova's fourth book, The Good Son, received a substantial advance from the publisher and met almost universal critical acclaim. When the young couple decided to leave New York City for a more serene life in the country, Christina quit her job at CBS, where she had been working in television news. "I managed the land as a tree farm, and I have to say this was one of the most happy times in my life," Nova recalls. "I'd write in the morning and then work in the woods in the afternoons. And when I saw something in the woods, bears, deer, rugged grouse, foxes, they found a way into the book I was writing."

After having two daughters, Craig and Christina moved to Vermont, where their kids went to school and he went on to write another five or six novels. "This was a lovely time, too, in that I would write in the morning and afternoon, and then cook for the children and Christina. Idyllic, in a way, but the difficulty of course is the nature of the writing life," Nova says. "You are either on your way up or on your way down and this endlessly changing prospect made for a continual uneasiness."

During this time, Nova worked on magazine assignments to fulfill his dreams of going to places he'd wanted to see and picked up plenty of inspiration along the way: "I went to the equatorial Pacific, went fly fishing in Austria and on the San Juan River, flew with bush pilots...all of which came in handy in the writing of novels." He wrote screenplays for Touchstone Pictures and Behavior, a Canadian company.

"When my children went away to college, I realized that I had some extra time on my hands," says Nova. "I thought it would be a good idea to share some of what I had learned after those years alone in a room." In 2005 he was offered an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and accepted. There, he serves as 1949 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

Nova writes for Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim award. He and Christina live in North Carolina.

As for the brook trout, Nova writes, "these fish are forever associated in my mind with the depths of thankfulness for good fortune, just as they always reminded me of beauty and a sense of what may be possible after all." He continues to fish for brook trout.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Family and Fish Story of a Novelist, June 21, 2011

By 

ron P. swegman (New York, NY, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brook Trout and the Writing Life: The Intermingling of Fishing and Writing in a Novelist's Life (Paperback)

Craig Nova is an American novelist who has enjoyed a long career as a creative writer. He has authored twelve novels and holds the position of distinguished professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Behind that literary public face, hidden within the folds of his family life, he has also cultivated and realized the role of a passionate fly fisher whose first love is the brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis.

Like his generational colleagues, Thomas McGuane and W. D. Wetherell, Nova has risen to prominence through his art of the novel, yet his most accessible book to some readers may very well be the side project, the little fishing book. For McGuane, this coalesced as the essays collected in The Longest Silence; for Wetherell, this became rendered in his portrait of a waterway, Vermont River. Here now for Nova, in a reissued and expanded edition featuring a forward by Ann Beattie, is Brook Trout and the Writing Life. Part fish story, part memoir, the book is at its center a thoughtful exploration of the overlapping threads of connection writers who come to fly fishing (or visa versa) perceive and experience within the greater realm of family life.

Nova's fish story attracts interest in part because of the time frame involved. Nova came relatively late to fly fishing. He was already established in New York City, living the life of a young writer, when a woman who would later become his wife introduced him to her family's country property; a little corner of Eden that held a trout stream. His own Eve gifted him his first fly rod and this instrument, like a pen or a typewriter, gave him not just knowledge, but a new kind of way to render experience, one that opened up a new vista within his personal life. Nova the writer found a refuge for rumination, for catharsis: the power of free time bathed in a stream's flow that, in his case, sustained him through literary lean times.

Sustained success arrived and two daughters followed. Nova's experiences with his girls, related here, provides a rare look into an area heretofore understudied by much of the fly fishing canon's best literature. Enough with the father and son story, oft told, now worn down so far as to become cliché. Here, at last, is the father and daughter fly fishing dynamic. And even when Nova digresses in a chapter about rowing, we find in this other freshwater sport another connection to that fundamental process, the flow, which informs fishing, writing, and life.

This edition, new from Eno Publishers, is an expanded version of a book first published in 1999 by The Lyons Press. The new material fits in seamlessly; there are no sections that read as if sutured on for the sake of elaboration or discursion. Nova reveals his writing skill by folding in the additional passages so well that the surface of the page remains as unbroken as the surface of a spring creek pool. Not a ripple can be detected; Nova is a lapidarian literary artist.

One subjective thought also arises after reading Brook Trout and the Writing Life. Nova's book fits well into what could be named The Northeast School of fly fishing writing. One will not encounter the big sky testosterone tales of a pot smoking alpha male with a thick thatch of beard; the tough guy who guides millionaire clients to massive steelhead in between pounded cans of domestic beer. Instead, you will find quiet natural beauty, emotional sensitivity, family values, maybe a glass or two of red wine, and therein an even stronger model of a man; an individual who can be a husband, a father, a lyrical writer, as well as one very talented fly fisher who excels in the sport's most nuanced facets.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Treatise on Fishing, Family, Friends -- and Writing, April 4, 2011

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brook Trout and the Writing Life: The Intermingling of Fishing and Writing in a Novelist's Life (Paperback)

I started out leisurely reading Craig Nova's BROOK TROUT AND THE WRITING LIFE a chapter at a time each day at lunch while I waited for my meatloaf or grilled chicken at the local meat-and-three. Around page 60 or so, however, the author turned the heat up and I had to finish this exquisite piece of fine writing in one setting. This is one of those rare books, that when I finished it, I just held it in my hands and knew that I had read something both beautifully written but also full of quiet profound truths about the way the world is put together. It is ultimately about almost everything that matters.

As Mr. Nova points out in the Preface the book, is really not about fishing but the people he cared about and the passage of time. Whether you fish or not does not matter--I do not--this book is not one you will soon forget. In addition to the author's wife and daughters, he draws other people, or as he says, he brings from the shadows into his narrative: among many a woman shelling peas on her front porch, someone that Nova never spoke to, while he fished nearby, a Frenchwoman intent on drinking herself to death--and sadly--an update on the bush pilot Jack McPhee, who was killed in an accident in his plane between the original publication of the book in 1999 and this updated edition.

First for a lover of words, BOOK TROUT is a complete pleasure. Mr. Nova glides over a "piece of green silk," ponds are "blue-pink mirrors," leaves are covered "with the golden film of tropical sunlight," a fish that ignored Nova's flies showed a distain that was "almost regal."

There are wondrously poignant sections of this book about Mr. Nova's relationship with his two daughters: how he answers his older daughter who, when she is twelve and he is teaching her how to do fly fishing, asks him how it feels to be in love. Or the day he goes rowing with the same daughter as an adult when she visits him. Finally there is the beautiful letter he writes to her just before she is to be married on what is important in a good marriage: "A little politeness, especially in trying circumstances, goes a long ways." "It is a good idea to forgive the spouse in the same spirit that one would like to be forgiven oneself." Even in this modern electronic age of e-mails, Nova writes the letter on stationery with a fountain pen, something he connects with trout fishing because it has value and people have been it doing for a long time. This long loving letter made me think of William Butler Yeats' poem "Prayer for My Daughter." But shouldn't one fine piece of literature remind you of another? (In this age when there are many living arrangements that do not fit into the traditional marriage complete with papers, Mr. Nova's advice to his beloved daughter on how to sustain a loving relationship works for the rest of us as well.)

Finally Mr. Nova on friendship: "So one of the things I have learned about the passage of time is that people you care about can disappear, and when they do, they leave a hole that is impossible to fill. For me, at least, when I am with a friend, I am a little different than I am with other people, and I only get to be this way when I am with this particular friend. It is a gift that someone you care about gives to you. These people let you be more the way you want to be, just by being with them. The hard lesson, as a Buddhist would say, is that when one of these friends dies he takes some of you with him, if only because you discover, with a sort of amazement, that the person you got to be when you were with the friend who died is gone." Like any good writer, Mr. Nova says so eloquently what the rest of us thought we believed but were too tongue-tied to express ourselves.

Mr. Nova goes on to say that when you are with friends, you are living in the moment and that this is what is so pleasurable about fishing with a friend. (He also fishes alone, however, when his writing is not going well.) I was so taken with the above-quoted paragraph that I called a good friend and read it to her. For us, neither of whom would ever go fishing, we opined that we have the same experience sitting down in a fine restaurant for a good meal, a glass of wine and an endless conversation. It was the novelist Andrew Holleran who said that a friendship is just one long conversation anyway.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful Wisdom on Fishing, Family, Friends -- and Writing, April 1, 2011

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brook Trout and the Writing Life (Kindle Edition)

I started out leisurely reading Craig Nova's BROOK TROUT AND THE WRITING LIFE a chapter at a time each day at lunch while I waited for my meatloaf or grilled chicken at the local meat-and-three. Around page 60 or so, however, the author turned the heat up and I had to finish this exquisite piece of fine writing in one sitting. This is one of those rare books, that when I finished it, I just held it in my hands and knew that I had read something both beautifully written but also full of quiet profound truths about the way the world is put together. It is ultimately about almost everything that matters.

As Mr. Nova points out in the Preface, the book is really not about fishing but the people he cared about and the passage of time. Whether you fish or not does not matter--I do not--this book is not one you will soon forget. In addition to the author's wife and daughters, he draws other people, or as he says, he brings them from the shadows into his narrative: three among many are a woman shelling peas on her front porch, someone that Nova never spoke to, while he fished nearby, a Frenchwoman intent on drinking herself to death--and sadly--an update on the bush pilot Jack McPhee, who was killed in an accident in his plane between the original publication of the book in 1999 and this updated edition.

First for a lover of words, BOOK TROUT is a complete pleasure. Mr. Nova glides over a "piece of green silk," ponds are "blue-pink mirrors," leaves are covered "with the golden film of tropical sunlight," a fish that ignored Nova's flies showed a distain that was "almost regal."

There are wondrously poignant sections of this book about Mr. Nova's relationship with his two daughters: how he answers his older daughter who, when she is twelve and he is teaching her how to do fly fishing, asks him how it feels to be in love. Or the day he goes rowing with the same daughter as an adult when she visits him. Finally there is the beautiful letter he writes to her just before she is to be married on what is important in a good marriage: "A little politeness, especially in trying circumstances, goes a long ways." "It is a good idea to forgive the spouse in the same spirit that one would like to be forgiven oneself." Even in this modern electronic age of e-mails, Nova writes the letter on stationery with a fountain pen, something he connects with trout fishing because it has value and people have been doing it for a long time. This long loving letter made me think of William Butler Yeats' poem "Prayer for My Daughter." But shouldn't one fine piece of literature remind you of another? (In this age when there are many living arrangements that do not fit into the traditional marriage complete with papers, Mr. Nova's advice to his beloved daughter on how to sustain a loving relationship works for the rest of us as well.)

Finally Mr. Nova on friendship: "So one of the things I have learned about the passage of time is that people you care about can disappear, and when they do, they leave a hole that is impossible to fill. For me, at least, when I am with a friend, I am a little different than I am with other people, and I only get to be this way when I am with this particular friend. It is a gift that someone you care about gives to you. These people let you be more the way you want to be, just by being with them. The hard lesson, as a Buddhist would say, is that when one of these friends dies he takes some of you with him, if only because you discover, with a sort of amazement, that the person you got to be when you were with the friend who died is gone." Like every good writer, Mr. Nova says so eloquently what the rest of us thought we believed but were too tongue-tied to express ourselves.

Mr. Nova goes on to say that when you are with friends, you are living in the moment and that this is what is so pleasurable about fishing with a friend. (He also fishes alone, however, when his writing is not going well.) I was so taken with the above-quoted paragraph on friendship that I called a good friend and read it to her. For us, neither of whom would ever go fishing, we opined that we have the same experience sitting down in a fine restaurant for a good meal, a glass of wine and an endless conversation. It was the novelist Andrew Holleran who said that a friendship is just one long conversation anyway.