Writing

Trout fishing and the truth

"For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to."

Nick Parish

Feb 5, 2024 — 2 min read

Percival and his pet, Jim Crow. "When he was on my shoulder, when I wrote the novel 'Erasure,' if I wasn't paying enough attention to him, he would march down my arm and peck at the keys. So, I do credit him for having written some of the novel."

Some water is so clear that trout will swim to your fly, your silhouette all too visible to them as they gaze up and through the water and air, and will inspect your tying job, the amount of head cement you applied, observe whether you used a good stiff hackle or whether you used natural or synthetic dubbing material, nose the thing, then swim away.

Occasionally, one will take the fly, not caring that a bit of thread is visible where the tail is tied down, not even caring that your tippet is corkscrewed. A trout hiding behind a rock in fast, muddy water might or might not take a nymph fished deep through the riffle. For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to.

— Percival Everett, Erasure

Here's another, from this wonderful interview with Greil Marcus:

GM: There are many scenes in your books where depression seems paired with fishing. It seems like a stream in your fiction.

PE: If I start talking about fishing, fishing as the metaphor that it is for so many things—first of all, I’ve never gotten back to my car in the daylight. I go and I park and I hike in to the river. And I start fishing, and every place I look upriver is beautiful to me and I can’t wait to fish it. And I imagine where the trout will be lying and I think about how to present the flies, whichever kind of fly I’m using in that particular water. And I move through it, through the river, and miles go by, and I’ll look at the sky and I realize, Well, I’d better get back to my car, but when I turn around—and this is where fiction comes into my life with fishing—when I turn around it’s a different river. From perspective, from direction of flow, from being on the other side of boulders, and then I feel a need to fish all these spots that I’ve walked by that I haven’t been able to see. And it gets dark on me. And I’m out there, I never make it back. I can’t look directly at a beautiful river—I find that I have to turn away and steal glimpses of it, because it’s too much for me.