The Beauty of Fish Stories Motivates a Writer

If you’ve ever sat around a campfire recollecting the day’s events with your friends, you know that there are some grand tales to be told. Stories shared over cold beers, tales of the rivers and how it ebbed and flowed in little pools that hid the next rising fish.

Sparks pop and ascend from the flames as the dry wood gives up a little spot of moisture to the fire, creating that mystical aura that only a campfire can create. Small talk and chatter brings another story to light.

A bond built of friends talking about how that one fish came out of nowhere on the drift, slamming into your fly and running for that overhanging limb. The line ripping from the spool, droplets of water catching the last rays of the falling sun. There your friends turn to focus on you and your fight with nature and its beauty.

Captured again by thoughts and visions of the fight, your friends are now no longer witnesses to your earlier contest, but listeners as you weave through chosen words of excitement retelling the sport of the fish.

My desire to share these moments in the pages of a magazine that a stranger will pick up and read resonates in my choices to pursue journalism as a profession.

I wish to paint pictures with my words and share the wonders that I have found as I stood waist deep in running water, scanning for that next fish.

I want the instruction of past writers to guide my words and allow others to witness the back cast of a fly rod as the line loops back and then forward in a rhythm synchronized with the peace and comfort of perfection and harmony that only fly fishing can create.

In a day and age when many people have become slaves to their work, trapped in an office, I want my passion to be shared with these people through journalism. I want these people around my campfire as I share my stories and craft that I have learned in classes, pursuing a degree in journalism. I want my words on paper to be in harmony with the cast of fly lines and the presentation of flies on the water’s surface.

There is a desire to escape to these moments when life does not allow you to have the water running past you as you seek a liberation in fishing, and I yearn to be the person that writes about that epic moment in faraway destinations of running rivers and streams.

I want to share the river with the world and have the world read about that next catch and feel as if they are sharing the river with us.