The Confluence: A Collection of Essays, Art & Tall Tales about Fly-Fishing & Friendship - Softcover

David Van Wie; Phil Odence; Norm Richter; Bob Chamberlin; Ed Baldrige; Dave Klinges; Bill Conway

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942155123 ISBN 13: 9781942155126

Publisher: DAVID A. VAN WIE, 2016

Synopsis

Seven lifelong friends head north each June to a remote cabin at the confluence of the Dead Diamond and Swift Diamond Rivers. What started as a single fishing trip has evolved over twenty-plus years into an annual retreat to the mystical environs of the Dartmouth College Grant, far from the workaday world and vibrant with brotherhood, creativity and reflection.

Fishing is only a part of their story. In a collection of intertwined essays from seven unique voices, the authors reveal how their friendships have grown deeper as their lives flow into middle age, with laughs, tears and insight into the intersection between humanity and the natural world. The reader comes along to experience wilderness wonders, stinky outhouses, original watercolors, floods, a wine tasting, a dramatic search and rescue...and fly-fishing for native brook trout.

About this title

About the Author:

DAVID VAN WIE, PHIL ODENCE, NORM RICHTER, BOB CHAMBERLIN, ED BALDRIGE, DAVE KLINGES & BILL CONWAY- The Boys of the Grant - are writers and renaissance fishermen. As college classmates, they pursued a variety of professions and interests that inform their essays and enrich their friendships.

Review:

"This collection of essays, sketches, and tall tales centered on fishing is well worth getting reeled into...Outdoorsmen (and women), fishing enthusiasts, and fans of nature writing will want to visit this book at will."
-Trina Carter, Foreword Reviews

"I read The Confluence with more than a trace of envy because so few of us have the gift of keeping lifelong friends from college. As the chapters went by, and I saw these friendships ripen and deepen I realized the book goes beyond one college and one shared backwoods tract. It's about the very meaning of friendship and young people growing older together."
-Mel Allen, Editor, Yankee Magazine

"Any longtime outdoors man knows how marvelous sporting friendships can be, not least because the sport is vehicle to deeper explorations --comic, tragic, and everything in between. Any writer knows that he or she can never quite adequately express the profundities, but each of these essayists, so different one from the other and so emphatically akin, comes as close as any of us is likely to get. A bright and wonderful read!"
-Sydney Lea, American poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Vermont"

"Like A River Runs Through It or A Walk in the Woods, The Confluence is a book for the best men in your life, the good guys, the ones with a sense of humor and intelligence who value loyalty and love, the ones who cherish rituals without becoming sanctimonious and who take the world seriously while taking themselves with an appropriate lack of gravity."
- Gina Barreca Ph.D. in Psychology Today (April 16, 2016)

"This land at the summit of New Hampshire is large and wild and very special; so is its evocation in these pages. Instigators Odence and Van Wie and their merry band of friends, with Dartmouth College and friendships formed there at their collective core, write well and, dare it be said, charmingly about their times together in the far American north." "The passage of the human seasons is as evident in these reminiscences as it always is along the Dead Diamond River. The memories differ (as memories do), and that's all to the good. The inspirations differ too, from Corey Ford and Norman Maclean and E.B. White to Edward Hoagland and Henry David Thoreau to Moe, Larry and Curly. It is the book's blessing that Van Wie is a fine photographer with a poetic eye, and Odence is his equal in illustration. The Second College Grant, a realm of rippling waters and pointed firs, can be a cold place at any time of the year. This, however, is a constantly warm, regularly moving reflection."
-Robert Sullivan, author of Flight of the Reindeer and A Child's Christmas in New England"

"Camaraderie pervades The Confluence: warmth, humor, touches of pathos, a shared love of fish and flies, special waters, also art and literature... a collection of stories, essays and art compounded and distilled by seven literate friends. . . Steadily engaging, often surprising, the prose here is polished but blessedly unpretentious.. ."
- Seth Norman, Fly Rod & Reel, Robert Traver Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize nominee

"The Confluence, which I read in one sitting, shows how this splendid remnant of the original New England wilderness, with its rugged mountains, big woods, icyrivers and tropically-colored brook trout, has shaped the outdoor experiences and nurtured the friendships of those who know and love it."
- Howard Frank Mosher, author and winner of the New England Independent Booksellers President's Award

"This is a wonderful book about fishing and like all wonderful books about fishing, the fishing both matters and doesn't. A bunch of college friends record their annual trip into the New Hampshire woods in appealing short essays with beautiful photographs and drawings. But it isn't a how-to-fish book but rather a how-to-live book. What it really does is to remind us, in our world of always too much information and noise, of the need to pay attention, and demonstrate that, as Simone Weil said, attention is a form of prayer."
-David Scott Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University"

About this edition

• Publisher: DAVID A. VAN WIE
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1942155123
• ISBN 13: 9781942155126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212