Women Writers Break Male Monopoly on Fish Story in ‘Uncommon Waters’ : Against the Current

Ernest Hemingway wades into the dark, rushing current of the Big Two-Hearted River. He lifts his arm to cast a grasshopper-baited hook into a pool. To his astonishment, someone else’s line skims into the froth first.

Standing on a log across the water playing out her line is Viva, a former Andy Warhol sidekick who is an actress, model, movie producer and photographer.

Such imaginary confrontations are an underlying theme of “Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing.” Published last month by the Seal Press, it is the first anthology of its kind.

For generations, men have held a literary monopoly on the fish story. With this collection, writers like Viva, novelist Margaret Atwood and poet Tess Gallagher wade into the rich genre dominated by such writers as Zane Grey, Thomas McGuane and Norman Maclean.

Storming these waters is not without risks.

Writer and publisher Nick Lyons, whose firm, Lyons & Burford, publishes outdoor books, says he fears some anglers will resist the intrusion on what has been considered male turf.

“I think ‘Uncommon Waters’ is a terrific book. The range is spectacular and there’s been nothing like it,” says Lyons, author of five books on fly fishing. “But I think the book is going to ruffle some feathers.”

A few feathers are already flying. A male caller to a Midwest radio talk show told “Uncommon Waters” editor Holly Morris that “women are ruining the sanctity of the streams.” What was meant to be a discussion of the book degenerated into a free-for-all on the topic: Should women fish?

Another angler who has taken exception to the anthology is Judith Bowman, who runs a Bedford, N.Y., mail-order business in hunting and fishing books. She has refused to sell “Uncommon Waters” through her catalogue, arguing: “It’s not a fishing book; it’s a piece of feminist literature.”

The 26-year-old Morris, a Seal Press editor who ardently fishes trout streams in Montana, Utah, Oregon and Washington, never intended to set the angling world in a spin.

Morris says in the introduction to the book that she grew up “hook-and-bobbering” the lakes and ponds of suburban Chicago; each summer she fished the waters of the Pacific Northwest with her grandparents. Like most anglers, as her fascination with fishing grew, she began to read fishing stories.

“I read about a sea captain who had a love-hate relationship with a whale,” she writes. “I read another about an old man who battled and killed a great marlin. I read about a young man whose father taught him to fly-cast by metronome. I read about fish and men, fishermen.”

When Morris began working on the anthology, she found that most of the few fishing books women had written were out of print and impossibly cutesy, with titles like “Wade a Little Deeper, Dear,” and “Women Can Fish.” Hardly an answer to “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Yet, Morris knew women had fishing tales to tell. As Mary Ellis writes in the anthology, “whether it is for sport or need, women have always fished and always will.”

The National Sporting Goods Assn. says there are 18 million women in the United States who fish for sport. In addition, women have traditionally fished to feed their families.

Tess Gallagher, who lives in Port Angeles, Wash., recalls learning to fish for salmon, a staple of her family’s diet, when she was 5.

Gallagher’s poem “Boat Ride,” along with about half the selections in the anthology, have been published elsewhere. The remainder were coaxed by Morris from often-reluctant fishers (the term she prefers to fisherwomen ) and writers she knows.

As an editor at the Seal Press, a feminist publisher, Morris has an allegiance to cultural diversity. “Uncommon Waters” introduces a variety of women who fish.

“Most of the fishing writing that’s out there is by white men,” Morris says. In an attempt to remedy that imbalance, her collection includes African-American poet and writer Audre Lorde’s poem “Fishing the White Water” as well as Sabrina Sojourner, a black journalist in Atlanta, whose essay “Currents” is about assuaging grief by fishing.

In addition to the professional writers, there is Marya Moses, an 80-year-old Tulalip Indian who has fished commercially in the Pacific Northwest for more than 40 years. Her memoir, “Ahn-Ka-Tee,” is transcribed from an interview.

In “A Buncha Guys, a Couple Fish and ME,” Viva describes turning up in red high heels and a tailored French suit for opening-day festivities on the Beaverkill River in the Catskills. “Viva’s delicious sendup of macho louts on opening day is alone worth the price of admission,” wrote Tom Rosenbauer, reviewing the anthology for Orvis News.

Another contributor, Dame Juliana Berners, is a nun, noblewoman and sportswoman who wrote the first known treatise on fishing, in 1421, nearly 200 years before the writing of Izaak Walton of “Compleat Angler” fame. Berners’ essay includes anglers’ etiquette (“Do not fish in any poor man’s private water, such as his pond or tank”) and bait recipes (feed maggots on mutton fat or with a cake made of flour and honey and then keep them hot under your gown for two or three hours).

Aside from a couple of big-game fishing stories, the anthology leans heavily toward fly fishing, a sport known not for its daring, but for its grace. The authors also favor the catch-and-release method in which a fish is hooked, only to be unhooked and liberated.

Killing and eating a fish is “the least interesting part of fishing,” said editor Morris, although she admits to a weakness for a fresh trout breakfast. “A lot of these women write about the interaction with the fish rather than the domination of the fish.”

Fly fishing is beloved by both men and women who write about the sport because, as Ailm Travler writes, it is “evocative beyond thought.”

To fool a trout into taking your line, “you become what you fish,” Travler writes. “A vulnerable cutthroat in a brushy, steep mountain stream; a sly brown (trout) hiding deep in the roiling waist-high waters of the Rio Grande . . . . “

Gretchen Legler writes about being the lone woman in a fishing camp full of men, and having her outing spoiled by threatening obscenities drawn on the outhouse wall.

Other writers point out that male anglers sometimes assert their dominance by forcing unsolicited advice on women fishing alone.

Contributor Lorian Hemingway is Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, and she has game-fished around the world, landing marlin, tarpon, shark and barracuda. Yet, she says in an interview, she was reeling in a cutthroat trout at Yellowstone Lake last summer when a 14-year-old boy walked up to her and began instructing her on how to land the fish.

A Seattle resident, Hemingway says she learned to fish when she was a little girl growing up in Arkansas.

As a Hemingway who both writes and fishes, she was bound to run up against her grandfather’s legend. And, sure enough, in Bimini 10 years ago, Lorian netted a Hemingway-esque story about an epic battle in the Gulf of Mexico.

She was delirious from sun, she wrote, with shoulder muscles torn and hands blistered and bloody. She sat strapped in the fighting chair with a 500-pound blue marlin yanking on the line while men yelled:

“Reel! Pull! Reel! Pull!”

For strength, Lorian drank beer and invoked the name of her grandfather.

These days Lorian Hemingway eschews the flamboyant adventures of deep-sea fishing for a quiet stream and a fly line. (Her novel, “Walking Into the River,” will be out in the spring from Simon & Schuster.)

Like other women represented in the collection, Lorian discovered there is more than one way to be a Hemingway and more than one way to catch a fish and write about it.