How did you come to realize this book had to be written? How did you find the throughline?

The impulse for this book began with a single line, “In my youth I lost a river.” I wrote it, in fact the whole opening of the book, in a rush of words, in a high-rise city hotel far removed from its inspirational source. The words arose instinctively through the dark waters of memory, like trout to the fly. That opening has not altered through the decades during which this book evolved. In the beginning, a writer doesn’t always know where such unbid clarity will lead. But it signalled that I was writing about a deep past and it contained a controlling metaphor for loss—of memory, of the people and places that I loved. The writing was a remembrance, not yet a memoir. It was a narrative, but I would have to wait another twenty years for the rest of the story to reveal itself. Those pages were unwritten because the events that compelled them had not yet unfolded. What connected these events to the death of my father when I was a young man apprenticing as a poet, my original subject—that is, my environmental advocacy for saving wilderness rivers and the premature passing of my brother—was a love of fishing, that primal and practical act of testing the waters for connection.

In the memoir, fishing is often the entry point for discussion both of your relationship to the environment and to the people in your life. What is it about fishing that’s so relational, so connecting?

Flowing water, the sound of it in spring opening the land, draws me out of the hibernaculum of winter, its inwardness and isolation. Brook trout are slurping the first mayflies, salmon are navigating high seas, silver arrows pointing ineluctably toward their rivers of birth in the fall. The flow of water, the flow of time, the round of the seasons, these life patterns draw me to rivers. The nature writer Ted Williams has said, “having one’s rivers is important, like having family …” and certainly that was true in my family. We fished together, my father, mother, and two brothers, but we also fished alone. Even when I was a boy my father and I would often go our own ways, him downriver and me upriver. An aspect of fishing is the need for human solitude, which brings you into closer touch with the elements and the plants and animals of a watery world. There is also a moral aspect to fishing, in relation to other lives, for you are inflicting pain and, when the fish is not released, administering death. Growing up on a farm and later working in the veterinary sciences faced me with these life-and death realities and the choices they impose. Flyfishing allows for easier and safer release of the fish, but when the fish is kept, there are rituals of expiation which my father taught me: the quick killing of the fish and its laying out in a bed of wet ferns in the creel to preserve its beauty, and ultimately, freshness for the table. Fishing has become, in the long reach of years, a way for me to reconnect to the loved ones I’ve lost, in a sense, to the springtimes of my life, and always to the natural world’s forces of renewal. Fishing is a kind of conjuring of the unseen and the unknown, a mystical pastime.

One might suspect that the poet and the journalist might sometimes be working at cross purposes when writing a memoir. Can you talk about how these two elements of your writing life worked together, or didn’t, in this work?

As has been observed elsewhere, contemporary poets in North America are mostly associated with the academy. Although I have been a Mentor in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College for the last several years, most of my working life was as a freelance journalist for a wide variety of trade magazines in Canada and the United States. I travelled widely for this work, which often fed my poetry, in more than one way. Journalism requires a certain objectivity, which is not foreign to modern poetry, so I have learned a degree of comfort navigating between the two genres. At my writing desk, with the ongoing work in both spread wide before me, I often switch attention spontaneously from one to the other. There is a difference, however, in voice, in inflection. In the memoir, though I am not freed from the need to verify the facts, I am freer to invoke a lyricism more common to my practice as a poet. It is an almost ideal form for one with my writing experience.