The Trout Underground has long had a manifesto – a reflection of the moment when the light bulb went on (albeit weakly), and (yet) another fly fishing site was born.

While I credit Gierach for exposing me to a different sort of fly fishing writing (remember, this was back in the late 80s), the Trout Underground came to life after reading (again) the introduction to McGuane’s seminal The Longest Silence.

Since then, the world has seen the birth of thousands of personal fly fishing sites, some of which probably qualify as national treasures – assuming that fly fishing qualifies as a national anything (Fly Fishing: “The Official National Time Sink of the USA”)

I’m not referring to the big sites, but the smaller, more personal – and often more literate – sites.

They’re labors of love, lacking both a publishing schedule and commercial underpinnings. Their authors are the true children of the digital publishing revolution, and at the very least, they offer a beguilingly personal glimpse of the sport – unencumbered by commerce, sponsorship or squeamishly narrow editors.

StoryArc - a fly fishing literary site

And yes, you’re probably running down a mental short list of your favorite little fly fishing sites. They’re not aggressively promoting a commercial angle on anything (gear, company, or even the writer), and they’re usually updated far less often than you’d like. (Feel free to identify your favorites in the comments section; unlike small trout streams, good little fly fishing sites don’t need the protection of anonymity.)

One of the best – and probably most unfairly overlooked – is the site I’d try to develop if I was writer enough – David Kim Mote’s StoryARC, which features a lengthy, but hugely appealing manifesto of its own:

I’ve been writing fishing stories and poetry for 30 years, but it’s always been on the back burner, behind jobs that pay, family, novels, actual fishing, and so on. About once a year I take my bundle on the market, submitting here and selling there. But ambitious stuff about fishing and the outdoors is not exactly a hot property. The poetry that gets bought tends to rhyme. The fiction that sells and reads is of the Santiago genre. You know it: man vs. beast, in which the man is old and savvy or young and callow; the beast is hoary, cagy, scar-lipped, monstrous-racked, and endowed with curiously human faculties and attributes. Hemingway and Faulkner mastered the ambiguous extremes, and everybody since then has covered the rest. Maybe it’s because I don’t catch enough big fish, or because I fall too obviously between callow and savvy, but that style of story has never worked for me. I get going on the epic struggle or the strange simpatico and suddenly veer off into irony or existentialism. I can’t help it, which is why I put like 40 hours a week into my day job.

Recently it got worse: I challenged myself to write a flyfishing story in which nobody catches a fish. I aimed for humorous realism, maybe with a clever analysis of the skunking every angler has to take now and then. Gierach, here I come. I liked the product (though Gray’s did not), so I went it one better: I wrote a fishing story in which nobody fished. The market liked that one even less, but I liked it so well I haven’t been able to write anything else since. At this rate, my next story will feature a dry river and a party of anglers slaughtered like sheep.

With my market choices dimming, the logical choice was to create my own market. Since I pushed the button on StoryArc, my acceptance rate has risen sharply. Self-publication is a long, hallowed, and only slightly embarrassing tradition. You might find it pathetic, but I prefer to imagine myself in the company of Whitman and Thoreau.

If you find yourself in the same boat–stuck with unsalable stuff and too lazy to market hard or too stubborn to write what the market wants–send it to me. (storyarccontact at the Google dot com.) It’s only slightly unfair that I’m both the main contributor and the editor in chief, but everybody gets paid the same. The site will remain simple, streamlined, and specific: words, words, words (and the occasional photograph). I’ll publish what reads, even the Santiago stories, but I’m looking for harder stuff: literary, challenging, subtle, political, muscular–you know, all the adjectives that came with the English degree. And no spelling or punctuation mistakes.

I’m assuming my work and money are going down the memory hole, but if some profit unexpectedly turns up, I’ll share until I become greedy and my values are corrupted, then, well, you know. But if Random House suddenly wants your work, they can have it; what I publish remains yours. If you have other terms, I’m happy to hear them.

Singelbarbed and I once had a phone conversation about our blogs, and I expressed more than a little frustration at the difficulty maintaining the Underground at a time when I was becoming a father, launching a new marketing presence, and watching half of the professional copywriting market implode under the weight of the Internet.

In short, I wondered how I could make enough money off it to justify the time – or even if there was an exit strategy in my future.

He simply said “That’s all bullshit – we write because we want to publish the stuff the magazines won’t.”

That, in a nutshell, sums up StoryArc, the manifesto of which touches a nerve.

Motes cops to not mastering the “epic” fly fishing story, and at a time when the fly fishing publications are seemingly soiling themselves in their rush to embrace the extreme.

The concept is clear (if not downright embarrassing).

If you’re simply having fun – if you’re not hung over, or chasing a fish bigger than the fish the previous writer was chasing, or writing from the back of a lama 6,243 miles away, or proudly throwing your life away – you’re not really fly fishing.

Reinforcing this trend are all the industry’s full-page ads featuring grim-faced fishermen, who appear to hate the sport even as they practice it in appalling conditions.

For one writer (published in a new, high-end magazine), “trout” even became a five-letter variant of a four-letter word.

Some seem to have a lot to prove with their pursuit of fish, and it seems fly fishing has evolved from a pleasant pastime to an Ahab-like obsession with big fish, big rods and hero pics. To paraphrase one astute commentor on the Underground, “The fly fishing magazines lost me when they switched the emphasis from fishing to catching.”

Of course, rants like these aren’t meant to change the landscape of fly fishing as much as observe it, which is probably what Motes had in mind with StoryArc.

Like Motes, I accumulated a small stack of rejection slips before going the Trout Underground route, so there’s what you might call an understanding there – an acknowledgement that what’s happening isn’t exactly commercially viable, but a lot of fly fishermen seem to think it’s pretty cool anyway.

Stop by StoryArc, and see if you think it’s cool for you too.

See you on the small fly fishing sites, Tom Chandler.

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