Notes from the San Juans: Thoughts about Fly Fishing and Home (The Pruett Series) - Softcover

Meyers, Steven J.

9780871089700: Notes from the San Juans: Thoughts about Fly Fishing and Home (The Pruett Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087108970X ISBN 13: 9780871089700

Publisher: WestWinds Press, 2013

This book, more than anything else, is a book about place. Centered on the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, a range of jagged peaks inhabited by the sometimes equally jagged people of small mountain towns, it is a book about the search for a place to call home, after other homes have been wrecked. Steve Meyers, a transplanted easterner, speaks for tens of thousands of younger people who have searched for a way of life outside of the homogenizing pressures of contemporary American society. His search led him to the San Juans and he writes with extraordinary warmth and depth about a way of life that has become increasingly rare and a region that has managed to maintain its startling beauty and idiosyncrasies; and he writes movingly about a father who vanished and about personal loss and about triumph. Throughout the book, wild trout and colorful people appear as comfortable residents of this relatively remote region in which the act of fly fishing seems as natural as eating and sleeping. Ultimately Notes from the San Juans is the story of a man who has been seduced by the pleasures of the mountains and the joys of fly fishing and bright mountain streams—but it is also very much a story of human values and courage and hard-won joy.

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About the Author:

Steven J. Meyers has been teaching English and Writing at Fort Lewis College since the winter of 2000. He has been a professional photographer, ski instructor, and fly-fishing guide, and much else. He is the author of six books and his writing has appeared in numerous national publications and journals.
Books: "On Seeing Nature," "Lime Creek Odyssey," "Streamside Reflections," "The Nature of Fly Fishing," "Notes from the San Juans," "San Juan River Chronicle." Awards: Colorado Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts, Honored Artist (1981); Colorado Council on the Arts/Western States Arts Foundation CoVisions Grant (1992); Colorado Endowment for the Humanities Colorado Journeys featured author (1996, 2004).

From Publishers Weekly:

Meyers's claim that he, a longtime easterner, was prompted to move to southwestern Colorado by his longing for his father, who deserted the family in New Jersey, turns out to be a Maguffin in this collection of 15 original pieces. The real compulsion is fly fishing for trout. Meyers (Lime Creek Odyssey) has a reporter's ear but a cleric's hand with issues of everyday life in the San Juans. One one hand is Damn Trout, one of the truest and funniest pieces about the outdoors to be written in the modern era. Other pieces seem stuck in a gyre of sentimentality that verges on the maudlin in Moving Downriver. The hard outline of life in Colorado's San Juan mountain range seems to oppose Meyers's flaccid style, but in the end these loose notes and sketches of the locals glow like bare rocks in evening light.

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