"I love Ann McMan."—Dorothy Allison, National Book Award finalist for Bastard Out of Carolina When sculptor and author Barb Davis is given an NEA grant to pair original feminist sculptures with searing first-person essays on transitions in women's lives, she organizes a two week writing retreat with twelve of the best, brightest, and most notorious lesbian authors in the business. But in between regularly scheduled happy hours and writing sessions, the women enter a tournament bass fishing competition, receive life coaching from a wise-cracking fish named Phoebe, and uncover a subterranean world of secrets and desires that is as varied and elusive as the fish that swim the inland sea. Set on the beautiful shores of Vermont's Lake Champlain, Backcast is richly populated with an expansive cast of endearing and outrageous characters who battle writer's block, quirky locals, personal demons, unexpected attractions, and even each other during their two-week residency. For Barb and each of her twelve writers, the stakes in this fast-moving story are high, but its emotional and romantic payoffs are slow and sweet. Filled with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and breathtaking pathos, Backcast serves up a sometimes irreverent, sometimes sobering look at the hidden lives of women, and how they laugh, love, lose, and blunder through their own search for meaning. Ann McMan is the author of five novels, including Jericho and Aftermath, and two short story collections. She has won two Golden Crown Literary Awards and her novel, Hoosier Daddy, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Part adventure story, part reconciliation with life's unexpected turns, and part commentary on the healing power of nature, "Backcast" explores the world of a man confronted by the hard choices divorce can bring to create a moving meditation on fatherhood.

New and specific presentation techniques beyond traditional dead drifting. Long-line nymphing, no-line nymphing, downstream strategies, micronymphing, nymphing lakes, and designing your own imitations. Instruction on hauling with weighted rigs, hammering, jabbing, tilting the rod plane, roll casting, elliptical casts, curve casts, downstream loading.

Called by Lefty Kreh "the best teacher of fly casting I have ever known," Ed Jaworowski presents his innovative method designed to help any angler cast more simply and easily.

Aldo Leopold was known to advocate a love of sport as a catalyst for conservation, and his own preference was the sport of fly fishing. But fly fishing is not just a religious or spiritual endeavour. It is also a sport essential to the conservation movement. No fly fisherman wishes to wade into rivers full of stormwater, to cast for invasive Asian carp. Freshwater anglers have been foundational to the preservation and management of freshwater fisheries and waters for centuries. To Leopold s land ethic, fly fishing adds an aquatic vitality. Surveys of fly fishing culture reveal that the sport ranks among the highest for experiences of nature and understanding of ecology. So, it s not surprising that fly fishing, and organizations like Trout Unlimited, has influenced fisheries management, conservation, and restoration in coldwater systems across the world. Backcasts reels these important topics in by exploring the intersection of conservation and fly fishing, in its history, present, and potential future."