Looking Back on the Season

This past season in Mongolia was a memorable one for many reasons. We again were lucky enough to enjoy a veritable parade of skilled anglers and photographers, including Lax-A's Árni Baldursson, Per Jobs of FishYourDream.com, John and Anna Riggs (you can see her photos of Bermuda in the December 2011 issue of This Is Fly), Worldcast's Gordon Hight, and Rasmus Ovesen and Klaus Pedersen, who have teamed up for stories in many publications in Europe and North America, including Chasing Silver.

Tasmania's Greg French was back on a self-guided trip, bringing me a copy of his estimable Frog Call, which is criminally hard to find in North America.

Also had the rare pleasure of guiding two old friends. How old? We first flyfished together as teenagers, in Yellowstone National Park, when the Summer Olympics were in Montreal and Gerald Ford was President of the United States.

News from New Rivers Press

My contributor's copy of American Fiction, vol. 12, arrived on Aruba after Thanksgiving. I've been dipping into its contents in no particular order, and am in awe of Vedran Husic's "Deathwinked,"  set in wartime Mostar, while the main character in Dika Lam's prize-winning story, "The Polar Bear Swim," produces one of my favorite lines of the past year: "Why do they get to ask all the stupid questions?"

The collection was edited by Kristen Tsetsi, Bayard Godsave, and Bruce Pratt, with Josip Novakovich serving as the prize judge. The publisher is New Rivers Press, which recently named the manuscript of my Florida Keys novel as one of the finalists in their Electronic Book Series.