Casting Quiet Waters: Reflections on Life and Fishing

by Jake Macdonald (Editor)

In Casting Quiet Waters, some of North America’s most respected literary writers take us on a fishing trip and use that as an opportunity to explore issues of the human condition. A little more than five centuries ago an odd English nun named Dame Juliana Berners (“The Prioress of St. Albans”) wrote the first book about fishing. Her obscure but legendary tome, a Treatysse of Fyshynge wyth an Angle, is as much a work of philosophy as a how-to manual, and in it she prescribes fishing as “a cure for domestic calamatie.” This anthology responds to her advice. A dozen of North America’s top writers embark on individual fishing trips and see if limpid water and the silence of wild places will help them reflect on their own lives and calamities. The exploratory process of writing is not so different from the process of trawling the unknown invisible world beneath the surface of a river or lake. The angler and writer both toss lines, chase shadows, and spend countless hours pondering what might have been if they’d handled that last opportunity with more gentleness and skill.

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2014

About the author

Jake grew up in River Heights in Winnipeg, one of seven talented siblings raised by Peggy, a homemaker and university student and Donald, who was Chief Commissioner of the City Of Winnipeg. Jake attended St. Paul's Catholic High School and studied literature at the University of Manitoba.

The celebrated Manitoba author took pleasure in the world's memorable landscapes - Canada's west coast, the Bahamian out islands, and the Pacific coast of Mexico, Northwestern Ontario rivers, lakes, granite, boreal forest, the muskies, bears, eagles, domesticated animals.

One of Jake's best stories, "Norris", was about a pig raised on an island like the one where Jake had his first houseboat in the Winnipeg River during the 1970s. "Becoming" was about a man morphing into a pickerel.

Jake's success was a genius for storytelling. "I like the idea of sitting on top of the water because it's like sitting on the subconscious and the fish below are stories and dreams. You go down there and try to bring them to the surface."

Jake will be lovingly remembered by his partner Petra Kaufmann and her children, Rory, Lily, Theo and Julia; his daughter Caitlin MacDonald and her husband Alex Nisbet. Also Wendy MacDonald, Dawne McCance, Sally & Bert Longstaffe, Danny & Deb MacDonald, Peter & Sherry MacDonald, Mary-Kate & John Harvie, and their children to whom he was very close.

Reviews

[Myles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A shout out to Kenneth Kidd for giving me a copy of this book of short stories for Christmas. Ken and his newspaper cronies regularly fish together. Some of them, including Kidd, have contributed to this book. I am not a fisherman. Never liked it. But I can appreciate what fishing means to the psyche in this intolerably fast and noisy modern life. Fishing ties to together man and nature, fathers with sons, grown men with their ideas of what it means to be a grown man, citizens with their country, and comedy with tragedy. I felt so many of these emotions stream through the pages of stories which included work from Americans Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane and well-known Canadians such as the David Adams Richards and Marni Jackson, a neighbour and family friend. Among the more personally painful stories for me to read was the memoir of editor Jake MacDonald of his fishing trips with the late Paul Quarrington, accomplished writer and folk musician. Quarrington and his family were customers of mine. Not surprisingly there are a lot of Scots in these pages and salmon fishing in the Miramichi Valley of northern New Brunswick. Richards' story Reflections From the Pools ties together sea, land and sky in a most poetic fashion. And time. And generations. I highly recommend these stories not only to sportsmen, but also to lovers of the wilderness, the folly of men, and the mystical pull of the competition between men and fish. (Since this review was written, my landlord and friend Ken Kidd passed away while on vacation in Africa. RIP. Our acquaintance was too brief.)

[Brent Arnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed all of the stories and it brought me back to many fising adventures.