Catch & Release

Some of my best friends are fly fisherman (Two happen to be Jewish, but that's inconsequential). One, dead for decades now, was an ungainly guy -- big bellied with gangly arms and legs, and eyes that fixed you sure but seemed to come from two different directions. However, put a fly rod in his hand and he became pure grace. The line he looped backwards and then slipped forward was balletic, elegant, breathtaking, even gentle. His ability to place the fly exactly where the fish would take it was a joy to watch. I say "watch" because I am not a fisherman. I don't like fish so see no point in catching them. My friends practice "catch and release" -- catch them; let them go -- but again I see no point in causing a creature panic just for the fun of it. It doesn't know it's going to be let go. It thinks it's going to die. However, as I was staring into the creek that flows in front of my house it occurred to me that I do practice catch and release, only in my own way.

Robert Frost said that a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of anger, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with. When I walk my woods and stare at rushing water I have no words either. I listen to all the birds singing with no goal to capture them on a list. I don't care what they're called. I just want to listen. I have no thoughts but I do have a lump in my throat. I do have yearnings. My job (if one can call what I do a job) is to capture these feelings by putting words to them, to craft them and allow them to float free of me, to bring them to the attention of someone else, to share them. In this way I keep my thoughts from dying with me. I don't believe in any mystical after life experience. I believe the here and now is all I've got. Except for the words I choose. If I choose them properly they will live on beyond me. I catch my feelings, distill them, and craft a spell that sends them on their way, to you, I hope. When I write a book or a screenplay external factors, lots of them, are involved. But these blogs are written for the pure pleasure of writing them, for the freedom I felt as a little boy rolling down a grassy hill and smelling spring onions as I mashed them on the way. Of course, having spent my life as a professional writer I do believe in an audience out there somewhere. I don't believe writers who profess not to care what other people think of their work. Of course, I care, but these blogs are not written for the same reason as the work for which I sometimes get paid. They begin as a lump in the throat, not a pitch, not a log line, not a query letter. For me they begin as something deep and mysterious. They come from somewhere and must mean something, but I don't know what until I catch them, process them, and let them go. The mystery, however, never goes. I continue to believe in the deep and mysterious, but only in all too rare moments do I catch a whiff of what it is. Only then.