Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Body of Water
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE:
CITY: Missoula
STATE: MT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/chris-dombrowski * https://milkweed.org/author/chris-dombrowski * https://www.outsideonline.com/1914476/fly-fishing-poet * https://geosireads.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/interview-with-writer-fly-fishing-guide-chris-dombrowski/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2008054751
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2008054751
HEADING: Dombrowski, Chris, 1976-
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PERSONAL
Born 1976, in MI.
EDUCATION:University of Montana, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
Interlochen Center for the Arts, Interlochen, MI, writer-in-residence; University of Montana, Missoula, MT, Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer; Beargrass Writing Retreat, Greenough, MT, founding director; 406 Writers’ Workshop, Missoula, MT, director; fly-fishing tutor; river escort.
AWARDS:National Poetry Prize, Alligator Juniper; Intro Award, Associated Writing Programs.
WRITINGS
Author of chapbooks, including September Miniatures with Blood and Mars and Fragments with Dusk in Them.
Also contributor to periodicals, including Gray’s Sporting Journal, Poetry, The Sun, New Letters, Outside, Michigan Quarterly Review, Orion, Crazyhorse, Angler’s Journal, and Gulf Coast. Contributor to books, including Making Poems and Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry.
SIDELIGHTS
Prior to starting his career, Chris Dombrowski attended the University of Montana, where he obtained a master’s degree. He works predominantly as a prose and poetry writer, having published work in numerous periodicals, including Gray’s Sporting Journal, Poetry, The Sun, New Letters, and more. Additionally, he has released chapbooks of his poetry, including September Minatures with Blood and Mars and Fragments with Dusk in Them. Other poems Dombrowski has written have been featured in Making Poems and Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry. Dombrowski’s work has also garnered him several accolades, such as a special mention for the Pushcart Prize and an Intro Award from Associated Writing Programs. Alongside his writing work, Dombrowski also teaches in several fields. In his home city of Missoula, Montana, he instructs in the sport of fly-fishing and helps others navigate the area’s rivers. He also leads writing workshops for the Beargrass Writing Retreat and 406 Writers’ Workshop, and was affiliated with the Interlochen Center for the Arts and University of Montana as their writer-in-residence and Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer, respectively. While Dombrowski has predominantly published books of poetry, such as Earth Again: Poems and By Cold Water: Poems, he has also delved into creative non-fiction.
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish is Dombrowski’s first nonfiction book. It concentrates on Dombrowski’s personal pastime: fly-fishing. More specifically, it deals with the subject of catching bonefish, one breed of fish that is immensely popular within the fly-fishing subculture. The book also forms a narrative that closely relates this pastime, and this fish, to a particular set of events within Dombrowski’s life. Body of Water starts with Dombrowski preparing to take a fly-fishing vacation during one of the most hectic periods of his life. He and his wife are due to expand their family within the coming months, yet are barely making it by financially. Dombrowski finds himself feeling unsettled with these new developments. With so much pressure bearing down on him, Dombrowski views his vacation—a trip out to the Bahamas—as a much-welcomed way to clear his head in the environment he loves. Along the way, this “getaway” morphs into a more transformative experience for Dombrowski, who encounters several unique experiences throughout his trip.
During his time on the Bahama Islands, Dombrowski meets and befriends David Pinder, a fellow seaman who specializes in helping fly-fishers catch the ever-popular bonefish. However, while he once enjoyed a lucrative career, he has since lost his fortune. An unfortunate twist of fate has stolen his sight, leaving him unable to perform the career that once brought him acclaim. He is relegated to menial work around the resort Dombrowski stays in, his well being and finances dwindled and unsalvageable. In recounting his meeting of Pinder, Dombrowski delves into the history of fly-fishing and its relationship with the bonefish, as well as how David helped to bolster the bonefish’s popularity within the fly-fishing world. Dombrowski soon learns just how hard the bonefish is to find, and how the industry has made it so. He recounts the ecological abuse reaped by the higher-ups of the bonefishing business—which Pinder abetted through his own work as a guide. Dombrowski draws up a sense of irony through this fact, as Pinder once was a part of the destruction of the natural landscape and now has been displaced from that world.
Through his attempts to catch a bonefish, Dombrowski also comes to a deeper understanding about himself and the world around him. He peppers in descriptions of the Bahama Islands and the oceanscape, and further details his special bond with fly-fishing and what it means to him. Dombrowski strains to catch a bonefish throughout the narrative, being constantly eluded thanks to its natural abilities to defend itself. In the meantime, he nurtures an interest in Pinder and his story, and spends much of the book trying to get to know and understand him better. Pinder also proves that he hasn’t lost his own talent and fondness for fly-fishing by demonstrating to Dombrowski just what he can do when given the chance to wield a lure and rod. Dombrowski and Pinder’s own individual narratives come to intertwine, along with the history of the pastime they both love. “Have no doubt–fishing literature has a new star,” wrote Colleen Mondor in an issue of Booklist. One Publishers Weekly Contributor remarked that “Dombrowski’s foray into nonfiction proves as thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming as his poetry.” Los Angeles Review writer B.J. Hollars initially commented that the writing in Body of Water “torques and twists and glistens into view much like the bonefish itself.” He later added: “Yet Dombrowski’s writing also echoes the sea: powerful, unrelenting, and controlled.” A writer from the Bonefish on the Brain Web site called Body of Water “well researched, unflinchingly honest and beautifully written.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Colleen Mondor, review of Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish, p. 20.
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of Body of Water, p. 198.
ONLINE
Bonefish on the Brain, http://bonefishonthebrain.com/ (December 23, 2016), review of Body of Water.
Geosi Reads, https://geosireads.wordpress.com/ (September 8, 2016), Geosi Gyasi, “Interview with Writer & Fly-fishing Guide, Chris Dombrowski.”
Los Angeles Review, http://losangelesreview.org/ (May 15, 2017), B.J. Hollars, review of Body of Water.
Milkweed Editions, https://milkweed.org/ (May 15, 2017), author profile.
Orion Magazine, https://orionmagazine.org/ (May 15, 2017), author profile.
Outside Online, https://www.outsideonline.com/ (March 12, 2013), Jonah Ogles, “The Fly Fishing Poet,” author interview.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (May 15, 2017), author profile.*
Chris Dombrowski is the author of Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish. He is also the author of two collections of poems, By Cold Water, a Poetry Foundation Bestseller in 2009, and Earth Again, which was named runner-up for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year in Poetry. His poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in leading journals and magazines, including Poetry, The Sun, Orion, and Angler’s Journal. Born in Michigan, Dombrowski earned his MFA from the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide, director of the 406 Writers’ Workshop and the Beargrass Writing Retreat, and the Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana.
Dombrowski’s second work of nonfiction, tentatively titled The Nature of Wonder, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.
Born in Michigan, Chris Dombrowski earned his MFA from the University of Montana. His publications include the chapbooks, Fragments with Dusk in Them (2008), September Miniatures with Blood and Mars (2012), and the collections By Cold Water (2009) and Earth Again (2013). He is also the author of the nonfiction collection, Body of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2016).
In a 2007 interview Dombrowski said that “finding the right form for the poem, I think, is why we write poetry.” Citing his early reading of Norman McLean’s novella A River Runs Through It as a formative influence on his decision to pursue writing, Dombrowski, who also works as a river guide, crafts meditative, free-verse poems that are deeply engaged with the natural world.
His honors include the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, Alligator Juniper’s National Poetry Prize, and a runner-up (Earth Again) for Foreword Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and have been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (2006), Making Poems (2012), and others. Both of his full-length volumes have garnered praise from reviewers. Writing on By Cold Water for Neo, critic Richard Simpson noted that Dombrowski composes “from a loose, ancient, explosive formula: poem = dream = vision = prophecy = myth …. (and) suggests that if anything can save a broken world it may be visionary song.” In Orion, Joe Wilkins lauded the “risky and courageous” poems in Earth Again for their ability “to wrestle with the most nonsensical, most horrifying … of events,” calling the work “beautiful and harrowing … a holy book.”
Dombrowski has taught at the University of Montana and the Interlochen Center for the Arts, where he was a writer-in-residence. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
Interview with Writer & Fly-fishing Guide, Chris Dombrowski
Photo: Chris Dombrowski
Photo: Chris Dombrowski
Brief Biography:
Chris Dombrowski is the author of Body of Water, forthcoming nonfiction from Milkweed Editions, and two full-length collections of poetry, most recently Earth Again, published in 2013 by Wayne State University Press and named runner-up for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year in Poetry, in addition to two chapbooks. His first book, By Cold Water, was a Poetry Foundation Bestseller in 2009. Dombrowski’s poems have appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including Poetry, New Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse, and his prose has been published in Orion, Outside, The Sun, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and many others. Other awards include the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, two Best American Notable Essay citations, a National Magazine Award Nomination, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. He has taught at the University of Montana, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and currently serves as the Founding Director of the Beargrass Writing Retreat based in Missoula, where he lives with his family and has worked for nearly two decades as a fishing guide.
Geosi Gyasi: How young were you when you started writing?
Chris Dombrowski: I was probably 6 when I started writing songs, mostly about scary characters at the apartment complex bus-stop, but occasionally about the moon. When I reached high school, a seminal teacher named Jim Colando ignited my interest in poetry, often via songwriters.
Geosi Gyasi: Which specific genre of writing did you start out as a writer?
Chris Dombrowski: In high school, there were a lot of early “poetic efforts,” but I’m not sure there were many poems–they were shaped like poems, at least! Perhaps if I dug deep enough, I could find a single redeeming line. I also recall an early essay in college, a narrative about watching a huge cottonwood snap and fall across the river on a windy day. Among other comments, Professor Mezeske wrote the following, which I cherished: “A very nice, moody piece. ++”
Geosi Gyasi: In your view, what’s the difference between a writer and poet?
Chris Dombrowski: Here are a few lines by a poet I adore, Alicia Ostriker, from the close of a recent poem, “The Liberal Arts”:
“In the novel they say omit nothing, harvest the entire goddamn world
In memoir they say the self is silently weeping, give it a tissue
In poetry they say the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned
by miracle”
Perhaps a poet is anyone who writes, in any genre, and allows “the arrow” to be “blown off course” and awaits its return.
Geosi Gyasi: Can you tell me something about your non-fiction book, ‘Body of Water’?
Chris Dombrowski: Yes! BODY OF WATER is forthcoming in October from Milkweed Editions. It’s a work of long-form nonfiction that centers around the elemental life of David Pinder Sr., the first Bahamian bonefish guide, who knew the ways of the largely inedible sportfish-to be decades before it became the industry upon which the Bahamian Ministry of Tourism bases its faith (to the tune of $150 million per year!). Several years ago, I had the rare fortune of meeting “Senior,” as the folks near the East End of Grand Bahama call him, and our friendship inspired the composition of the book, which also focalizes my own life as a guide, and water’s very lasting ambit and impression.
Here’s a link to the publisher’s description: http://milkweed.org/shop/product/416/body-of-water/
Geosi Gyasi: Which writers of the past do you most admire?
Chris Dombrowski: Keats, Basho, Issa, Dickinson, Teresa of Avila. Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Levis. I refuse to call Jim Harrison a writer of the past because he just left us, but I’ve found great sustenance there.
Geosi Gyasi: What is it all about your life as a fly-fishing guide?
Chris Dombrowski: For nearly two decades I’ve earned at least a portion of my income rowing the rivers of western Montana. The occupation, which has occasionally flirted with being a “vocation,” has afforded me the opportunity to work seasonally, setting aside large chunks of time for writing; kept me in wild places for much of each year; allowed me to spend much of my work-time with good, feral friends, some of which are rivers.
Geosi Gyasi: What time of the day do you write?
Chris Dombrowski: I prefer the morning, starting early before house bustles with its often pleasant distractions; I like working after lunch, after a walk with the dog and an espresso or a cup of strong green tea; I even like mornings after late-night dinner parties, where perhaps I had too much to drink, for editing with an unforgiving eye.
More and more I find value in practicing like a fish in a stream, trying to identify peak-activity periods, the way a trout would during a hatch of mayflies, and attempting to block out all else during said time.
Geosi Gyasi: By what medium do you write?
Chris Dombrowski: For a long time I preferred a roller-ball ink pen on legal pad, but the further I delve long-form non-fiction, the more I find myself typing straight into the computer. When editing, I like a clean printed draft under a good light, and a blue pen with which to attack!
Geosi Gyasi: Do you think about prizes and awards when you write?
Chris Dombrowski: No, but I’ll admit to thinking about money when I’m at work on freelance pieces.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you read as much as you write?
Chris Dombrowski: When I’m reading, I binge; when I’m writing I read only to fuel what I’m working on, and usually just in bits because I’m very easily influenced by prose styles and aspects of mind. I find I can read poetry, though, most anytime.
Geosi Gyasi: How do ideas for poems come to you?
Chris Dombrowski: “Poems are made not of ideas,” the French poet told the inquiring French painter, “but of words.” Most often poems arrive as sound or image. If the latter, the challenge for me comes in giving audible life to the image; if the former, the task lies in finding an imagistic residence for this sound. Sometimes, too, to complicate things, the sound is an inner one–Robert Lowell talks about this in the Paris Review interview–that arrives wanting a shape or form. The groan, the cry, the exultant yelp. Ad infinitum.
END.
The Fly Fishing Poet
When he isn't guiding world-renowned photographers, psychologists, and Hollywood acting coaches, Chris Dombrowski is writing. We caught up with him on the occasion of his new book.
By: Jonah Ogles Mar 12, 2013
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Dombrowski. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Dombrowski
Earth Again.
Which Chris Dombrowski you know depends on whether you spend more time fishing or reading. Those that fish will know him as one of Montana’s finest guides—his clients include David James Duncan and Jim Harrison. But the one thing he does better than read a river is write poems. Jonah Ogles reached him in Michigan, where he spends the academic year teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, to catch up, talk about his new book, Earth Again, steelhead, and how A River Runs Through It made him want to be a writer.
A lot of writers are drawn to fly fishing. Why do you think that is?
I’m not sure exactly. I wasn’t ever a writer who started fishing. Pretty early on, I think after reading Zane Grey, I determined that I wanted to be a writer who fished and not a fisherman who wrote about fishing. But it is a noticeable thing. I don’t think you would say, So many writers play an instrument, even though there are presumably as many writers who play an instrument as there are writers that fish. I think it’s because of attention on the physical world. I think that the act of writing can be an entrance into a wilderness in the same way that a canyon can be. I think we’d all agree that when fishing we’re not the same person we are when we’re mowing the lawn or paying the bills. Yeats said as much when he sat down to write. He wasn’t the same person who made oats and bitched about the morning news.
I think there’s a patience that both things teach you.
I’ve thought about fishing a lot as a metaphor for the act of writing. Any angler who’s ever spent a good amount of time on the water has struck those kind of magical golden moments, when suddenly the river comes alive. You’re fishing the same pool you’ve fished 15 times and suddenly there are trout rising everywhere in it in a way you’ve never imagined before. I think a similar sensation can occur for the writer, too—when language is coming alive and bristling and sparking. And a lot of it has to do with putting oneself in the stream over and over again.
It’s funny to me how the natural world inspires that. You talk to a hunter or a climber about poetry and their eyes glaze over. You talk to them about their last elk or climb, and they become poets.
With the hunter instinct comes a need to tell stories of the hunt.
When was the moment that you realized you had that need to tell stories?
I recently wrote an essay about my high school English teacher. He was a fascinating man named Jim Colando. He basically rescued me from being a jock for the rest of my life. I was really involved in sports all through college. He knew that I had just started fly fishing, maybe a year or so before. And he came into class and he handed me A River Runs Through It and said, I think you may like this book. By the time class was over I was on page 20, by the time school got over it I was on page 50. It was the first book I read cover to cover that wasn’t required for class. In that experience came the realization that my experiences in the physical world could be completely re-enacted in language. That was a magical experience. And with it came also a kind of charge. Suddenly it’s not just enough to exist in the physical world, I have to find a way to reconstruct the experience in language. Or re-live experiences, which is what writing is. It’s a second life.
When you get that need to get outside of yourself, does either activity fill the need? Or do you get a specific urge to write or fish?
When I’m writing a lot, I feel like I need to fish or walk the dogs or hunt to get out of my head. If I’m not writing, I feel the opposite way, like I need to get back to the desk and spend some hours hunched over it. But I never feel like a day spent away from writing—be it with a fly-rod or a shotgun or with the kids hunting morels—I never feel like that is wasted. There’s a pile of steelhead at the mouth of the Platte right now. I know it. I know it wouldn’t hurt me to spend a morning doing that, but I’ve been working on some stuff at the desk and I don’t want to leave it alone.
Your summers out in Montana, that guide schedule must be crazy. You have to be up really early or really late depending on conditions or the client. How do you balance your writing time with that kind of schedule?
Well, a lot of it happens on the backs of receipts or in a little notebook I keep in the car. I just don’t get a ton of writing done from the end of May through the end of August. So then September rolls around and I feel this immense pressure of all the images or the things I’ve jotted down over the months, and I’m going to explode if I can’t sit down and start doing some writing. Norman MacLean called it a recipe for schizophrenia, going back and forth between teaching and his home in Montana. But it’s become more and more part of the rhythm of my life. You know, just about the time. This is going to make it sound too perfect, because usually I could use a little more outdoor and a little less teaching time. But just about the time I’m ready to be done with teaching, fishing season rolls around. And just about the time I’m ready to be done fishing, it’s time for school.
You’re a teacher and now you have kids, who pop up throughout the book. I kept wondering how you were teaching them to either love language or love the outdoors.
I don’t think I’ve taught them anything. I think they’ve taught me. Kids exist in a natural state of wonder. There are certain things I can teach, like why, before a pale morning dun emerges, a soft hackle swung through the water does really well. But really I try to learn from them.
Does the guiding ever get old?
I’m in my 17th year guiding, and 70 percent of my clients are return customers. So 60 days of my summer are spent with my friends. They’re interesting. I have a Jungian psychologist who's a regular client, a Hollywood acting coach, a world-renowned photographer. A British timber baron. I keep saying that if I didn't have to gas up the car, clean the boat, or get lunch together every day, I'd never stop. If I had a roadie, I'd guide forever.
Chris Dombrowski and is poet and writer who lives in Missoula, Montana. His publications include chapbooks, Fragments with Dusk in Them, September Minatures with Blood and Mars, collections, By Cold Water, Earth Again, and his first nonfiction book Body of Water published by Milkweed Editions. His honors include the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, Alligator Juniper’s National Poetry Prize, and a runner-up (Earth Again) for Foreword Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and have been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (2006),Making Poems (2012), and others.
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most
Alluring Fish
Colleen Mondor
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish. By Chris Dombrowski. Oct. 2016. 215p. Milkweed, $24
(97815713135221. 639.2.
Fly-fishing guide and poet Dombrowski's delightfully elegant book about bone fishing in the Bahamas hits all the right points in content and
language. His narrative includes gorgeous descriptions of the landscape, the fish, and the work of the legendary guide, David Pinder. In heartfelt
passages, Dombrowski writes of his own deep love for the rod and reel and his quest to build a relationship with Pinder, a reticent and selfassured
man who is credited with knowing more about the fish than anyone alive. In waters frequented by literary greats like Ernest Hemingway
and Zane Grey, Dombrowski is in heady company tackling this subject, but he proves himself more than up to the challenge, effectively not only
conveying his passion for the sport but also giving readers a peek into the area's history and Pinder s place within it. This is the stuff of men and
boats and saltwater and meditations on what it means to take to the sea in search of one great catch. Have no doubt--fishing literature has a new
star.--Colleen Mondor
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mondor, Colleen. "Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 20. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463754982&it=r&asid=e71b21b8f69a91df4bf27395ed2efa9b. Accessed 12 May
2017.
5/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A463754982
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Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most
Alluring Fish
Publishers Weekly.
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p198.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish
Chris Dombrowski. Milkweed (PGW, dist.), $24 (232p) ISBN 978-1-57131-352-2
Dombrowski (Earth Again), a poet and fly-fishing guide, pays a lyrical, genre-defying tribute to the angling legend largely responsible for
popularizing the cultish sport of bonefishing: David Pinder Sr., "the head guide and cornerstone of one of the world's most fabled sporting
lodges." In the throes of depression and financial hardship, Dombrowski accepts a friend's invitation for an all-inclusive fishing expedition to
Grand Bahama Island. He has little idea just how revelatory his journey will prove. Encountering local fishermen and stunning seascapes, as well
as embarking on quests for the elusive bonefish--whose lightning speed and uncanny talent for camouflage have earned it the nickname "gray
ghost"--Dombrowski gleans many lessons about ecology, economy, and the relationship between the two. Some are cautionary: decades of fishing
have severely damaged Pinder's eyesight, for example, and commercial overdevelopment has led to grave habitat loss for the bonefish and other
local species. Yet there is also much to celebrate, including Pinder's virtuosity with a fly rod and the "philosophical foundation" a life of fishing
can provide. Drawing on Caribbean history and the evolution of fly-fishing, and interweaving Pinder's miraculous memories with his own
redemptive story, Dombrowski's foray into nonfiction proves as thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming as his poetry.
(Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 198. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287556&it=r&asid=96a12edbc4f491e5535a32d9bcaf1ccf. Accessed 12 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287556
BOOK REVIEW: BODY OF WATER BY CHRIS DOMBROWSKI
url
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish
Nonfiction by Chris Dombrowski
Milkweed Editions, October 2016
$24.00; 215 pp
ISBN: 978-1-57131-352-2
Reviewed by B.J. Hollars
When sidled up at a bar listening to a fish story, more often than not, the listener learns more about the fisherman than the fish. Which is certainly true of Chris Dombrowski’s debut nonfiction work, which employs the subject of bonefish—a shallow-living creature known for their bursts of speed—as an entry point into a much larger story, one that includes Dombrowski himself.
After a dozen years serving as a fly-fishing guide, Dombrowski—a husband, father, and poet—receives a much-needed all-expenses paid trip to Grand Bahama Island to partake in a bonefishing expedition. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Cash-strapped, anxiety-ridden, and with a second child on the way, Dombrowski’s good fortune seems the perfect salve for his struggles. Rather than rely on more conventional means of support, Dombrowski notes that he “trusted only water’s treatments.” It’s the water that will save him, he believes, though as he soon learns, bonefishing is no relaxing cast into a neighborhood duck pond. Instead, it’s an intricate procedure with little room for error, the fish itself having achieved “sport fish-royalty status due largely to its fickle manner and unsurpassed acceleration.” It is a ghost creature, and one “built for departure.”
Yet bonefishing is only one strand of Dombrowski’s wider story, the disturbance that allows his tale to ripple outward. Soon, the book veers toward the human side of things; notably, David Pinder, a “shore-foraging boy turned rock lugger” who, over several decades, rose to become “the head guide and cornerstone of one of the world’s most fabled sporting lodges.” He’s the man credited with building the Bahamas’ bonefishing industry, which today brings in over a billion dollars each year. Pinder, who spent most of his life exploiting the fish that made him famous, was himself exploited by the industry he helped to create. Over the years his money has dried up, as has his health. When a cyst the size of a “salad plate” is discovered in Pinder’s skull, surgery saves him, but cataracts leave him all but blind. Suddenly the man who was famous for spotting bonefish in the deep can no longer see what’s directly in front of him. In some ways it seems an updated version of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a cautionary tale, though this time, even more pointedly focused on the exploitation of the environment.
But rarely do cautionary tales dazzle like this. It’s a credit to Dombrowski’s prose, which torques and twists and glistens into view much like the bonefish itself. One can’t help but hear echoes of Dombrowski’s teacher and friend, James Galvin, whose prose is often rooted in the earth. Yet Dombrowski’s writing also echoes the sea: powerful, unrelenting, and controlled. “If there is a greater pleasure in angling than stalking bonefish barefoot across an urchin-less sand flat, I have not encountered it,” he writes. Readers can’t help but marvel at the sentence, which so skillfully delays its subject until the crescendo of the final clause. Though Dombrowski regularly frontloads his sentences with images, in other instances he tries another tact, such as when he describes an encounter with his prey: “Dithering, the fish stares squarely at the fly, but before the man can play puppeteer again, it pivots its body to inhale.” This time, it’s the accumulation of clauses that reels us in, one reel after another until we’re gloriously hooked.
It’s true: few readers dream about curling up with a book about bonefish. But that’s not what this book is about. This is a book about seeking that which we cannot see, of understanding a place and its people not nearly as foreign as we might imagine. It’s a book about what connects us, and a book about disconnection, too. Though most importantly, it’s a meditation, not only on the ebb and flow of our lives, but on the lives with which we share this planet.
By book’s end, Dombrowksi leaves readers with many lessons, though this one most of all: whether on a skiff or in a book, the guide matters. And Dombrowski’s the one you want.
What to read: Body of Water by Chris Dombrowski
As I was flying back to the Bay Area from New Orleans I finished “Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish” by Chris Dombrowski.
This is the best book about bonefishing I’ve read to date. It isn’t a how-to or a where-are-they kind of book. It is a work of “creative nonfiction,” as the author calls it, and it speaks to so much that is at the heart of bonefishing I doubt I’ll do it justice in the description.
The book centers on David Pinder, guide extraordinaire of Deep Water Cay fame. The book, in language I wish I possessed, takes us through the early days of DWC and the role David Pinder played in the creating of what we know of as bonefishing and his legacy. There is just too much in this book you should read for yourself I don’t want to take anything from that experience.
I’ll say this about the book. It is well researched, unflinchingly honest and beautifully written.
I caught my first bonefish in DWC’s backyard. I’ve fished a half-day out of the lodge itself and have driven out to Mclean’s Town many times and after reading this book I know I didn’t know anything about the ground I was walking on.
In action in Grand Bahama in David Pinder’s back yard.
I don’t know what else to say. I can’t MAKE you read the book, but if you love bonefishing and have ever been out with a guide in the Bahamas, or maybe anywhere, you really should.