Perhaps more so than any other sport, angling, and fly fishing in particular, has long relied upon the written word to instruct and inform, and it has also relied upon the written word as a way to evolve. We avidly read books and magazines and blog posts that teach us how to fish more successfully, that open our eyes to new opportunities and adventures, and when something new is learned, it in turn is passed along, usually through words on a page or a screen.
By improving our competence and by sparking our passion, good writing enhances the experience of angling. But communicating about fishing through writing is not necessarily as simple as one might think. Given the importance of this medium to us, I thought it might be interesting to get the perspective of a fly fisher deeply entwined in the activity of communication. This issue, we’re placing the spotlight on Bud Bynack, who, observant readers know, is the one usually conducting the interviews for this column. He is also a fine writer and by profession an editor, who, incidentally, has for years been instrumental in shaping the character of California Fly Fisher as both an enjoyable read and as a useful tool for fishing.
— Richard Anderson
Richard: You’ve mostly been lurking in the shadows around here, popping into print only now and then, so most folks probably don’t know much about you. Where are you from, when and how did you start fishing, and when did fly fishing become part of your life? And how did you end up editing angling writing?
Bud: I’m from Cooperstown, New York, a place whose spirit is wildly overdetermined by American historical myths: the “home” of baseball (it isn’t really, even though the Baseball Hall of Fame is there) and the setting for many of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (in which it is the landscape, depicted fairly realistically, and not Natty Bumppo, that is the real hero). There’s a lake there — Otsego Lake, which is also the origin of the Susquehanna River, which flows all the way to Chesapeake Bay. As a kid, I drowned worms and cast Daredevils from the docks of the local boatyard (it wasn’t remotely a “marina”) and sometimes in the river. It’s what kids do — or did in the 1950s — especially in what can still look to outsiders like an idyllic American small town.
But I am the child of Depression-era parents, and I was told early on to “get a good education,” and I did. I was the town’s smart poor kid in a place where there were basically two kinds of people — the local aristocracy, which included some old-money families who had estates that had grown out of summer homes, and everyone else. I worked my butt off in high school, and thanks to a scholarship provided by one of those old-money families, I went to Yale. There, I was what was known as a “grind” — I worked my butt off again — and did well enough to graduate with distinction in American Studies. Being pretty good at this education thing, I stayed at Yale and got a PhD in American Studies. That’s also where I met my wife, who was a grad student in English and then classical Chinese, but who also was working part-time in academic publishing, having started out opening the mail at Yale University Press. After knocking around in a few one-year academic jobs (the academic job market sucked, even in the mid-1970s), I was hired in a tenure-track position in the UC-Berkeley Rhetoric Department. That’s how I ended up in California.
There was no place in all of this for fishing, but when I was at Berkeley, my wife and I did a lot of backpacking in the Sierra and the Trinity Alps in order to preserve some modicum of sanity in what was a high-pressure job environment for both of us. (She eventually was tasked with building the humanities list at Stanford University Press.) The destination of those hikes almost always was a lake, so I started carrying an ultralight spinning rod and some Mepps spinners, and that’s how I returned to angling.
But fly fishing came later, and I’ve come later to the sport than most of the people I’ve interviewed and most of the people I know. I didn’t get tenure at Berkeley and was hired on “soft money” on a year-to-year basis at Portland State University, in Oregon. I initially continued to fish with spinning gear, but Oregon has a vibrant fly-fishing culture, and fly fishing always had attracted me — my parents had divorced when I was quite young, but my dad had been a fly fisher. So with an income-tax refund, I bought an entry-level rod and took some casting lessons, then set out to fish the Deschutes, which I still think of as my home river.
As I’ve written in pieces published in this mag, I read a lot of books and articles while climbing the fly-fishing learning curve, and there were times when I thought, “Ya know, for all the help these guys are to me, what with their having spent so much time in the river, they sometimes could use the help of someone like me, who was spending that same time in the library, getting a handle on nonfiction prose.”
There came a day, after three years in Portland, when a recession dried up the soft money, and I was faced with a choice. Where I really belonged was at a small liberal arts college, teaching small liberal artists, but that meant doing a nationwide job search and likely winding up somewhere far from my wife, who by then had an international reputation as an editor at Stanford. So I went home to her.
And while I was trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life, someone at Stanford Press said, “This rhetoric thing sounds a lot like what editors do,” and it was. So I in effect joined the family business, but as a freelancer, starting out copyediting academic books for Stanford and then for UC Press, where they eventually figured out that what I’m really good at is what’s called “developmental editing.” I heal sick books by a laying on of hands — not too roughly, but still. . . . And that’s what I do today — I take nonfiction prose that has problems and try to solve them.
A few years after I started editing, I was shuffling up and down the aisles of the San Mateo International Sportsmen’s Exposition and stopped by the California Fly Fisher booth. As I recall it, I said something like “I really like your magazine, but the copyediting could be better,” noting that that’s what I do. As I recall, your response was something on the order of “Eeurmph.”
Richard: That was the sound of the light bulb going on over my head, Bud. It’s hard finding people with editing skills who also have knowledge about fly fishing and fly tying. You got me thinking, and…
Bud: And next year, when I again passed your booth, you smiled and said, “Hey, aren’t you that copyeditor guy?” I was.
And as it turned out, for the magazine, I still am, with some developmental editing thrown in. From there, I also started editing angling books, not just for your foray into book publishing, Aguabonita Books, but for the late, lamented Greycliff Press run by Gary LaFontaine and Stan and Glenda Bradshaw. But mostly I still work as a freelancer on the kind of high-theory postmodern scholarly writing that gives you and most of your readers fits.
In the early 2000s, the corporatization of higher education was well underway — not a good thing — and the Stanford administration was one of the leaders of the effort. My wife helped organize resistance to it, and eventually, since they found it impossible to fire her, they declared that she had done such a good job that they were eliminating her position. She moved to Fordham University Press to build up its humanities list, and we moved to the suburbs of New York City. “I can still help edit the magazine,” I remember telling you, “but I won’t have any local knowledge.” “Dude,” you replied, “you don’t have any local knowledge now. You don’t fish enough.” Which, alas, was true. But then, nobody fishes “enough.”
Richard: So basically, you’ve spent over twenty-five years working in publishing. People have a lot of misconceptions about this aspect of the fly-fishing culture, right?
Bud: Yeah — as they do with how sausages and laws are made. Any book or magazine, including this one, is the work of many hands. What an author writes and what gets printed seldom are exactly the same thing, for starters. Every publication has a house style sheet that dictates a whole lot of ways of doing things, such as capitalization and punctuation, that most authors ignore — rightfully, because they’re concentrating on what they’re trying to say. Because I use it in my academic work, the style sheet I use for the mag, except for tweaks you want made, is the Chicago Manual of Style, which is the bible of academic copyeditors. At 1,026 pages long, it’s no mere “sheet,” and it still doesn’t cover every possible issue that comes up.
But beyond “mechanical” matters of style, and beyond doing basic copyediting, editors, fundamentally, are readers. In fact, their job is to stand in for the readership of the publication, starting with what writing they accept and what they reject. Once a piece has been accepted, that means trying to guarantee that what an author is trying to say is intelligible and entertaining to his or her audience, and every author, with the best of intentions and the greatest command of the language available to them, sooner or later writes something that goes kaflooey in those terms.
In other words, every author needs an editor — that includes me, as you know all too well — and for editors, that means intervening in a variety of ways in what an author has written, from making gentle suggestions to outright rewriting. I have a saying: editing is like dentistry, proctology, and gynecology — your hand goes places (intervening in someone’s words and thoughts) and does things where usually no one else’s hand is ever permitted to go. It’s important to give pain as little as possible and to strive to do no harm.
And there’s more, some of which is dictated by the medium. For most periodicals, the secret motto of all publications is “All the news that fits the print.” Sometimes, we have to edit to fit the available space. And for books, production costs increase with length. Some of the work is real drudgery — proofing, for example, or obtaining permissions for the use of other texts or artwork, in academic publications. Then, for books, there are designers who specify everything from the typeface and layout on the page to trim size, not to mention the cover art and layout. Most publishers these days outsource a lot of these functions, which once were done in-house, to freelancers who consequently lead a somewhat precarious financial existence. And of course, there are printers who actually turn all the edited files and design specifications into books or other publications. And there are marketers, even for scholarly books with print runs in the low three digits.
All these hands and more — the folks in the warehouse, for example — are on the same side: the side of the author. Their effort is to make the author look as good as humanly possible and to get the product of his or her labor into the hands of as many people as possible in the best form possible. There are times when some authors forget this, but most know and value how much the work of many hands goes into something that, in the end, has only the author’s name on it.
Both one of the selling points and one of the tragedies of self-publishing, which has become increasingly common in recent years, especially in angling writing, is that it allows authors either to avoid having their work pass through the hands of many of these professionals, especially editors, or to do part of it on the cheap. I increasingly review books that, however excellent the writing, are painful to read because of the lack of attention to all the things that publishers do, from basic copyediting, to language editing, to design and production.
Richard: That brings us to the place of books and magazines in fly fishing’s present media environment, from self-publishing and e-books to blogs.
Bud: Yes, but I think it depends on what kind of text we’re talking about. The area I know best is a very idiosyncratic one, scholarly publishing — that is, books written by scholars largely for other scholars, although many pant for a wider readership. However, in a sense, all areas of publishing are idiosyncratic. That is, based on the audiences involved, on the material, on the temporality of the material, from work whose influence can last a generation or beyond to ephemeral writing whose relevance is gone in a day, and on how audiences use that material, readers have gravitated toward many different kinds of media, and what’s appropriate for one is by no means appropriate for all. For upward of twenty years, it has been a dogma accepted by directors of university presses (and even by some scholars I know) that the paper-and-print book will soon be dead and that e-books are the wave of the future. But the physical book hasn’t died, because scholarly readers still want them. What they also want are e-books as supplements to them, because e-books are searchable and help them find passages they need to revisit or quote. This duplication actually is a burden, because contrary to the mythology, coding and maintaining e-books is not cheap. My wife once heard someone from Oxford University Press say that it costs them four times as much in staff time to do so as it costs for a traditional book.
For other kinds of texts — murder mysteries, say — folks have voted for e-books big time, and that makes sense. They tend to resemble consumable commodities, and many people don’t use them as anything else but commodities anyway. And the temporality of blogs — daily or occasional writing — both fits and tends to dictate their contents. That’s cool, too. As I said, for those of us who care about the books, it’s the hybrid nature of self-publishing that is problematic. Computers have democratized writing, which is a great and good thing, because a lot of really worthy things get published that way that may not otherwise have seen print, but they also have made it possible for writers to publish without the presence of those of us whom I only half-jokingly call the Language Police. Nobody likes to get involved with the cops — until they need one. But when they do, the positive function that such folks serve is clear. I’m an aging hippie leftist, but when it comes to language, I also see the value of the forces of law and order.
Magazines seem to occupy a different kind of hybrid space these days. Some of the sorts of things we publish also are the sorts of things that guides, for example, publish on their own blogs or Web pages — destination-specific information or techniques developed for specific situations. Such folks can publish things like that on their own, on-line, whenever and however they want. But publishing in physically “real” publications — for example, magazines, with folks like you evaluating material as gatekeepers, or book publishers with sales and audiences in mind — is increasingly an obligatory part of the business plan for anybody trying to make it in the fly-fishing business. “Everything Not Prohibited Is Compulsory,” reads an ironic poster that used to be for sale up and down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and that’s pretty much the case for would-be Lefty Krehs and Ed Engles these days. The imperative to write and publish puts many of them in a bind, because not everybody who has great angling skills and even great people skills has great writing skills. So maybe there is a role for folks like you and me in the Internet world yet.
Richard: You’ve been in New York since 2003. What’s the difference between West Coast and East Coast fly fishing?
Bud: Have you ever reflected that the reason that clichés are repeated is because they’re true? That’s pretty much the case with clichés about the differences between the fly-fishing cultures of the two coasts. The East Coast angling historian Mac Francis calls the Catskills, where I now fish, “the land of little rivers,” and compared with the Deschutes, the Sacramento, or the American, among others, that’s certainly apt. And even smaller streams tend to have considerably lower gradients than Western rivers and creeks. It is the rare “mountain” in New York that is over 3,500 feet high. Theodore Gordon is said to have adapted British dry-fly patterns to the “roiling” waters of the Catskills, but those waters roil only in comparison with the English chalk streams where the patterns originated.
Then there’s the attitude toward the past. I was about to say that it’s not true that you need to wear a tie, tweed coat, and knickers to fish in the same waters that Gordon fished, but I have friends who this year are proposing an outing in which everyone dresses in period costume and fishes only classic cane rods, silk lines, and classic flies. I publish the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild newsletter and as a consequence hang out with a lot of traditionalists, but even at the big Somerset iteration of The Fly Fishing Show, where the emphasis is on what’s new and what’s now, there’s a backward-looking component, and likewise, in angling writing, historical accounts such as those by my buddy Mike Valla, author of The Founding Flies, seem more prominent.
Finally, even with regard to anglers’ involvement with issues of conservation, there’s a difference in the nature of what I can only call “power.” I also publish the newsletter and serve on the board of the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers, an association of anglers “promoting stream and river protection and self-sustainable salmonid populations through conservation, environmental oversight, activism, catch-and-release practices, and education.” Among its founders and early members just over fifty years ago were Lee Wulff, the writer Ed Zern, Ernest Schweibert, Ted Rogowski, who as a young lawyer working for Ed Muskie in the 1970s wrote the Clean Water Act, Donal C. O’Brien, Jr., whose law firm represented the Rockefellers and who was a special assistant to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Arnold Gingrich, the founder an publisher of Esquire. Our members today still include lawyers, people of serious financial means, and other folks with traction in a city and state where that matters. (The fly tyers guild meets in a small room behind the bar in a restaurant in the Catskills; the TGF board meets at the Union League Club, just off Park Avenue, founded during the Civil War by the likes of Frederick Law Olmsted.) Conservation efforts tend to come from volunteer efforts on both coasts, but my sense of TGF, at least, is that the volunteers are more establishment and less populist in their origins than in California. That doesn’t mean we’re more effective, but it is a notable difference.
Richard: You’ve inflicted question this on all the people you’ve interviewed, so it’s only fair it comes back to you. If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be?
Bud: Arrgh! I was afraid of that. I thought of bamboo, because I wrote a piece for the magazine in which I praised the concept of the rhizome. “The thing about rhizomes is that they can grow in different and sometimes opposite directions and still remain rooted,” I wrote then. And bamboo spreads by rhizomes. I could end up as a cane rod!
But bamboo is technically a grass, and this question is about trees. The closest I can come to the same thing is the redwood. Not because of its size, or its longevity, but because they endure, and they do so via a strategy much like the rhizome. “New sprouts may come directly from a stump or downed tree’s root system as a clone. Basal burls — hard, knotty growths that form from dormant seedlings on a living tree — can sprout a new tree when the main trunk is damaged by fire, cutting, or toppling,” is how the National Forest service puts it. I hope I can endure like that.
