On the occasion of California Fly Fisher’s twentieth anniversary year and in the spirit of the recent interview with the magazine’s editor and publisher (see the September/October 2012 issue), we’re focusing the spotlight here on Seth Norman. Seth, too, has been present since the creation — though not, as his Jehovah-like gray hair and beard might suggest, since the Creation — with his “Master of Meander” column occupying the space at the “back of the book.” In the glossy national fly-fishing publications, that space has been the domain defined by the work of the likes of Nick Lyons and John Gierach. Seth brings to California Fly Fisher’s humble newsprint pages a voice and a perspective as distinctive as theirs and as instantly recognizable as uniquely his own. Some people “need no introduction,” as the cliché goes, and some definitely do, but as you’ll see, there’s no simple way to wrap just a few reductive introductory sentences around Seth Norman.
Bud: I usually begin by trying to elicit some biographical background, but “The Master of Meander” can be read as a sort of twenty-year-long serial autobiography, with events discussed as they happened to you and flashbacks to earlier parts of your life. Most of us, however, also have a short-form, potted “official biography” that we tell others (and sometimes ourselves) when it’s necessary to say something about who we are and how we came to be that. For the benefit of new readers or older readers with porous memories, what’s yours?
Seth: My potted bios have always struck me as self-aggrandizing, confusing, and complicated — not so much “interesting” as “middling incoherent.” I’ve credits from six colleges and universities, for example, with a B.A. and teaching credentials for my trouble; I’d collected a score of addresses on three continents by my midtwenties, when I stopped counting; and today, I’m claimed by five kids, step or adopted and spawned, not to mention five grandlings, none of whom I see often enough — and a new one I’ve not yet met. (I know that makes me sound careless or too casual about family ties, but I believe the opposite’s true.)
My career’s equally awkward to describe. I discovered I’d be a writer at 17, writing in an English 101 class at Carnegie Mellon about a fishing camp where I worked — one of those “What did you do this summer?” exercises. Conveniently enough — I was restless — this epiphany obligated me to consider life a process of “gathering material” anywhere I could find it. That meant making a living any way I could, working odd jobs, from timber thinning to day labor and picking the tops of pear orchards on an Israeli kibbutz.
I started my first, still-unpublished book while bartending in Denver and finished the second draft while teaching English in Malaysia, shortly before I was charged with the Sharia crime of khalwat, “illegal proximity to a woman,” also sabotage, sedition, and five violations of the Internal Security Act.
That led to writing a second novel — sprawling, slightly mad, raucous, and still unpublished — penned in parts while editing college texts in Southern California, case-managing criminally charged mentally ill defendants in Berkeley, and attending a semester of law school at Chapel Hill. In fact, it was an irresistible invitation from a New York literary agent that instantly ended my legal studies. All for naught. Among other flaws, publishers found the book’s portrayal of militant Islam alarmist and unflattering. (It still is. Even today, you’ll rarely read anything about female genital mutilation in Southeast Asia.)
By the time those rejections set in, I’d been adopted by three kids, Marc, Eric, and Cathy Morales, and was pursuing three careers simultaneously: writing (I’d sold to magazines, including Field and Stream), leading restraint teams on a locked ward, and teaching, specializing in classes designed for mentally ill adults in hospital wards and day-treatment programs. I took on the odd project, as well, as marketing director for a Silicon Valley start-up.
In the early 1990s, I took a brutal turn at investigative journalism, leading to a Pulitzer Prize nomination and creating an angst that led indirectly to writing the “Meander” column for California Fly Fisher, fiction for Fly Rod & Reel, and features for Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Chicago Reader, and the Christian Science Monitor, also a humor column for California Angler. Somewhere in there I did radio voiceovers — “Corbett Canyon Winery, San Luis Obispo and Rincon, California,” published Meanderings of a Fly Fisherman and A Fly Fisher’s Guide to Northern California, working with a great bunch of real experts, and The Fly Fisher’s Guide to Crimes of Passion.I also started a small fly-fishing manufacturing company, MidStream, intended to provide a for-profit model for contracting with disabled workers. That company’s now 17 years old and still very much alive, located at the Cerebral Palsy Center for the Bay Area, making MidStream Rifflers (anglers’ entomology nets) and the Landing Hand (today aka the Teeny Landing Hand, by MidStream).
Lest I forget — hardly likely — I also mated, marrying Dr. Lisa Jungclas, a psychologist, but otherwise nice person — and producing the Sophia and Max people we still keep in our home water, downstairs, when possible. Since then, I’ve worked as PR and communications director for a pair of nonprofits and lately as a freelance editor.
Bud: My impression from your “Meanders” is that you used to fish with bait and your soul — you actually talk a lot about those in the “Meanders.” But what do you tend to edit out of both the “official biography” and the “Meanders”?
Seth: I’ve always left romantic relationships out of my non-fiction, “Meanders” included. I think most of my favorite essayists in the field do the same, however widely they roam; I believe most who tell all are divorced. Other than that . . . actually, in the “Meanders,” there’s not much that I need to leave out.
A great thing about so many fly-fishing editors and publishers — Richard Anderson is a prime example — is how much respect they have for readers’ intelligence and range of interests. It’s not all about Arbor Knots and dubbing ropes. That perspective allows so-called lyrical writers extraordinary latitude. I’ve knit the lives of mentally ill folks into a dozen “Meanders,” for example. Try to imagine some football journal including these. Of course, Richard keeps the balance. Many readers prefer how-tos and where-tos, and I think California Fly Fisher serves them admirably.
Bud: As you’ve frequently noted, it’s something of a wonder that an angling writer and gonzo angler emerged from what Arthur Conan Doyle called in A Study in Scarlet “an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization.” How does angling become an obsession for a kid raised in Arizona among the cacti? And how does writing become something that a fishing-obsessed kid also does?
Seth: Water and words: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed by both. Maybe the desert amplified both attractions. Water’s a treasure to desert rats, and even rain is exciting. As it happens, though, my New York grandfather first put me on a bank with a rod, at a pond in Central Park. Instantly — and I do mean instantly — I was convinced there was a magic world beneath this cocky cork bobber.
That sounds innocent, a little boy’s fascination. It wasn’t. To this day. I can’t explain what happened, although I tried again in a “Meander” last year, “Born to Fish,” relying on passages from writers who describe the same phenomenon. I strongly suspect that for some people, fishing taps something truly primitive, serves an instinct native to a species that needs to know, to fathom mystery or, failing that, to capture and connect to what’s unknowable. Others stare at stars and the moon, try to a fix moments of their world in paint or on stone, construct stories that explain a world that seems — and is — inexplicable to an animal with our limitations. I don’t mean to inflate the significance of an activity most folks find simply practical or, these days, mundane. But I have to believe that many of those reading this have curled their fingers around a fish, stared into its eye, and felt something beyond appreciation and amazement. Awe.
As to words . . . the desert of my memory seemed utterly disinterested in life, as much as I found there — and profoundly silent. My family was neither, however. Words filled the house; I really believed that bookcases held up our walls.
For much of my boyhood, a summer day meant hunting horny toads though forests of ocotillo, paloverde, and prickly pear, poaching bluegills from a golf course pond, a couple hours of baseball, then dinner enlivened by an argument about whether I could say we “won” the other team or “beat them”… all this followed by reading White Fang or Ivanhoe as late as I was allowed, or later.
Bud: “Mamas, don’t let you babies grow up to be English majors” never made it as a song lyric, but it does have a certain amount of currency as conventional wisdom. No one ever got rich writing for angling magazines, but you’ve parlayed an English major into a series of day jobs that seem interesting, to say the least. Let’s start with that Pulitzer Prize nomination for investigative journalism. What’s the background on that?
Seth: Along with my parents’ love of language, I inherited a profound appreciation of friendship and, from my father, a hatred of bullies, a hatred that turned pathological during my boyhood. So when Steve Gore, my closest friend and fishing partner of 15 years, went after a rogue police force, pursuing these SOBs at the risk of his life, I was worried and angry enough to beg him to let me write an exposé.
Steve was an investigator for the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office when he began an investigation of the Oakland Housing Authority Police. After his boss specifically forbade him to try to expose rampant criminal conduct and conspiracy — officers in uniform beating, robbing, and planting drugs on hundreds of people living in the projects — he went ahead anyway, first from within the office and later on his own as a private investigator.
Steve cultivated contacts with honest officers and dispatchers to construct in secret an overwhelming case against the department. For all that was worth: the chief of police was the architect of an operation in which officers split stolen cash and individually brokered the sales of jewelry, electronics, guns, and drugs. Even worse, the Public Defender’s and District Attorney’s Offices and members of the mainstream media had personal and political investments in the cover-up.
When the extent of that collaboration became clear, Steve set me loose. I was his cipher for six months, conducting interviews with courageous, but seriously paranoid sources who often brought weapons to clandestine meetings. Toward the end of the investigation, the DA’s Office “accidentally” snitched out some of these, prompting the dirty cops to take out street contracts to kill at least one, also to post on the bulletin board at police headquarters a list of others they intended to target.
We’re talking total corruption. I revealed this in a 15,000-word piece I wrote for the East Bay Express, in those days a high quality Bay Area independent weekly. The editor added an intro and his name, then dedicated the magazine’s issue to the story.
It just exploded. 60 Minutes picked it up. A call from the program’s producer forced federal indictments out of a grand jury that had spent six months sitting on videos of uniformed officers — men still on active duty — filmed robbing and beating undercover operatives during an FBI sting operation. Ultimately, a third of the OHA’s officers were charged — but not the police chief, a former FBI agent — and a quarter of the force went to federal prisons. I’d left the state by the time those indictments came down — on the urgent advice of a senior San Francisco Chronicle writer who’d tried and failed to break the story for years. For the next three weeks, I traveled, trying to fish my way out of the filth I’d left behind while grappling with a conviction that confronting corruption in a place like Oakland can be like trying to embroider oatmeal. I just could not get clean. And then, because we all live a few fairy tales in our lives, I hooked something that took me beyond exhaustion, also the limits of hope and expectation. The result was a sea change that diverted my writing from the mainstream, very soon into “Meanders,” and that later emerged in “6X Redemption,” the longest story of Meanderings.
For my reporting I received the Jane Harrah Memorial Award in Print Media and the Golden Medallion Award of Special Merit in Public Interest Journalism from the San Francisco and California State Bar Associations, respectively, also the nomination for a Pulitzer that prompted this torrent of explanation. However overlong, it still can’t conclude without an addition: During the following year, Steve Gore won the Skip Glenn Award from the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice for “outstanding contributions to criminal justice” — the first time they presented their highest annual honor to anyone not an attorney. He helped salvage the lives of exposed story sources while helping to work on a civil suit filed by OHA victims that the City of Oakland settled for millions. He spent the next decade working on some of the largest international criminal cases prosecuted in the United States. In the early 2000s, he became an author himself, first of the Graham Gage thrillers, more recently of the Harlan Donnally series. I recommend them highly — stories constructed by a player who’s lived real events often more dangerous and dramatic than any in his detective fiction.
Bud: My impression from your “Meanders” is that you used to fish with bait and conventional tackle. Fly fishing seems to have been your primary mode of angling over at least the last two decades, though. What drew you to fly fishing? Any thoughts on the relationship between this sport and the kind of writing you do? Seth:I first used flies at a kids’ fishing contest at Encanto Park in Phoenix when I was eight or nine — a pair tied up per some Outdoor Life instructions, awkwardly pitched with a Zebco 202 spin-cast outfit. I remember watching small bluegills and sunfish following this tiny bee pattern, though I wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t equally interested in the split shot. They were not convinced, so neither was I.
At 14 — a year before I’d ever seen a fly fisher at work — my parents gave me a Jorgenson glass rod, pot-metal reel, and a selection of Korean monstrosities that came in one those disk-shaped selector boxes. I tried one that actually looked like an insect, a mosquito pattern, at the very blue-collar resort I worked at that summer, Whitehorse Lake, outside of Williams, Arizona. I got enough line out to miss some rises, then whacked a bat with a false cast. It died the next day. For a week, my boss — a man with a wicked sense of humor — kept threatening to tell the local warden that I’d been “wing shooting with a fly rod.”
After that . . . I kept trying, between many, many much more serious bait-and-lure adventures. I’m not entirely sure why, except that while seining stock tanks for baitfishing and waterdogs to sell, I’d developed some dim sense that luring fish to the prey they ate — to representations of that prey you made yourself — signified some ultimate phase of my obsession: what bowhunting was to killing with a rifle. It seemed to require a deeper understanding of wild lives and a closer connection to their mystery. Not that I let this more aesthetic appreciation stop or even slow my conventional-tackle pursuits. I honestly didn’t believe I’d ever be skilled enough to master what seemed to me so complex. Certainly not when it came to fishing for trout: I spent my first long period of fly dedicated time in Colorado, working warm waters with streamers for crappies, bass, and little walleyes.
About a year later, in Berkeley, I found my first fishing mentor, the same Steve Gore who took on the Oakland Housing Authority. He didn’t fish flies often, but taught me how little I understood about reading and stalking water. When I moved to North Carolina for law school, his lessons prepared me for more effectively targeting with flies the same species I’d hunted outside Denver. Back in Berkeley a year later, again fishing with Steve, I was confident enough to fish flies more often, taking salmon and my first steelhead from the Feather.
Then . . .
It was really that flight after the police corruption story that changed everything. I was, as noted, trying to get clean, to purge from my mind this exposure to some of the bloodiest kinds of predators I’d ever encountered. Fly fishing really seemed part of that, providing a code of ethics, along with everything else. And slowly, it worked: I took trout on the Williamson and the Sprague, on half a dozen tiny streams and lakes in Washington, from a remote pond in the Cascades, and finally the “6X Redemption” fish.
Not long after, I would find fly fishers, the people.
I found them after I returned to Oakland and truly threw myself into the sport. I took some classes, then joined a club. I’m not saying I found myself accepted with open arms — believe me, this wasn’t my most approachable time of life. But here was this quiet cadre of passionate anglers who would endlessly debate odd points of honor, such as indicator fishing.
I didn’t find them absurd at all. Sure, I was still spending time dealing with the fallout from my encounter with filth, utterly jaded by almost everything. But come a Thursday night, I’m suddenly surrounded with guys and a few women who would patiently and generously explain basics I still needed to know, folks so different from too many I’d met lately as to seem an alien race. Civilization — that’s what it felt like I’d found, the kind I’d been raised to believe in. So it really does still exist. And eventually, I made friends who remain touchstones for me.
Why not write about them? Why not write about the sport I’d loved such a long time? When the editors who read my work welcomed the kinds of essays that introduced and often contrasted the coexisting worlds the readers and I lived in — who didn’t flinch from the bitter, or from sentiments that sometimes sounded a lot like celebration. . . .
And here’s a nexus: a large part of me is what I write — and what I’m writing right now. That’s always been true. I’m often inextricably engaged in my stories and subjects. So if I’m writing about something, that’s how I feel when I stand up, eat, sleep, stare off into the distance.
Enough already, I thought. Why not? That doesn’t mean I’ve avoided addressing ugly issues in the last twenty-odd years. But without exaggeration, spending so much time writing about fly fishing has provided saving grace.
As to how writing is like fly fishing?
That is another story.
Bud: You’ve also taught writing in circumstances that were somewhat different than usual. How did that come about, and what was it like?
Seth: I wrote, I taught; for 16 years, I taught reading and creative writing to adults with mental illness, along with other academic and vocational skills. I can’t tell you how gratifying I found this, though not for the reasons most folks presume.
Mental illnesses such as schizophrenia strike individuals across the range of intelligence and character, from gentle geniuses to stupid sociopaths. The act of writing — of seeing words on the page — helps many steer fragmented thoughts and inchoate ideas toward a more accessible reality. My students’ struggles to regain sanity were nothing short of heroic. They forced me to listen and read through apparent chaos, searching for sense and intent. When I did find meaning and could reflect this back . . . call those moments epiphanies shared at some level fundamental to human experience.
Bud: You’ve had other gigs that “put food on your family,” as it has been so felicitously phrased. What are you up to now?
Seth: The last decade has been uncomfortably eclectic. Some PR, communications and marketing for nonprofits, teaching at a tribal college, constructing how-tos and where-tos for a fishing website, also freelance editing of nonfishing materials, including The Undying Soul, a book by Steve Iacoboni, an oncologist friend, describing his journey from hard-core rationalist and former researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center to a physician convinced by his patients that the spirit lives on after death. I took Soul through the publishing process, navigating past an astonishing number of perils and predators, and now add a few a blogs to his Web site. After a long hiatus, I’m piecing together several books: another Meander, also a fiction collection, and a set of essays about kids that I’m getting a kick out of pulling together.
Along with that, I’ll continue to look for editing projects, including those unrelated to fishing. I enjoy a process that at its best incorporates elements of both teaching and writing — listening through, again — trying to help an author distill meaning for the readers that he or she hopes to reach. It’s been a great way to share some fine “Yeah!” moments.
Bud: Among the recurrent themes in the “Meanders” is a discussion of the vagaries, constraints, rewards, and insanities involved in writing for publication. I gather that some readers view this as engagingly “meta” and others as akin to too much information about how sausages are made. Why do we need to know about this stuff, and, briefly, what do we most need to know?
Seth: You know, I suspect that too much of what developed was my own narrow vision of an industry changing fast — this fragment of a history that already begins to feel ancient and maybe irrelevant. But my original motive was mainly to demystify the process of people putting themselves out in the literary world.
As a fishing writer, I think I followed as closely as I could on the heels and themes of Nick Lyons — the fly fisher’s Everyman, never an “expert,” always trying hard to fish better and live a little more wisely. Early in the “Meander” column, I started to construct “dialogues” with what I imagined as “a sympathetic mind.” At the same time, as a writing teacher, I want everyone to have at it, to add their knowledge and interesting selves into the conversation. While it’s true that most need to learn craft and hone skills — not so easy — a hopeful novice is more likely to make those commitments when he or she understands that publishing in this field doesn’t require crashing the gates of a Good Ole Boys’ Club. To this day, I get a rush from seeing bylines from new writers who were tentative or cynical when I first talked to them.
But in publishing now, the opportunities are more inclusive than anything I ever imagined. What moveable print did for readers, the Internet’s doing for writers. That said, I’m convinced that good magazines will survive, along with a few distinctive voices. Unless standards fall precipitously — and I suppose they may — some readers will still look for well written work that’s refined by editors who make it better and who never forget it’s the reader who’s most important.
Bud: Here we are at the dreaded Silly Tree Question. If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be?
Seth: I know it’s wrong — that they’re too thirsty, weak-rooted, and soft-wooded — but I’ve never lost my love of the giant cottonwoods I first found beside desert arroyos and later along trout streams. Add a carpet of leaves, a breeze, and deep blue shade: there’s no place I would rather sit for an hour. It wouldn’t be bad, I think, to provide that kind of sanctuary for another creature or two, and maybe sometimes an angler working the pool at my roots. Seth can be contacted at sethnorman4@gmail.com.
