Fishing No Good WIthout You An Autobiographical Novel eBook Charles Kerlin Scott Kerlin
Download As PDF : Fishing No Good WIthout You An Autobiographical Novel eBook Charles Kerlin Scott Kerlin 
It’s About More Than Fishing…
Here's a brief description of what the novel is all about and a poem from the back cover
Fishing’s No Good Without You, my 74,000 word autobiographical novel is about the difficulties of passing down legacies from one generation to the next within a family torn apart by divorce. It begins with a father breaking his promise to his ten year old son to continue fishing with him after a divorce. The following chapters show how other men and women who love him and are mostly fishermen, fill the gaps left in Curly’s life. Curly discovers his mentors have taught him more than how to fish they’ve taught him how to how to love. He is able to reconcile with his father and later he mentors his own son on fishing trips they take together in Canada.
Its second major theme shows how nature shapes our lives even though climate change and negligence are starting to destroy those wild places where we can still get in touch with it.
Like Norman Maclean’s book, A River Runs Through It, mine is an elegy celebrating men and women, mostly fishermen, who help boys grow up. If you are concerned about passing on your family’s legacy you will love my book. If you are disturbed by climate change and neglect you will love my book. If you are bothered by our consumer-obsessed society, which doesn’t allow us time to think and reflect, and maybe go fishing, you will love my book as well. Fishermen will especially appreciate it, of course, but so will their wives and girlfriends who put up with them and their gadgets, obsessions, and endless stories of the ones that didn’t get away.
I'm a professor of creative writing and American literature at Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana, with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. I was in the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate program for two summers. I've published a half dozen stories in The Hopewell Review, The Flying Island, and From the Edge of the Prairie. I won the Hopewell prize for best fiction judged by Alan Cheusse, book editor for NPR.
It’s Not Too Late
We used to take our kids to lakes,
And streams and woods.
Now, we take them to Disneyland,
And to McDonalds for a Happy Meal.
Round them up
Give them an old tacklebox,
And a fiberglass pole
And an old plug or two
You don’t use anymore,
Then say “fish on”
When they catch their own dinner.
It’s not too late.
Come with me.
It’s really not too late
Fishing No Good WIthout You An Autobiographical Novel eBook Charles Kerlin Scott Kerlin
This is the story of a life well-lived both on the water and off. The fishing itself is important--whether the fish are practically leaping into the boat or they are taunting the author. As a young boy, he learns to observe and listen to the grown men he's fishing with. What does it mean to be a good man? Who is worthy of admiration? Who lacks patience, sportsmanship or common decency? As he grows older, the parallels between fishing and life continue as the author lands teaching positions, marries and has children and meets the love of his life. He has many wonderful years on and off the water with her but then loses her to illness. It's a lovely story about life containing both calm times and the occasional storm.Product details
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Fishing No Good WIthout You An Autobiographical Novel eBook Charles Kerlin Scott Kerlin Reviews
Fishing’s No Good Without You is a story of big game and even bigger heart. This debut novel’s cross-generational story is told through accounts of the relationships and fishing excursions that impacted narrator Curly’s life from childhood through middle and later adulthood. Author Charley Kerlin manages to capture in the same breadth of pages and in great detail that recalls Norm MacLean’s A River Runs Through It both the high-action experience of helming a fishing rod that’s hooked a big one and the emotional undercurrents that belie marital and familial stresses. Concerned with tradition, preservation of an earlier time, reconciliation, and father-son relationships, this novel was a great read from start to finish.
Kerlin’s Fishing’s No Good Without You, a fictional memoir, is a series of episodes spanning perhaps 50 plus years of fishing experiences beginning with young Curly’s becoming a river rat along side his father, Big Curly or Dad, and his father’s fishing buddies and ending with Curley now a father of two grown sons, fishing with just one other friend on a lake in Saskatchewan. Fishing is a constant theme and Kerlin narrates well the joy and the challenge of fishing, whether it’s fishing on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana, or in the Gulf of Mexico, or in an Ontario lake accessible only by seaplane. The primary theme, however, is the camaraderie of fishing, men bonding with each other, fathers bonding with sons. Curly’s parents were divorced when be was boy and he was separated not only from his father but the other river rats, and that break is poignantly told in the episode “Don’t Forget I Love You.” The break of father and son recurs with Curly’s divorce, and this time it is his own son who affirms, “Don’t cry, Daddy. I’ll always love you. Don’t forget that I love you.”
Curly’s divorce widens the rift between him and his father, and, when he remarries, his father is cool and distant to Eileen, but she proves her mettle and her moxie and wins the appreciation of her father-in-law while fishing in the Gulf by letting him know how many more groupers she caught than he did.
One of the most moving episodes, however, is about baseball. Kirby, Curly’s first stepfather, is baseball player, not a fisherman, who wins the affection of his stepson by introducing him to baseball.
Curly’s world is primarily a man’s world, a world of men with deep bonds but who are unable to express the value of their relationship except through competitive camaraderie of teasing and boasting. Only twice are such emotions directly expressed, the first time while Curly is fishing the Tippecanoe with his father and explains to his father his feelings for Kirby. His father finally understands his now adult son. They share that new relationship and enjoy each other’s company. Fishing “all the way home, gently moving with the rhythms of the river,” Curly felt “completely happy.” The second moment occurs in the final episode after Curly and Allen, a former teaching colleague, fished together, this time without their sons or other fishing buddies. After the trip Allen wrote, “Our fishing summers define the rhythm of my life—and they mean an awful lot.”
Kerlin’s stories will enable readers to experience the rhythms of rivers and lakes as well as the rhythms of friendships that mean an awful lot.
I read Charles Kerlin's inspiring autobiographical fishing novel "Fishing's No Good Without You" mid-summer with lots of fishing time left before school started up again. I am a teacher, and my fishing window is limited. I read quite a few novels, usually literary stuff. I enjoy fishing books. They constitute a big chunk of the low-effort beach reading that I do. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself wrapped up in a novel that had some of the most engaging fishing writing I had read in a long time, but was so much more than just a fishing book.
I imagine men mostly read fishing books. I suspect, like me, most men read them for the gratuitous thrill - the meaty stories of the unforgettable rainbow trout caught on the fly in the remote mountain stream, or the hours-long battle to land the swordfish or giant tuna. For sure Kerlin's book has some of these gratifying, dopamine-stimulating stories battling a giant muskie on a river in Wisconsin; huge northern pike pulled out of a pristine lake in northern Ontario; the perfect trout on a fly out of a two-mile-high lake near Boulder, Colorado. But these are not what make "Fishing's No Good Without You" a remarkable read for fishermen and non-fishermen alike. There's much more to this memoir-like novel.
This novel restored my understanding of fishing as something much more than an addictive hunter-gatherer ritual. Indeed, here we have fishing as a nexus for all the complexity of human relationships. Here we have fishing as a bond between generations. Here we have fishing as a dying art - the serious avocation of ordinary, hardworking, "grand and elegant," gritty, everyman heroes, not of the wealthy sportsman with thousands of dollars of the best equipment. It's not that Professor Kerlin's book is deeply philosophical; it's that fishing itself is. Yes, fishing is the site of so much that is beautiful, troubling and ineffable about life, and when the subject is in the hands of a skillful writer, it makes for a very meaningful book.
Fishing provides the backdrop for just about all the significant relationships in one man's life. The novel's protagonist, Curly, was born in the late 1930s, and the book traces a challenging childhood growing up with a distant father. In the place of "Dad," a quiet, somewhat surly but magnetic figure, are a collection of other men who serve in young Curly's life as guardians, caregivers, and compellingly gritty and agreeable role models for good and bad behavior. The most likeable is Pete who loves Curly and tries to be everything Dad is not, but Pete, like most of these men, drinks and lives hard and puts a young Curly in harms way.
My favorite "story" in this book of stories is "Kirb." Kirb is Curly's first stepfather. "Kirb" is an elegant and eloquent little story of a boy, hurt by a divorce, who slowly warms up to a loving and decent man, but one who also does not remain in his life. Then there is Emil, Curly's father in-law. Curly and Emil become inseparable fishing partners. There is tremendous love between the young man and the rough Pall-Mall smoking Emil, but the book takes a painful turn when Curly and his first wife's marriage falls apart. Sadder than the divorce is what happens between Curly and Emil. Such stories of love, romantic, paternal, brotherly, and platonic abound in this book. Relationships are constructed, destroyed, maintained and healed around fishing. This fact alone brings tremendous truth value to this book.
I connected deeply with the men of this book. The older men are of my grandfather's generation. They came of age in the depression and the Second World War. My grandfather fished every day until he died and was best friends with his son-in-law (my father). He was the best flounder fisherman in western Long Island Sound, just as there was none better than Curly's Dad at fishing soft craws on the Tippecanoe. My grandfather was an ordinary man with a blue-collar occupation. A man with nine-lives and epic stories, he was larger than life to me. Like my grandfather, the men in the book fished hard, drank hard, smoked hard, and ribbed other men mercilessly. They built houses, constructed concrete decks along rivers, and created businesses in towns. Nonetheless, Kerlin's characters are real, not static; they grow and evolve.
I was pleasantly surprised at the novel's richness. Not only does it enact an archetypal quest of son looking for father, but Curly struggles and succeeds in raising his own children through two marriages. The last chapters of the book revolve around fishing in Florida with a spunky new wife who fills big expectations well and fishing in a remote lake every summer in Northern Ontario. While the latter chapters lack the gravity of the men who populate the first two thirds of the book, the book, to me, ends with a more ruminative tone a story of a cerebral anthropologist who "goes native" stalking grouse on a bad-weather day; the majesty and terror of a vast and unreadable northern lake (think Tim O'Brien); the fear that the art of fishing itself will be lost on the next generation; wondering why we humans do all this fishing in the first place.
Kerlin's style throughout the book is informal though not colloquial. It is the voice of an older Indiana gentleman telling a story on the banks of the Tippecanoe country but tutored. As with any book, it takes a little time to modulate the ear to it, but it works well with the content of the book. Early in the book, a twelve-year old Curly eavesdrops on the older men. The narrator reflects, "Grumbling like this is the stuff of life on the river. None of the men except Pete and Daddy have much. Some of the men depend on Daddy for handouts, for his gifts the fishing reel that he has just discovered....Or the T-Bone steaks that Bud cuts from the 4H beef that Daddy buys each year. But they are grand and elegant heroes to me." There's no irony here. This was life in Indiana in the mid-twentieth-century.
The fishing passages are ubiquitous, and they are dynamite. They have movement and energy, but it's hard to read them and not want to fish. When I took my twelve- year-old son fishing for snappers (baby bluefish) a few weeks ago, I could not help but frame the experience through the lens of Kerlin's book. I thought of Emil and Curly fishing bluegills; Curly and Dad drifting on the Tippecanoe; Curly trolling for giant walleye with a best friend in Canada. Small fish or trophy fish, fishing is about the fishing. Fishing is about being with the self, about companionship with friend and family, and, best of all, about the mystery of nature, though I suspect Kerlin would take issue with me.
Loved it!
A great read! Well written, and full of life lessons...enjoyable!
Just bought the book. Cannot wait to read. Congratulations Charlie and Scott.
loved reading this and knowing how the author grew up and lived his life. It was written about areas where I grew up and lived so it made it doubly interesting to me.
Karen Davis Anderson
This is the story of a life well-lived both on the water and off. The fishing itself is important--whether the fish are practically leaping into the boat or they are taunting the author. As a young boy, he learns to observe and listen to the grown men he's fishing with. What does it mean to be a good man? Who is worthy of admiration? Who lacks patience, sportsmanship or common decency? As he grows older, the parallels between fishing and life continue as the author lands teaching positions, marries and has children and meets the love of his life. He has many wonderful years on and off the water with her but then loses her to illness. It's a lovely story about life containing both calm times and the occasional storm.
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