About the Editors
Tyler McMahon.
TYLER MCMAHON grew up in Virginia where his father raised race horses and forced him to break them in. For three years he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer building rural aqueducts in El Salvador. He taught writing at Boise State University and now teaches at Hawaii Pacific University on the island of Oahu.
Paul Diamond
PAUL DIAMOND grew up in Washington, D.C. where he had his own break dance crew, did an internship for then senate majority leader, Bob Dole, and then sang in a punk band (in that order). He worked as a photojournalist for United Press International in Pittsburgh and later taught writing at Ohio University and then at Tulane University. He now lives on the water in San Diego and works as a writer and editor for a CEO membership organization. He surfs and swims more than he fishes.
Contributors
Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times, and numerous other publications, and have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Food Writing, and The Best American Sports Writing. His book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a finalist for a PEN-Faulkner Award in 2000. Bilger lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jennifer Nelson, and children, Hans, Ruby, and Evangeline.
Bob Burt spent seven seasons on the F/V Island Enterprise, taming the world’s appetite for fish sticks. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where his fish stories get larger every year. He’s been writing a novel for fifteen years, and if he ever finishes it, his wife will find other things for him to do.
Born in Chicago, Gene Cabot left at seventeen to join the Navy and later traveled for an aircraft modification company. In 1958 he went to the Atlantic Missile Test Range (Cape Canaveral) in Florida and worked on missile-tracking radars on many islands in the Caribbean, Ascension Island, and Greenland. Retired in Panama City, he fishes in lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. His goal is to catch a 30-pound kingfish.
Ian Card and his father Alan operate the Challenger, a 40-foot marlin and tuna charter boat out of Bermuda. He has 20 years’ experience in the charter boat business and holds the Bermuda record for catching the largest Mako shark (821 lbs.).
Scott Carrier is a writer and radio producer who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. His written work has been published in Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and Mother Jones magazines. His story collection, Running After Antelope, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2001. His radio stories have been featured on All Things Considered, This American Life, Marketplace, Day to Day, and other public radio programs in the United States, Australia, and Canada. He is currently a senior producer for the new NPR weekly series, Hearing Voices, and a professor in the Communication Department at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
Lauran DeRigne is a writer and high school librarian in St. Louis, Missouri. She enjoys camping, hiking, kayaking and, occasionally, fishing, with her husband, Garret, and their two-year-old son, Sawyer.
As a full-time freelance writer and with monthly columns in Outdoor Florida Magazine, Bob t. Epstein has spent the past twenty-five years creating and selling articles for hundreds of markets in the U.S and Europe as well as having spent nineteen years as PR Consultant to Olympus Consumer Digital Cameras Corporation. Bob was past president and CEO of the sixty-year-old Florida Outdoor Writers Association. Bob has been a Scripps Howard News Service freelancer and specials writer for Treasure Coast Newspapers. Bob is a columnist for Frederick, Maryland daily newspaper titled Frederick News-Post food section, and freelances for their travel section, additionally he contributes a weekly column to the Miami Herald for the Florida Keys outdoors scene. Bob’s books include: Best Restaurants of the Florida Keys, Calypso Café, and Bridges through the Florida Keys.
Michael Fedo is the author of seven published books, including The Lynchings in Duluth, The Man From Lake Wobegon, and the novel, Indians in the Arborvitae. His articles, stories, and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Sports Afield, Gray’s Sporting Journal, American Way, America West Airlines Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and fishes in Minnesota with his art teacher wife, Judy and their five grandchildren.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and former Chinese interpreter for the U.S. Department of State, David Finkelstein served for over a decade as the Ford Foundation’s China specialist. Now a New Yorkbased freelance writer, he has written for The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Field & Stream, Sports Afield, Audubon, Marlin, Atlantic Salmon Journal and countless other national and international publications. A flamenco guitarist and avid fisherman, he also holds an 8th degree in Okinawan karate. His travel classic, Greater Nowheres: Wanderings Across the Outback, an account of his year in the Australian bush, was recently republished by Nick Lyons Press.
Phillip Gentry is a freelance outdoor writer and photographer from Taylors, South Carolina. He has written hundreds of articles for outdoor publications throughout the Southern United States. He is also the author of the book The Freshwater Guide to Striped Bass Fishing, which he dedicated to his faithful dog, Jake, and is available from Knapp Press at major retail sporting goods stores.
Kathleen Gerard remains intrigued by the sea and all creatures therein. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, anthologies, and has been featured on National Public Radio. Her prose has been nominated for “Best New American Voices,” a national prize in literature, and awarded The Perillo Prize for Italian American Writing. She lives in northern New Jersey.
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France and The Soul of Creative Writing. He has written on a variety of subjects for many national publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Review, Vanity Fair, Saveur, Creative Nonfiction, Louisville Review, Ascent, French Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Bill Heavey is a bald white man who raises crabgrass in the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia. He is editor-at-large for Field & Stream magazine, where he writes a column, “A Sportsman’s Life.” He recently published a collection of his least-offensive work for Field & Stream, entitled If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?
Veteran freelance writer Dave Hurteau has penned hundreds of articles for a variety of outdoor publications, from Adirondack Explorer to Saltwater Sportsman, where this story was first published. He has edited hundreds more during his 12-year affiliation with Field & Stream magazine, where as Special Projects Editor his writing recently shared in a National Magazine Award nomination. His outdoor news blog, “Field Notes,” is updated daily on fieldandstream.com. Hurteau lives in upstate New York with his wife, Robin, daughter, Hannah, and son, Jackson.
Robert H. Jones was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1935. He began writing in 1975 and went full time in 1980. He has contributed to over fifty different magazine, written three books, co-authored three, contributed to sixteen, edited sixteen published books, and won twenty awards for excellence in writing. He is a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and The Writers’ Union of Canada. Jones resides in Courtenay, British Columbia, with Vera, his wife of fifty-two years, who is also a writer and editor.
Michael Lovell lives in central New Hampshire where he is a professor of Theater Arts at Colby-Sawyer College. Although he is an obsessed hunter and angler, he no longer does any fishing in the ocean out of little boats.
John Medeiros’ work has appeared in Water-Stone Review; The Talking Stick; Gulf Coast; Willow Springs; Gents, Badboys and Barbarians: An Anthology of New Gay Male Poetry; Evergreen Chronicles; Christopher Street; and several other journals. He has received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant; Gulf Coast’s First Place Nonfiction Award; the AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Jerome Foundation Grant and several fellowships. His work has been nominated for a Puschcart Prize, and has been selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2006. His website is www.jmedeiros.net.
Mary L. Peachin is a freelance adventure travel writer, photographer, author, and lecturer. She has published two books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sharks (Alpha/Penguin, 2003) and Scuba Caribbean (University Press of Florida, 2008). She has also contributed to numerous publications including: Sport Fishing Magazine, Fly Fisherman Magazine, Destination Fish, and Karen Brown’s Pacific Northwest. She is the publisher of a travel adventure website: www.peachin.com.
Len Rich is an award-winning outdoor writer living in Canada. His eighth book is due for publication in late spring 2008. He writes feature articles for numerous outdoor magazines and a popular bi-weekly newspaper column, “My Outdoors.” In 1991 he received the prestigious Canada Recreational Fisheries Award. He built and operated for more than a decade a remote, fly-in trophy trout lodge in Labrador called Awesome Lake Lodge.
John Struloeff directs the Creative Writing program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. A book of his poems, The Man I Was Supposed to Be, is available from Loom Press. He has published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Southern Review, and a wide range of other magazines. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he now lives with his wife and son in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Keith Sutton of Alexander, Arkansas, works full-time as a freelance writer, editor, photographer, TV personality, and lecturer. His articles and photographs appear regularly in dozens of periodicals and websites. He has written eight books, edited a dozen and co-authored more than twenty, including Out There Fishing, Catfishing: Beyond the Basics, Hunting Arkansas, Birder’s Bible and Shooter’s Bible. Sutton served 19 years as editor of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission conservation magazine Arkansas Wildlife.
Lou Ureneck is an outdoorsman, professor, and father. In his twenty years at Maine’s Portland Press Herald, where he rose from reporter to editor, Lou crusaded to protect the state’s environment against clear-cutting and commercial overfishing. He was an editor-in-residence at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and page-one editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is now chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Field & Stream. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Mickey Wright has lived a life full of interesting experiences. He has been a professional skier, a UPS driver, furniture salesman, teacher, health inspector, zoo keeper, prison guard (many parallels there!), wildlife control operator and park ranger. Currently, he and his wife own an environmental consulting company and a taxidermy shop. Through it all he has continued to hunt, fish, hike, boat, and camp and is passing that legacy on through his two daughters. His previous publishing experience has been writing poetry and short fiction for children. His work has appeared in publications such as Cricket and Spider.