I’m with HideHunter on this. “Campfire” and “me and Joe” stories are my favorites, too. When I was growing up, the Big Three outdoor monthly periodicals ran those kind of stories all the time. I couldn’t wait for the next issues to come out.
Then sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s the entire psychology of outdoor writing (or publisher dictates) began to change. You’d open a magazine and find almost nothing but what I call “expert stories” where the entire focus was about MORE or BETTER or BIGGER or NEWER. Gone were those relaxed personal accounts of ordinary hunting and fishing trips written by everyday people who, apparently, just decided one day to grab a couple sheets of paper and write a trip story and send it in along with some snapshots. Suddenly those stories were gone and you were being overwhelmed by “expert” articles, each of which bombard you with fifty thousand ways to catch MORE fish, BIGGER fish, etc.
When I was the Sunday Outdoors columnist for my city’s newspaper, one of the things I was proudest of was that I never, not once, wrote a story about a fishing tournament. (And I had many invites to do so.) The whole psychology of organized fishing contests – with money prizes for God’s sake! – is alien to what I love most about being outdoors.
The thing I appreciate about FAOL is that it lets anybody – anybody – submit a story about a trip they took, or some aspect of fly fishing, and write it in their own words using their own writing “voice”. This is so cool because I’ve always had an ear for the unique ways people will talk during conversations and in their writing. These differences show through clearly in FAOL’s wide spectrum of columns.
We each do our own thing every time we go fishing, tie a fly or whatever. People who submit stories about this stuff, they’re doing their thing, too, expressing themselves in their own words and writing voice. No pressure to be an “expert”; we’re allowed to be our usual imperfect, sometimes even boring, selves.
Because…in even the most ordinary story you almost always will find a pearl of wisdom, some little tip or tactic, something that you never thought of before, and that little thing helps you in the future maybe (if you can remember it!). But whatever it is, it hits you at the moment you read it and it’s entertaining.
So fishing-wise, for me FAOL fills the position vacated by the Big Three magazines when they moved away from publishing trip stories written by ordinary folks like me and everybody else who reads this site, and/or writes in it.
Joe
“Better small than not at all.”