Forward
These stories and essays were written monthly as part of my role in putting out the newsletter of my home flyfishing club, The McKenzie flyfishers. In 1988 the newsletter had fallen on hard times and did little more than announce the next meeting. Since I wanted the club, because of it's enormous influence on critical river habitat and fishing regulation issues, to continue to grow and thrive, I hoped that by putting out a valuable newsletter the yearly turnover in new members would slow somewhat. Whether I succeeded in that is debatable. But the project DID force me to sit down and crank out the stories and incidents that were rattling around in my head.
TRUMP DOYLE is a pen name, taken, erroneously from the french idiom "trompe d'oiel" (sic), referring to an illusion, a mirage, a tricking of the eye. Too late I realized that my embarrassment of french was complete as the correct idiom is "trompe l'oiel". Trump Loyal didn't quite ring clear so I left it as an illusion within an illusion. It took quite a while for some of the members to figure out exactly who Trump Doyle was, and some of the associate members, living around the country, never did. The Steamboat Inn on the North Umpqua still owes Trump a promised dinner.
Within the club, my small and captive audience, are a number of professors at the University of Oregon, and they're appreciation of the stories led me to offer some of them for more national publication. Three have seen formal publication. Gray's Sporting Journal picked up and pubished "The River of No Deposit, No Return", and "Haul-ass Mallards" and the latter was their feature story for a quarter of the year on their website. "The Lesson" was published in book form in the anthology of northwest fishing writers "Fishing the Northwest", edited by my friend, fellow club member, and U of O English professor, Glen Love. The story was then re-published in the quarterly "Northwest fly Fishing"
Writing specifically for publication necessarily changes how one presents the story, and inevitably in the slicing and dicing the editor controls the knife. Some of my stories just don't or wouldn't fit into a short magazine format. If you want to know my favorites, which have never YET seen formal publication, or even necessarily been written YET to my satisfaction, they are:
Geography Imitates Reality
The Longest Float
The Grass May Not Be Greener, But The 'Sides Are Redder
Synchronized Wading =>
Yes, it IS all true.
Fishtales Start
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