Trash Fish: A Life

Just about everything that rocky mountain raconteur, poet, essayist, biographer, painter, professor, and trash fisherman Greg Keeler creates is a "must read", a "must hear", or a "must see". If you haven't experience Keeler's intoxicating genius, add this book to your cart. Trash Fish is a hoot and a treasure -- like landing a prehistoric lunker from that hastily man-made lake somewhere west of town. His searing honesty and gut-splittingly funny ruminations will reel you in like a Tail Dancer #5 hooked to the lip of a 5" perch. Greg was my creative writing teacher in 1980. He was an endearingly awkward, untenured professor in those days who indulged a few of us upstarts by reading poetry side-by-side with us at the now defunct Union Hall Coffee House on Main Street. Greg's poems were ridiculously superior to the self-absorbed, half-baked drivel the rest of us dished up, but Greg treated us like comrades-in-words.

We are not fishing snobs by any means, but a book called Trash Fish probably wouldn't have caught our attention on the shelf at the book store. Fortunately this book was received as a gift this last Christmas. What started out as a quick scan of the introduction upon unwrapping the holiday gift turned into an afternoon of quiet reading. This is one of those books that we found hard to put down. Though not really a traditional fishing book, it is a look at the life of a fisherman through many of life's ups and downs. There were a lot of experiences the author had in Trash Fish that other lifelong fishermen can relate too. Don't expect to learn any new hot fishing tricks from this book - you won't. Read it, though, if you need a good laugh and want to relate to the humility Greg Keeler shares with us about his own life.

This is not really a fishing book, but the story of a life in which the stabilizing force, such as it is, is fishing--in many forms: trotlines, bait, spin-fishing and even fly-fishing. From his childhood to his second marriage (to the same woman), Keeler entertains with snapshots and vignettes and avoids the long, plodding narrative. The sadness is incompletely covered over with wit, even silliness (I'm thinking of the sections in which his penis becomes a character, Dick, with its own very insistent voice), but Keeler never loses sight of his seriousness of purpose (the power of words and the healing power of fish fishing-though he might disagree)and never lost at least this reader's interest.