Chris McCully

Welcome to the web pages of the writer, Chris McCully. Chris's work spans poems, essays, reviews, memoirs, textbooks...and a great deal of work about (fly-) fishing. In 2008-09 several new books by Chris will appear: Old English Poems and Riddles (translator, 2008); Sketches with Fishing Rods (2008, with illustrations by Ad Swier); The Sound Structure of English (2009); Polder (poems, 2009); and Pike Lures (2009).

In 2010-12 further titles authored or co-edited by Chris appear, including a Selected Poems from Carcanet (2011) and From the Last Sane Places on Earth (2012, also from Carcanet).
 
    Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis
        arboribusque comae;
    mutat terra vices et descrescentia ripas
        flumina praetereunt....

    The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
        And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
    The river to the river-bed withdraws,
        And altered is the fashion of the earth....

(Horace, opening of Ode VII, Book IV, trans. A.E. Housman)

[Photo of Chris, right: Fergus Wilde, 2005.]

Chris has also contributed to many anthologies of prose and/or verse, most recently to Writing Your Self, edited by Myra Schneider and John Killick (2009), and to a wonderful set of fishing essays and stories edited by Dexter Petley (also 2009).

[Photo: James Sadler, 2007.]

These days, up to half of my working life involves angling or angling-related work. Among the journals in which I published in 2005-07 are Trout and Salmon, Waterlog, Fly-fishing and Fly-Tying, Journal of the Grayling Society, and Vissen (Amsterdam). In 2007 I completed a month-on-month series for Trout and Salmon, called 'Meetings with Memorable Fish', while in late 2007 and early 2008 I ran a set of linked feature articles in the same journal on sea-trout and salmon fishing in the west of Ireland, the result of a trip in July 2007. And in 2007 I published my first full-length feature article in Dutch, in the journal De Roofvis ('The Predator') - see 'Expeditie naar Groenland' in issue number 60. This article is about fishing for charr in river systems near Kangerlussuaq and Nuuk.

In 2008 I have completed three feature articles about sea-trout fishing in different parts of the west of Ireland (Donegal, Mayo, Kerry), and four (possibly five) pieces about different English chalkstreams, which I visited as part of the absurdly protracted angling celebrations for my 50th birthday. I enjoyed every minute. I hope that this work will appear in Trout and Salmon in autumn 2008 and again during 2009.

Pike fishing - all methods, but with a strong inclination towards fishing big streamers where feasible - occupies the winter half of the angling year, and, since I moved to Het Hooge Land in 2007, zander feature increasingly in these catches. During the later spring, summer and autumn my focus tends to be on sea-trout.

The Fishing Diary here includes entries on pike and zander; pike lures and streamers; fly-casting; sea-trout; grayling; middle-aged exhaustion; some literature and tackle reviews; stuff about Battenburg cake; pictures of Greenland, the Swedish Arctic, Denmark and Ireland; some nice camera shots of General Relevance, whose purpose is Moral Improvement; nothing about Scouting for Boys; plenty about fly-tying; a picture of a man in very large wellies; a picture of a boy sitting on a rock; various unhealthy heraldic and etymological obsessions; a great deal of fatuous whining about work, and how it gets in the way of fishing; and, fortunately or unfortunately, much, much more....

Note: please feel free to download, share or cite anything in these pages, including photos. If you do so, however, please include an acknowledgement of the source in the new context, eg. 'Text: Chris McCully, 2007' or 'Photo: James Sadler, 2007' or 'Photo: Chris McCully, 2007'. You'll find the images already have both captions and acknowledgements, and so will be able to cite the source accurately. Thank you.

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