I am so excited to have this post by author Sarah Stonich. Her book FISHING! is taking part in a blog tour with WOW! Women on Writing right now. It is available to purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble , and Bookshop.org. You can also add this book to your reading list over at GoodReads.
I write this serenaded by the now-familiar thrup–thrup of helicopters hovering over my Minneapolis neighborhood. A march protesting the police murder of George Floyd will be coming down our street within the hour. Waiting for results of a Covid test, I can only lean out our loft windows to add my voice as marchers pass below.
Part of the inspiration for writing Fishing! Came from realizing that younger women were getting the rug pulled out from under them in regard to rights that generations of women – mine included – fought hard for. While Fishing! is considered a comic novel and often reviewed as a laugh-out-loud read, it’s underlying themes are, as Gran would say, serious as a heart attack, touching on issues of equality, so very much on our minds today. RayAnne’s navigated sexism and harassment in the pro-fishing circuit, but now she’s out of it, she understands the best way to contribute is to uplift kick-ass women by interviewing them on her show. Since the 2016 election, much of the gain our mothers and grandmothers worked so hard for has been slipping; It’s 2020 and the ERA is still not ratified; police are still killing people of color. Yet, the summer of 2020 is feeling different, hopeful even. This moment, living in the eye of history, feels like a tipping point, promising to become a fat chapter in the history books. Perhaps by the time they get written, our nation will be seeing itself with clarity, hopefully with 20/20 vision.
Here are books by a few feminist authors I love:
Bad Feminist Roxane Gay is an opinion writer for The New York Times, author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Difficult Women and Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. Gay is a powerhouse.
Women, Race, and Class Angela Y. Davis is a political activist and outspoken advocate for prison reform and is the author of several books. She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. Her most recent book is Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems. Most of us have read an Alice Walker novel, if not The Color Purpleperhaps Possessing the Secret of Joy, or Meridian.But did you know she wrote poetry? This book is perfect to take to the park, have a break, be inspired.
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected essays, Speeches and Meditations by Toni Morrison. We lost the great Ms. Morrison last year, but her genius lives on in her novels: The Bluest Eye; Song Of Solomon and Beloved. Here she is in a brief video on racism (trigger warning to Karens: it contains a cringe-worthy moment of epic white privilege)
So much change has happened since this book has come out – just since I started this blog tour! While the world swirls, I try to write and work, currently editing Reeling, because RayAnne’s journey does not end with Fishing! Her story requires a trilogy. As I plot out book three, Leaping I have much to consider for material. What a world. Thanks for reading.
About the Book, Fishing!
Having fled the testosterone-soaked world of professional sport fishing, thirty-something RayAnne Dahl is navigating a new job as a consultant for the first all-women talk show about fishing on public television (or, as one viewer’s husband puts it, “Oprah in a boat”). After the host bails, RayAnne lands in front of the camera and out of her depth at the helm of the show. Is she up for the challenge? Meanwhile, her family proves as high-maintenance as her fixer-upper house and her clingy rescue dog. Her dad, star of the one-season Big Rick’s Bass Bonanza, is on his sixth wife and falling off the wagon and into RayAnne’s career path; her mother, a new-age aging coach for the menopausal rich, provides endless unwanted advice; and her beloved grandmother Dot—whose advice RayAnne needs—is far away and far from well.
But as RayAnne says, “I’m a woman, I fish. Deal with it.” And just when things seem to be coming together—the show is an unlikely hit; she receives the admiration of a handsome sponsor (out of bounds as he is, but definitely in the wings); ungainly house and dog are finally in hand—RayAnne’s world suddenly threatens to capsize, and she’s faced with a gut-wrenching situation and a heartbreaking decision.
First published in 2015 under a pseudonym, this first installment in a trilogy filled with hilarity and heartbreak unspools with the gentle wit and irresistible charm that readers of Sarah Stonich have come to expect. Fishing! eases us into unsuspected depths as it approaches the essential question . . . when should life be steered by the heart, not the rules?
Fishing! is available to purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble , and Bookshop.org. You can also add this book to your reading list over at GoodReads.
Sarah’s first novel, These Granite Islands was awarded a Loft McKnight Award and was a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers pick. That novel was translated into eleven languages. Her second, The Ice Chorus, was also widely translated and won several honors. Her memoir Shelter: Off The Grid In The Mostly Magnetic North won a Northeast Minnesota Book Award.
Sarah is best known for her Northern Trilogy, beginning with Vacationland, followed by Laurentian Divide, winner of the 2019 Minnesota Book Award and the NEMBA award, as well as being a 2019 National Reading Group Month selection by National Women’s Book Association. In March/April 2020, WPRI, Wisconsin Public Radio International’s longest running program, Chapter A Day chose Laurentian Divide to be read on air by Jim Flemming. That novel won the Minnesota Book Award, and along with Vacationland, has been chosen as a community read in two dozen midwestern and Canadian cities including most recently in Willmar, Inver Grove Heights, Grand Forks, and Thunder Bay. She’s currently researching and writing Watershed, the final volume of the Northern Trilogy.
Fishing!,the first installment of her feminist chick-lit Fishing With RayAnne trilogy published by the University of Minnesota Press in March of 2020, is to be followed by Reeling in 2021. Sarah is currently working on Leaping and hopes to see it published in 2022. Sarah is adapting the trilogy to a television series, as well as writing original screenplays.
You can follow her online at:
Twitter: @sarahstonich
Instagram: sarahstonichwriter