“I don’t know how y’all normally like to fish, but I was taught to take turns between trout and pools,” David Joy says with a smile as he steps into waders next to his pickup. Here, in the mountains of western North Carolina, the sun is beginning to warm the air through the thick, green canopy of May. Hidden behind the tangle, a brook trout stream tumbles over a series of falls toward the valley miles down the mountain. My dad and I say taking turns suits us just fine.
Standing 6-foot-5 and with a rusty beard, Carolina foothills accent and camo shirt, Joy might not be what most people think of when they imagine an Orvis-style fly angler. Mostly a full-time novelist, he jumps on a construction crew to make ends meet when the advance and royalty checks start to run a little thin. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting, we’ve already talked more about turkeys and wingbone calls than flies. “I had a bird come down off the roost gobbling, and he strutted all up and down this gasline in front of me,” Joy says. “The morning was so cold that every time he let loose I could see his breath hang on the air. For about an hour he just strutted and gobbled and drummed at maybe 40 or 50 yards. I nearly got sick of it because he wouldn’t come in.”
If you’ve read any of Joy’s four novels (published by Putnam) — most recently — or if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on his memoir, you understand that he is shaped by water. “All I know of beauty I learned with a fishing rod in my hand,” he writes which he edited with Eric Rickstand.
