Catch and Release

Yakima River, Washington

I started writing “Catch and Release” during a trip to Washington state. My husband and I visit the Pacific Northwest whenever we can because our daughter lives there. In September 2021, we ventured east to the Yakima Canyon area and found a landscape I’d never seen before. The Yakima River carves its way through mountains that are somehow rocky deserts.

This narrator—an unnamed teenage girl—had been on my mind for a while and my early attempts told her story. Jackson Eliot showed up—the idea of him, that is— in the Sea-Tac airport while waiting for our flight home. “Catch and Release” became as much his story as hers.

The town is fiction, but the landscape, the fly-fishing, and the sounds of the river are real. Jackson, with his efforts to take care of this vulnerable teenage girl as best he could and then letting her go, feels as real to me as anyone I know.

A fiction-writing class led by the gifted and wise Elizabeth Ferris (elizabethferris.com) helped this story along. I debated whether to include more about the narrator’s mother. My writer friend, Sara, said that the dark gap between the floor and the mother’s door said enough. The scene in the girl’s high school developed in order to “raise the stakes” for the narrator. For example: why does the girl need Jackson? Why does she need to leave town? I wrote this as a scene rather than summary, hoping you could feel the narrator’s frustration and fear with her precarious living situation and why she hopes for Jackson to stay. She’s trapped between the menacing coach and the closed school counselor’s door. Behind it lies her chance to go to college and the only capable adult in her life.

I don’t write many short stories with happy endings, but “Catch and Release” could only end hopeful. Thanks, Jacks.

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For the past several years I’ve been working on a novel, currently titled Degrees of Forgiving. Here’s the gist of it: the narrator, Laurel—a new veterinarian—finds her carefully-planned future upended by loss and grief. Her fiancé’s disastrous mistake parallels the one her biological mother made long ago and Laurel can’t forgive either one of them. Certain that forgiving is equal to weakness, she finds herself desperately alone and compensating with behavior mirroring her mother’s past.

Right now, I’m fine-tuning, trying to get the book ready for submission to literary agents. If you’re not eyeballs-deep in the writing-hoping-to-publish life, the next steps are crafting a strong enough query letter that an agent might want to read the whole book, offer to represent me and sell Degrees to a publisher. I’ve been told landing an agent is about as likely as being accepted into Stanford. Low, single-digit percentage odds.

To avoid spiraling into despair about that, I’m drafting another novel.

Thanks for coming along on my newsletter’s maiden voyage!

Heather