Wheatgrass Books will host author John Maclean Sunday June 19th at 3:30pm for a reading, book signing, and a talk on the subject of river conservation. The event is in collaboration with Dan Bailey’s Outdoor Company and Park County Environmental Council.
Released thirty years ago this summer, the movie, A River Runs through It, made fly fishing hugely popular. Home Waters is a call to address the negative consequences of that popularity.
Originally published in hardcover last summer, Home Waters will be out in paperback June 14, 2022. Both hardcover and paperback will be available at Wheatgrass.
In the spirit of his father’s beloved classic A River Runs Through It, John N. Maclean’s, Home Waters is a gorgeous chronicle of a family and the land they call home. Home Waters is John N. Maclean’s meditation on fly fishing and life along Montana’s Blackfoot River, where four generations of Macleans have fished, bonded, and drawn timeless lessons from its storied waters.
“The trout completed its curve in an undulating, revelatory sequence. A greenish speckled back and a flash of scarlet on silver along its side marked it as a rainbow. One slow beat, set the hook … in those first seconds I felt a connection to a fish of great size and power.”
So begins John N. Maclean’s remarkable memoir of his family’s century-long love affair with Montana’s majestic Blackfoot River, which his father, Norman Maclean, made legendary. Now himself past the age that his father published his bestselling novella, Maclean returns annually to the simple family cabin that his grandfather built by hand, still in search of the fish of a lifetime. When he hooks it at last, decades of longing promise to be fulfilled, inspiring John, reporter and author, to finally write the story he was born to tell.
A book that will resonate with everyone who feels deeply rooted to a place, Home Waters is chronicle of a family who claimed a river, from one generation to the next, of how this family came of age in the 20th century and later as they scattered across the country, faced tragedy and success, yet were always drawn back to the waters that bound them together. Here are the true stories behind the beloved characters fictionalized in A River Runs Through It, including the Reverend Maclean, the patriarch who introduced the family to fishing; Norman, who balanced a life divided between literature and the tug of the rugged West; and tragic yet luminous Paul (played by Brad Pitt in Robert Redford’s film adaptation), whose mysterious death has haunted the family and led John to investigate his uncle’s murder and reveal new details in these pages.
A universal story about the power of place to shape families, and a celebration of the art of fishing, Maclean’s memoir beautifully portrays the inextricable ways our personal histories are linked to the places we come from—our home waters.
John’s theme for the year is river conservation: A River Runs through It made fly fishing hugely popular, Home Waters is a call to address the negative consequences. He is happy to talk on that subject to whoever will listen, and the book in general.
“‘Home Waters’ details the history of the family, the area’s geology, the ancient trail through the Blackfoot Valley that the Indians followed to hunt the buffalo in the plains. There is a host of characters who vibrate to a different frequency than most of us.”
“The prose in Home Waters, which is often transporting, flows with a shadow-cast grace. What’s more, John Maclean generously welcomes the reader into his family… The best word I can think of to describe Home Waters also happens to be the Maclean’s family word: beautiful.”
Wheatgrass Books is located at 120 N. Main in Livingston. •