It takes neither a literary critic nor a serious outdoorsman to gather two basic facts about Ted Leeson: he is a lifelong practitioner of fly fishing and a masterful writer of lyric nonfiction. At the intersection of these pursuits there is The Habit of Rivers, Leeson’s lush collection of essays first published in 1994. The book blends philosophical musings, local detail, and the cheeky, often self-deprecating snipes of a man whose “real-life” responsibilities—he is a creative writing professor at Oregon State University and a recovering academic—are as irksome as they are sustaining. Preferring to address the world from the rocky foothold of a trout stream, Leeson is happily unable to shed either his propensity to think like a literary intellectual or his nearly clinical urge to go fly fishing whenever he can. As he writes, “There’s nothing interesting about a resistible urge.” In The Habit of Rivers, he reveals just how complex and instructive the fishing urge can be.

Indeed, reading Leeson, we realize that the project of catching fish and the project of writing nonfiction are intimately related. Both are repeated “tries” or “attempts,” as the French etymology of essay would have it; both constitute a rich pedagogy of failure, where meaning always leaves a tantalizing remainder, a further stretch of water to explore. The fly fisherman, in confronting the challenges of finding and catching fish (learning the ecology of rivers, improving technique, cultivating a perpetual “husbandry of hope”), learns to make an “argument.” The things that make fly fishing distinctive—the handmade imitations of insects and the delicate, intricate casting styles that present them to the fish—give the argument its shape. But its final form is encompassed in one tiny object: the fly, that “quarter’s worth of chicken feather and wire” that, released into the world, has just the earnest gravity and terrifying insubstantiality of a newborn piece of writing. The fly—like, arguably, the essay—is “an end as well as a beginning”; it “forms the terminus of all our preparations, study, practice, and observation.” As Leeson sums it, invoking further genres still:

Grosser things serving finer ones, the clumsy and tangled labor for the ordinary, the consequential hinging on the apparently slight—these imbue the whole affair of fly fishing with a dramatic structure, like a novel… In its details and techniques, fly fishing may be poetry, but the fact of the fly gives it the shape of...