Catch of the Day

When I began this blog several years ago I titled it Catch of the Day, despite the strong cautions from fellow authors. It was my attempt to brand myself as a "Self-Proclaimed Storycatcher" as I say on the home page of my website.

"It's too much like fishing," they said.

"It will give the reader the wrong impression," they said.

"Your blog is about history, not fishing," they said.

But I held firm to the title, steadfast in my decision to share my adventures in catching stories. I took a class on writing nonfiction and after submitting a chapter, received this comment from the teacher:

• Don't be afraid of your own voice! Any powerful historical account has a narrator weaving through it, negotiating and bringing to life all kinds of personalities. A story catcher still has to extract the story to get it out of her net. 

So I morphed into a being a storycatcher.

Fast forward five years and Ron Beane appears at my door with a box of manila folders in his hand. "Fly fishing," he begins.

"Okay," I begin. Make that a slow, drawn out, two syllable "O---kay."

And the fly fishing story begins. He had already caught most of the stories, he just didn't know what to do with them. Would I help him turn them into a book, he pleads.

Would I ever.

And that is the rest of the story.

Except that, isn't it peculiar that my blog title is Catch of the Day? Odd things, coincidences. Maybe there's more to the cosmos than I first thought.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen