Few people have affected a sport’s or pastime’s literature the way Nick Lyons has with fly fishing. Through a celebrated career as an author, editor, and publisher, Nick advanced the field of fly-fishing writing in such significant ways that Tom Rosenbauer calls him the godfather of modern fly-fishing books.

Through countless essays and books including Bright Rivers, Full Creel, The Seasonable Angler, Confessions of a Fly Fishing Addict, Fishing Stories, My Secret Fishing Life, A Flyfisher's World, and most recently, Fire in the Straw–Notes on Inventing a Life, Nick’s unique perspectives on the joys, challenges, and intricacies of fly fishing have always blended technical expertise with personal anecdotes, reflections, and his trademark self-deprecating humor.

As an editor, Nick assembled some of the most beloved anthologies in the genre, such as In Praise of Wild Trout, The Quotable Fisherman, Traver on Fishing, Hemingway on Fishing, and The Best Fishing Stories Ever Told—highlighting diverse voices and perspectives and celebrating the rich tapestry of fly fishing literature. As a publisher, he helped produce some of the top-selling fly-fishing books of all time, including Selective Trout by Doug Swisher and Carl Richards, Art Flick's Streamside Guide, Practical Fishing Knots by Lefty Kreh and Mark Sosin, and The Orvis Fly Fishing Guide by Tom Rosenbauer.

As an angler, Nick has fished some of the finest rivers in the world. But when asked about his favorites, he always ends at the same place. “The best, I think, was the very special chance I had to fish O’Dell, a spring creek near Ennis, Montana.” Nick recounted his time there in Spring Creek—a book Craig Mathews calls the best fly fishing book ever written.

“Everyone who's asked me for advice,” Nick says regarding his writing, “I tell them you've got to find your own voice. There's no formula. There's no model that you can put into your head and have it work.” In Spring Creek, he describes the voice that has worked so well for him:

I’d like the stew to be rich enough to catch some of the stillness, complexity, joy, fierce intensity, frustration, practicality, hilarity, fascination, satisfaction that I find in fly fishing. I’d like it to be fun, because fly fishing is fun—not ever so serious and self-conscious that I take it to be either a religion or a way of life, or a source of salvation. I like it passionately but I try to remember what Cezanne once said after a happy day of fishing: he’d had lots of fun, but it “doesn’t lead far.”

In the seventh episode of the Reading the Water podcast, “I Never Put a Bomb in a Trout Stream,” Nick joins host Tim Schulz to share his thoughts about the best anglers he’s known, the stages of fly angling, his unique writing voice, a Mt. Rushmore for fly-fishing writers, why there is so much good writing about fly fishing, and the source of his stories:

“The river really is talking to me about what it wants to have written about it.”

We are all blessed he listened.

You can listen to the entire discussion with Nick Lyons in Episode 7 of the Reading the Water podcast, available through Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pocket Casts.