We all get our 15 minutes of fame. I've been very fortunate to have some interesting opportunities with some various magazines. Here are a few of them. If you click on the thumbnails below you'll open up a page that will be readable.

State Supported Fly Tying
This is a nice article written by my sometime fishing buddy Dave Klausmeyer for his Editor's Bench column. It describes the NH Traditional Arts program I was in when I apprenticed with Bob Wyatt in Concord. No, that's not my Gray Ghost on the cover, I just wanted to show you which issue the article was in.

Art Fuller's Notebook
As part of my historical work with the Monadnock Chapter of Trout Unlimited, I stumbled onto a notebook that belonged to a Monadnock Region fly tyer. This turned into quite an adventure, and eventually an article in the Spring 2009 issue of Fly Tyer. 

Full Dress Finery
In the January 2009 issue of American Angler, editor Phil Monahan wrote an article on the intricacies of Classic Atlantic Salmon fly tying. He contacted me to get a fly to use for the illustration. I was working on a Bulldog, so sent that along.
The article was a two page spread. This might have been the largest fly image ever published. (If I would have known how big he was going to make it, I would have done a better job...)

$300 Salmon Fly
Late in 2008 I was contacted by the editor of Outdoor Life (thanks to Phil Monahan). They were looking for an article that would make fun of the "over the top" activities of the obsessive salmon fly tyer, to be used in the April Fool's issue. I worked on an article for quite some time, and came up with something that was terribly witty, overall brilliant, and downright hilarious. I also tied up a cartoon version of a Jock Scott - ostentatious use of feathers, a big, fat body, and I even put googly eyes on it, like a bass fly.

The magazine hated the article, and trashed the whole thing. (In retrospect, I think it was indeed quite funny - it was just that there were only 7 people in the universe who actually got the jokes.) They did like the fly, however, and the article became just a juxtaposition for the worm-and-bobber articles that followed it. The title came from a discussion we had on what a well-known classic tyer would charge for a Jock Scott, using all authentic materials. The $300 was an educated guess on my part, but I actually had people contact me and want to buy one after the article was published. (I talked them all down to a more reasonable figure, using subs for many of the exotic materials.) Still, the fly I sold to Outdoor Life went for - well, more than $300!

I have to say I was amazed at the coverage of Outdoor Life. It's pretty cool to have an article in Fly Tyer, but where I come from, Outdoor Life (and/or Field and Stream) are just fixtures in the average household. I actually had people call me up from Wisconsin and congratulate me on getting a fly in Outdoor Life. And these are people who wouldn't know a fly rod from a broomstick, but they somehow saw my name on the article. Amazing. So to have a fly right on the cover of a huge magazine like that, well, it's pretty neat.