hold first annual benefit dinner
"It's not just about fishing," says Joe Furia '00, editor-at-large of the Yale Anglers' Journal, the publication he created four years ago.
Part literary sampler, part gallery of illustrations and part abstruse advice to the angler, the undergraduate-run biannual publication is, Furia ventures, a fisherman's New Yorker. The journal features an eclectic assortment of short stories, poetry, meditative musings and colorful illustrations culled from all over the world and from as far back as Homeric times.
To celebrate its success -- it already has an international subscriber-base of 300 -- and to help raise the funds to continue its mission, the nonprofit journal will hold its first annual dinner on Wednesday, April 19, in the Presidents Room of Woolsey Hall. Tickets are $100 per person.
The simple act of casting a line and waiting for a fish to bite has been an object of fascination through the ages, says Furia, noting that Izaak Walton's 17th-century classic, "The Compleat Angler," is the most reprinted work after the Bible.
"The subject of angling," claims the undergraduate, "is second only to love" as a preoccupation in Western thought. Amateur anglers cross classes, genders, nationalities, professions, generations and centuries, he says. A list of celebrated fishing fans today includes former President Jimmy Carter, New York Times editorial page editor Howell Raines, former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, Supreme Court Chief Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw -- several of whom have written for the Yale Anglers' Journal. Popular interest in the sport has exploded since the release of Robert Redford's 1992 film, "A River Runs Through It," says Furia, noting that Redford is himself an angler.
Furia's own passion for angling began at the age of 4 when his father set him up with a reel and rod (but initially without a hook, he later learned). As much as Furia enjoys the sport in its own right -- from strategizing about where to enter a stream to fashioning the elements of a fly from fur and feathers -- what excites him most is the process of watching and waiting for the fish to bite, which he describes as a transcendental, almost mystical experience. Fishing, he claims, is so spiritually refreshing that its effect can last a long time. "I can spend four days on a stream, but I can feel the currents for the other 361 days of the year," he says.
In fact, the Yale Angelers' Journal was originally created in 1996 as a kind of bait to attract Furia to Yale by James Prosek '97, an artist and naturalist whose book "Trout: An Illustrated History," published when he was an undergraduate, led him to be dubbed as the "Audubon of the fishing world" by the New York Times. The two were introduced by Furia's cousin when he was visiting the campus as a prospective student and discovered their mutual obsession for fly fishing. Prosek suggested that if Furia would come to Yale, he could found and be the editor-in-chief of a new angling journal, and Furia, who was about to choose Middlebury because of its trout stream, was hooked.
Furia has already passed the editorial torch to sophomore Alexis Surovov, whose interest in Yale incidentally began the first time he read the Yale Anglers' Journal.
The Yale Anglers' Journal, which comes out twice a year, costs $12 an issue -- which is apparently a good investment, notes Furia, since copies of the first printing of the first issue are now selling at rare bookstores for 600% of their original value. The journal's website is located at www.yale.edu/yaj.
More information about the April 19 event is available at (203) 432-0357 or yaj@pantheon.yale.edu.
-- By Dorie Baker
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