Paul Schullery

The Artful Sport is a guide for fly-fishing writers and readers, those who want to write a book or magazine article, and those who enjoy reading in the subject. The book goes far beyond the basics of a simple writer’s manual. Its authoritative and sympathetic instruction delivered in lively style, an insider’s take on how fly-fishing books, magazines, and journals happen. The book is filled with the practical rules and guidelines good writers need and good readers appreciate plus well-told stories, many amusing or appalling war stories of the writer’s life, lots of writing and reading advice, and any number of perspective-altering revelations about the sport. The book will appeal to those attracted to the sport’s solid literary roots and to the budding Waltons with aspirations to publish.

A Fish Come True celebrates the enduring joys, mysteries, and miseries of fishing through a series of “what-if” stories:What if someone discovered a fly that worked on every cast?What if we could fish anywhere, any time in the distant past?What if we could explore the fishing on a different planet?What if our sport’s leading thinkers suddenly decided that an infamous trash fish was really cool and a great sporting trophy after all?A Fish Come True answers these and other engaging questions in stories full of sympathy, surprises, good humor, and—most important of all—hope. In this remarkable array of stories, a tour de force of literary styles ranging from unadorned tale to historical mystery to faux press release to science-fiction adventure, Schullery honors the angler’s innate and precious need to hope. And in the midst of this lively storytelling he illuminates the rich rewards and deeply satisfying misadventures that arise from the fulfillment of our angling dreams.

In The Bear Doesn’t Know, Paul Schullery-honored naturalist, storyteller, and former Yellowstone ranger-has given us a bear-lover’s book of wonders. It is rich in the joy, beauty, inspiration, and pure fun to be had during a life well lived in bear country. While exploring the cultural complications of an animal we have long both feared and adored, he chronicles the bumpy course of our coming to terms with the mysteries of bear ecology and behavior. Schullery brings to the matter of bears a long view-of our centuries-long and always-evolving perception of wild bears, of the scientific exploration of bear ecology and behavior, and of the sometimes bitter struggles to protect bear populations for the future. Featuring Schullery’s trademark gifts for historical inquiry and scientific translation, as well as for mixing humor with telling insight, Schullery enlivens The Bear Doesn’t Know with many of his own quirky tales of life in the wildlands of North America and in the obscure realms of bear folklore and literature. North America’s bears have become universally recognized symbols of wild landscapes and the struggles to preserve them. In this collection, Schullery illuminates and celebrates the bears and their world, making plain why they always have and always will matter so much to us.

Since it became the world's first national park in 1872, Yellowstone has welcomed tourists from all corners of the globe who returned to their hometowns and countries with reports of this American wonderland. Stories from the park's earliest visitors began to spread so rapidly that by 1897 Yellowstone became solidly established as a successful tourist destination with more than ten thousand tourists passing through its entrances.Travellers in the park's first years faced long, dusty, and tediously slow stagecoach trips and could choose only between rather primitive hotels and tent camps for their overnight accommodations. Devoured by nineteenth-century readers, many of the narratives from this era are long forgotten today and are only gradually being recovered from historical archives. Park historians Lee Whittlesey and Elizabeth Watry have combed thousands of firsthand accounts, selecting nineteen tales that offer unique and engaging perspectives of visitors during Yellowstone's stagecoach era. From an 1873 newspaper serial that represents one of the earliest park's recorded trips to the 1914 "Little Journey" that popular writer Elbert Hubbard took with his wife Alice, the chronicles included here reveal the enduring captivation that Yellowstone held in the popular imagination, as it does today.

Eldridge Hardie has made a name for himself as a highly respected sporting artist, capturing in watercolor and oil the heart-in-the-throat moments and the quieter times hunters and fishermen live for. Hardie’s art helps us see, feel, understand, and hold on to those times. This book, with 150 paintings carefully and exquisitely reproduced, documents Hardie’s lifework. Hardie has painted every kind of sporting scene—Wisconsin grouse hunts, Atlantic salmon camps, southern quail plantations, angling waters in Tierra del Fuego and Scotland, waterfowling on the Santee marsh and Chesapeake Bay, fly fishing the Bahama flats, the Bighorn, Colorado, and South Platte Rivers. He’s painted home rivers and close-to-home fields and destinations to dream for. He recalls these times and the paintings that capture them in descriptive text. Workbook pages of preliminary studies and notations from the artist’s workbooks are reproduced side by side with the paintings. These notes give a rare look into the artist’s creative process.

Drawing on historical perspectives, personal excursions, and decades of professional research and work in the field, Paul Schullery illuminates many of the possible truths embedded within the natural and cultural reality that is Yellowstone National Park. By varying the scale of observation—from a single encounter between a cow elk and a grizzly bear to the sweeping forces of evolution—Schullery celebrates the park’s history and future potential as a laboratory of ideas. It is, as he states, a place with “layers of meaning waiting to be explored . . . many possible truths to be weighed.” He thus invites us all to participate in the “Yellowstone conversation.”According to Schullery, national parks allow for the study of relatively unmanipulated ecological processes, even amidst civilization’s increasing influence. They act as reservoirs for water, wildlife, and essential wildness. The uncertainties inherent in wild landscapes and in the unfolding idea of Yellowstone allow scholarly and popular dialogues to advance management practices and public understanding. Through this inquiry, Schullery establishes a framework for approaching conservation and the experience of America’sgreat wildlands.Paul Schullery delivered this lecture on March 26, 2014, at the 19th annual symposium sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S. J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah.

The Fishing Life is an entertaining anthology of fishing anecdotes and well-researched articles from across Paul Schullery’s research and fishing career. The author offers up stories, essays, farces, daydreams, and ruminations that will engage readers of all kinds. Of course, being a fisherman and living the fishing life goes beyond just those days spent with rod and reel in hand. It is something that occupies your mind and your heart, not just your hands. As such, this collection is not only about intense fishing moments, but also “a book about those long stretches of thinking, hoping, daydreaming, and otherwise getting ready that occupy fishermen between those moments.” It is truly a way of life. Whether you’re looking for informal advice or deep reflections related to the sport and art of fishing, The Fishing Life is sure to catch your fancy—and give you plenty to dream about, when you can’t be on the water.

Yellowstone National Park, a global icon of conservation and natural beauty, was born at the most improbable of times: the American Gilded Age, when altruism seemed extinct and society's vision seemed focused solely on greed and growth. Perhaps that is why the park's "creation myth" recounted how a few saintlike pioneer conservationists labored to set aside this unique wilderness against all odds, when in fact, the establishment of Yellowstone was the result of complex social, scientific, economic, and aesthetic forces. Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey, both longtime students of Yellowstone's complex history, present the first full account of how the fairy-tale origins of the park found universal public acceptance, and of the long process by which the myth was reconsidered and replaced with a more realistic and ultimately more satisfying story.

Modern fly-fishing is only the latest chapter in a two-millennia saga of technological creativity and passionate observation of the natural world. In ""Fly-Fishing Secrets of the Ancients"", historian-naturalist Paul Schullery explores the earlier chapters in that saga and unearths a host of provocative theories, techniques, and insights that helped shape the modern fly-fisher. Schullery demonstrates that whether we're looking for a good fish story, a clearer understanding of why we fish the way we do, or even a way to improve our own sport, we ignore our elders at our peril. ""Fly-Fishing Secrets of the Ancients"" offers the beginning fly-fisher an unprecedented opportunity to come to terms with some of the sport's most fundamental theoretical and practical challenges. It offers the expert fly-fisher a chance to test current angling dogma - and his or her own pet theories - against that of the sport's greatest past masters. And it offers all readers a fresh, probing, and often-humorous take on the great endless fish story we perpetuate and enrich every time we cast a fly.

"Mountain Time, a thoughtful and often moving work, is not only about Yellowstone as a superb sample of American wildness, . . . but also about a man named Paul Schullery and his relationship to it. This fact gives the book much richness and power, for Schullery comes across clearly as a caring, observant, undogmatic person whose reasonable and intelligent opinions are reinforced by plenty of facts. In a certain mood, it is possible to wish (vainly) that people of his civilized caliber were the only ones allowed to open their mouths very widely on any subject that really matters, as Yellowstone definitely does."--John Graves, author of Goodbye to a River and From a Limestone Lodge"Paul has pushed outdoor writing to new limits. I pay him the highest compliment I can: I wish I had written Mountain Time."--Lionel Atwill, Sports Afield

After centuries of observation, anglers are still trying to solve the mysteries of that magical instant when a trout takes a fly. The Rise, based on scientific research into trout feeding behaviour and the author's extraordinary photographic studies, provides many new clues. With unprecedented photographic clarity, Schullery reveals the subtleties of the trout's feeding behaviour, analyses the rise forms that puzzle us, and offers startline and reassuring insights into the lessons of rejection. Schullery challenges modern 'common knowledge', reconsiders neglected flies, ideas and tactics, and faces some of fly fishing's toughest questions with wit, patience and the happy conviction that the questions are more important than the answers anyway.

Yellowstone National Park, a global icon of conservation and natural beauty, was born at the most improbable of times: the American Gilded Age, when altruism seemed extinct and society's vision seemed focused solely on greed and growth. Perhaps that is why the park's "creation myth" recounted how a few saintlike pioneer conservationists labored to set aside this unique wilderness against all odds, when in fact, the establishment of Yellowstone was the result of complex social, scientific, economic, and aesthetic forces. Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey, both longtime students of Yellowstone's complex history, present the first full account of how the fairy-tale origins of the park found universal public acceptance, and of the long process by which the myth was reconsidered and replaced with a more realistic and ultimately more satisfying story.

Lewis and Clark's expedition was full of adventures, but few were as exhilarating as their moments with grizzly bears. The author has combed the journals to provide readers with Lewis and Clark's own words on the Ursus horribles and offers new insight into the role of the grizzly bear in this tale of Western exploration and discovery.

Presents a rich and varied cross-section of early encounters with the park's most famous wild residents.