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Articles by Chris Dombrowski
Why Fly Fishing Isn't About Counting Fish
(Al Hassal art) June 10, 2026 By Chris Dombrowski This article was originally titled "On Counting” in the Seasonable Angler column of the December 2007 issue of Fly Fisherman. “The river is as far as I can get from the world of numbers...” I’ve heard a lot of numbers talk lately, what with the fishing being as good as it’s been. It’s easy, during the best fly fishing of the year, to turn the experience into a numbers game.
Governor Cites Tariffs And Increased Medi-Cal Costs For $16 Billion Revenue Shortfall
MP Manatt, Phelps & Phillips LLP More Manatt is a multidisciplinary, integrated national professional services firm known for quality and an extraordinary commitment to clients. We are keenly focused on specific industry sectors, providing legal and consulting capabilities at the very highest levels to achieve our clients’ business objectives.
The Sun Magazine | Nature and Nurture
I have always loved January—not for the weather (I’m originally from the Midwest) but for the sense of new beginning that it brings. It’s like an unmarked notebook, untrod snow, a fresh stick of butter. I can make my life whatever I want it to be, I always think. Of course, this both is and isn’t true. I’m not sure which has a larger influence over my life: my will or my surroundings.
Angling for the elusive permit
We roll out of the campground toward Long Key with the windows open. Bleached shells and limestone gravel crunch under the Westfalia’s tires. Birds make their vibrant predawn racket, a symphony in stark contrast to my brain’s lethargy, stymied as it is from last night’s festivities. At least I remembered to set an alarm clock.
Catching the Sky
The article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of Fly Fisherman. Tonight the caddis fly so thick they fill the spaces between the early stars. The trout are taking pupae with such ferocity and regularity you'd have to douse the run with gasoline and strike a match to stop their rising. You've built your leader, tippeted-down, pulled the perfect imitation from your hat brim, dressed the bug, lashed it on. And you've spotted the biggest fish in the run.
The River You Touch
by Chris Dombrowski reviewed by Henry Hughes Henry Thoreau wanted his nature-based Walden to be about everything, but he never had a wife and kids. Chris Dombrowski’s memoir about life in rural Montana—with all its hunting, fishing, foraging, philosophy, and home economics—is deepened by the presence of his wife, Mary, an elementary school teacher, and the children they share.
Personal Essays By the Dozen (Okay, Just One Dozen. All Great.)
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — plus many additional publications. And last week we welcomed Orion Magazine as a partner publication.
Lessons on Community From a Father Reading Dostoyevsky
Several pounds of peeled potatoes boil in a ten-gallon steel pot. Covering kitchen duty at the homeless shelter where I’m employed part-time, I take another potato from a burlap sack and begin to peel. My cooking partner, a drifter named Carl who’s made his way to Missoula from Wyoming and speaks in the staccato cadence I’ve come to associate with the displaced, stirs the pot with a wooden spoon. His dizzy spin downward, he informs me, began with a harmless bar fight.
Love Song - Terrain.org
Whether we accept it or not, the land itself is our earliest predecessor, the main character of all our stories, and listening to it, after all, is not a onetime undertaking but a practice. At its uppermost source, this book began as a love song to the rivers on which I’ve guided for 25 years and the land through which they pulse like veins.
A poet and river guide celebrates family life and the environment in a new memoir
There's enjoying nature, and then there's the desire to be one with it. Poet Chris Dombrowski is in the latter category. A native of Michigan, he left the world of his "forbearers' General Motors jobs" when he was 19 "in search of wild trout [and] vast systems of unfettered freestone water." That journey is the subject of his memoir, "The River You Touch." He wasn't alone in his journey.
Review: 'The River You Touch,' by Chris Dombrowski
There's enjoying nature, and then there's the desire to be one with it. Poet Chris Dombrowski is in the latter category. A native of Michigan, he left the world of his "forbearers' General Motors jobs" when he was 19 "in search of wild trout [and] vast systems of unfettered freestone water." That journey is the subject of his memoir, "The River You Touch." He wasn't alone in his journey.
Moving water as a muse
‘The River You Touch: Making A Life on Moving Water’ By Chris Dombrowski Milkweed Editions (2022, 321 pp.) “To learn the language of rivers is the task of many lifetimes, more than the single one I’ve been afforded,” writes this poet and lover of Montana wild spaces.
Virtual: Chris Dombrowski appearing at Books in Common featuring Nickolas Butler
Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.
The River You Touch
“We are matter and long to be received by an Earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children, each of us, without exception, every one. The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.” When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with , the book was acclaimed as “a classic” (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee.
Bonefish: Speed, Power and Grace
Shall I compare thee to a Kawasaki? To a just-launched RPG? To a juiced-up 100-meter sprinter popping from Olympic starting blocks? Afforded my full quiver — snarky similes, literate metaphors and intricate conceits — I would nonetheless fall short of characterizing my beloved bonefish’s unsurpassed short-range surge and velocity. Does the poet’s insufficient diction shame him? Hardly. He is consoled, rather, by the company he keeps. Even Carl Linneaus failed.
Poem with Several Unforgivable Keatsian References, Poem Burning Up in the Fire I Lit to Warm My Son, or Do as I Say Not as I Do
Given the circumstances, who wouldn’t talk to the birds—they can fly, we can’t.
River Kismet
Illustrations by Doug Schermer Fifteen Junes ago, I guided a wealthy gentleman who was itching to employ a bamboo fly rod he had recently purchased at an even wealthier late-gentleman’s estate sale. He threw persistent tailing loops even with a standard 9-foot, 5-weight graphite rig, a mechanical casting flaw that would only be exaggerated by the shorter, slower vintage piece.
Letters: Gyms should be considered essential services
OPINION Chris Curran Dombrowski Published 12:33 p.m. ChT May 31, 2020 Gyms should be considered essential services as long as they follow certain guidelines.
Jim Harrison: "Force of Nature"
I am sitting at the Hitching Post in Melrose drinking vodka with Jim who steals, between sips, a scant glance at his beloved barmaid Nicole’s rear, puffs from his American Spirit, and says: “Do you want to know how you can believe in God?” Smoke purls thickly from his cigarette, and in the window-parried shaft of evening light his face looks quite conjured with its blind eye wandering opposite his working eye, one of them—I’m not sure which—glancing often at some bird darting just beyond my...
The Oar: A Summer In Three Acts
JUNE IS A SONG I don’t really know the words to but am singing along with anyway. One verse tells of small yellow warblers calling, Witchity-witchity-witch, and garishly plumed western tanagers up from Mexico to feast on just-hatched salmon flies crawling drowsily through bankside willows. There’s a verse about a young bull moose, too, modest antlers still in velvet, chewing cress by the river road each day, and something about a black bear dragging a trash bag through the preschool parking lot.
Anglers Journal - A Fishing Life
At 89, Joan Salvato Wulff is thinking legacy. Don’t worry. There’s still a spring in her step, and the gray matter functions as well as ever. It’s just that there’s still so much to accomplish, says the architect of modern-day fly-casting mechanics. Framed by sweeping views of undulating grass flats from the Islamorada, Florida, winter home she shares with her husband, Theodore Rogowski, Wulff is explaining the four evolutionary stages of an angler and how she arrived at Stage Four.
The Gospel According To Jim
I’m sitting at the Hitchin’ Post in Melrose, Montana, drinking vodka with Jim Harrison, who between sips steals a scant glance at his beloved barmaid Nicole’s rear, puffs from his American Spirit and says: “Do you want to know how you can believe in God?” Smoke purls thickly from his cigarette, and in the window- parried shaft of evening light his face looks quite conjured, with his bad eye wandering opposite his working eye, one of them — I’m not sure which — attracted to some bird or small...
Force of nature | Head Lines & Features | Montana Headwall
I am sitting at the Hitching Post in Melrose drinking vodka with Jim who steals, between sips, a scant glance at his beloved barmaid Nicole's rear, puffs from his American Spirit, and says: "Do you want to know how you can believe in God?" Smoke purls thickly from his cigarette, and in the window-parried shaft of evening light his face looks quite conjured with its blind eye wandering opposite his working eye, one of them–I'm not sure which–glancing often at some bird darting just beyond my...
The Gospel According To Jim
I’m sitting at the Hitchin’ Post in Melrose, Montana, drinking vodka with Jim Harrison, who between sips steals a scant glance at his beloved barmaid Nicole’s rear, puffs from his American Spirit and says: “Do you want to know how you can believe in God?” Smoke purls thickly from his cigarette, and in the window- parried shaft of evening light his face looks quite conjured, with his bad eye wandering opposite his working eye, one of them — I’m not sure which — attracted to some bird or small...
Reading rainbow | Books | Missoula Independent
The Alaska Seth Kantner writes about in Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska's Frontier isn't the one of glossy travel magazines and calendar photography. But I still love spending time in Kantner's world via his writing, where the air smells of salt and woodsmoke—when it isn't clogged with diesel fumes and Snogo exhaust—and a pleasant afternoon may be spent watching herds of caribou storm the river just beyond the front yard.
Orion Magazine - Kana
Submit your own haiku in the discussion area. TO REACH THE HONEY HOLE I have to cross a channel of knee-high, silt-stained river with twenty-month-old Luka, my mushroom-picking partner, on my shoulders. I wade in: the soles of my sandals clambering for purchase on the moss-covered cobbles, the cold flow kiting my pant legs, Luka’s knees tightening around my neck.
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