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Articles by John Larison
Tips for High Water Steelhead
A dimer on a high water day. So far in the Northwest, this has been a winter of extremes: a full month of ultra-low water, then weeks of near flood stage. I've been switching my tackle back and forth from light heads and short tips to massive heads and long tips, and I've burned through flies I rarely get a chance to fish. But now, given these ocean currents and the pending storms, I'm guessing we're in for a long spell of heavy flows and murky water.
[中字]什么是机械降神？#21 文学指南 - 哔哩哔哩
什么是机械降神？ #21 定义与示例-视频文稿 LICENSE: CC BY By John Larison, Oregon State Senior Instructor and Popular Novelist MLA Citation: Larison, John. "What is Deus Ex Machina?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 23 Aug. 2020, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-deus-ex-machina. Accessed [2025-6-30]. Imagine. You’ve been working for years to prepare a college application worthy of the Ivy League.
#FridayReads: The Ancients by John Larison
By Rachel Tran | October 25 2024 | NewsFridayReads Have you read this yet? Reading this right now? Share this image with the hashtag #FridayReads to spread the love! Sign Up for the First Look Book Club! A Novel A richly imagined, sweeping novel of hope, love, and adventure set in the unforgiving world of our own descendants, by the acclaimed author of WHISKEY WHEN WE’RE DRY
Skagit Secrets: Swing Flies like a Pro
We were on a coastal steelhead river the day after a monster cold front dumped two inches of rain in six hours, and the water was just settling back into shape–milky green and debris-free. My buddy Nate–whom we call Bomber for his ability to drop feathery ordnance with laser-guided precision–was working his way down one of the most consistent runs while I warmed up on shore. Water dripped from the mossy limbs, and the ferns were glazed with moisture. Everything felt right.
The Beating Heart: A Guest Post by John Larison
The Beating Heart: A Guest Post by John Larison What will we leave the generations to come, and how to we best prepare them for the future? John Larison’s new novel The Ancients follows three siblings surviving each day in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic world. Read on for Larison’s exclusive essay on where the inspiration for this book sparked, down below. Hardcover $30.00 Please enable javascript to add items to the cart.
No Human Is An Island: On Fiction As a Way of Connecting Across Difference
Maybe all fourteen year-olds feel like they are living on an island—though in my case, the island was literally an island: a speck of limestone dressed in green jungle, part of the Micronesian archipelago, just north of the equator, in the middle of the moody, blue Pacific. Article continues after advertisement I’d resided on perhaps a dozen islands before this—some tropical, some frigid—as the child of National Geographic filmmakers. These were not tourist destinations, at least not yet.
THE ANCIENTS | Kirkus Reviews
Warnings are wrapped up inside of portents in turning today’s headlines into literature. Two inimical societies seek to escape the ravages of climate change in this imaginative novel. Extend the post-apocalyptic sections of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and you’re in the territory of Larison’s tale. Set in unspecified locations—though one imagines Alaska at one end and southern California at the other—it begins with children of a hunting clan who have been abandoned.
Five Kinds of Bass Grabs
The real warmth arrives in late April. By dawn, backlit vapor rises from the edge of lily pads; at noon, turtles sunbathe on every exposed log; just after 2 PM, a quilt of gray clouds arrives from the south. It’s beer-time on your local largemouth pond. #1: That Has to Be Wood The cast lands right where the shallows meet the deep. A green and yellow Clouser sinks for a five-count before you begin the retrieve. A short strip, then about three beats of stillness before another.
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On the Podcast: Neelou Malekpour, Dylan Tomine, and Erin S. Lane
On the Podcast: Neelou Malekpour, Dylan Tomine, and Erin S. Lane In this episode, meet SMUDGED founder Neelou Malekpour, author of The Art of Sacred Smoke, Patagonia ambassador and conservation advocate Dylan Tomine, author of Headwaters, and writer and theologian Erin S. Lane, author of Someone Other Than a Mother. Listen in to hear what inspired these authors to write their audiobooks, and what they’re most excited for audiobook listeners to hear.
Flood, Fire and Chrome
We’d driven through the night only to find 31 trailers already in queue at the boat launch, red taillights bent by the rain sliding down our windshield. Welcome to a Thursday morning on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the peak of winter steelhead season. We stepped onto the muddy road and flipped up the hoods of our wading jackets.
End-Times Steelhead. Group therapy on the Oregon Coast.
ConservationDaily DrakeDrake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2020Fly Fishing Industry NewsFreshwater Fly FishingHomepage ContentHumorLifestyleSalmon/SteelheadTrout Photo by Corey Kruitbosch End-Times Steelhead. Group therapy on the Oregon Coast. by John Larison None of us guessed what was coming. Within hours of our leaving the river, the county would close all boat ramps and Oregon’s governor would implement stay-at-home guidelines.
Effectively Presenting Flies to Steelhead
One of my favorite parts of guiding steelhead anglers has always been watching the glowing line swing across the blue and green currents. Fly fishers waist deep in the river rarely have a clear view of the swing, which is a shame because there's profound pleasure in watching a fly swim through fishy water. More to the point, when you're waist deep, you don't see how a fish acted before it ate or what precisely about your swing prompted the fish to chase in the first place.
Whiskey When We're Dry
John Larison’s mould-breaking Western is a gritty and lyrical American epic which offers a fresh and very modern take on the myths surrounding the struggle to open up the largely untamed American west. The book’s unrelenting momentum and thoughtful exploration of questions of gender identity, race, power, and violence both celebrates and subverts the accepted version of the romance of the West.
Prison Book Program
In the last five months, we've sent five boxes of new books to the Prison Book Program and that is all thanks to you! We've added some new books for the holidays: vampire romance, sci-fi, westerns, and creative topics. And thanks again for supporting Wellesley Books and the Prison Book Program! The Prison Book Program believes in the life-changing power of literature. Books give people the chance to learn, grow, and explore the worlds of their choosing.
Good Reads at Waco libraries: Nov. 2018
FICTIONNovember Road Set against the assassination of JFK, this poignant and evocative crime novel centers on a desperate cat-and-mouse chase across 1960s America. Frank Guidry, a street lieutenant for a New Orleans mob boss, flees when his knowledge about JFK’s assassination makes him a target. Guidry takes off to Las Vegas to find help so that he can vanish. On the way he spots a housewife and her children in a broken-down car.
‘Whiskey When We’re Dry’ depicts Civil War-era trans protagonist
There’s an increasingly rich vein of storytelling, both fiction and non-fiction, about the ways people of yesteryear dealt with transgender issues. It was, of course, a “thing” before we had the language for it. In John Larison’s new novel “Whiskey When We’re Dry” (his third) out last week and already praised by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine and other outlets, we meet a teen protagonist thrust into crisis.
The History and Future of the Western in 10 Books
True Grit meets Yentl in Larison’s evocative debut, Whiskey When We're Dry. In the post-Civil War West, 17-year-old Jessilyn Harney’s father dies, leaving their financially strapped homestead in her hands. She decides that the only way of saving it is to track down her errant older brother, Noah—who left several years back and has since become a notorious outlaw—and convince him to return home. Since it’s dangerous to be a woman traveling alone, she chooses to masquerade as a boy.
Win A Copy Of 'Whiskey When We're Dry: A Novel' By John Larison
In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess’s quest lands her in the employ of the territory’s violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah–dead or alive.
Where The Western Meets Crime Fiction
Crime novels. Westerns. Most of us think of these two genres as grossly different: one tends to feature detectives-types solving mysterious felonies, while the other prefers to focus on rough-riding cowboys behaving badly. Crime emphasizes the keen thinking of its protagonists, a tradition born maybe from Sherlock Holmes himself, while westerns emphasize a certain nostalgia for the frontier past. And yet on a deep structural level, these two divergent genres share a surprising amount.
Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison
Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR’s All Things Considered. “A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners.
Effectively Presenting Flies to Steelhead
One of my favorite parts of guiding steelhead anglers has always been watching the glowing line swing across the blue and green currents. Fly fishers waist deep in the river rarely have a clear view of the swing, which is a shame because there’s profound pleasure in watching a fly swim through fishy water. More to the point, when you’re waist deep, you don’t see how a fish acted before it ate or what precisely about your swing prompted the fish to chase in the first place.
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