Guiding Elliott - Softcover

Guiding Elliott, first published in 1997, is a novel, told through a series of letters from a fly-fishing guide named Donnie Phillips to a New York City fly-fishing club. Donnie lives amid the best trout fishing in the West. He’s a Montana fly-fishing guide, a simple man who believes that women have no right to be on the trout stream and that oatmeal has no business being considered food. With a comic mangling of the English language rivaling Mrs. Malaprop’s, Donnie attempts to impart to city folk the wisdom of a “real fly-fishing guide.” But he gets carried away with hilarious accounts of small-town life, its wacky characters—including his new friend Elliott—fly-fishing rivalries, and barroom brawls. As it turns out, this season is a particularly bad one for Donnie. A barrage of personal trials worthy of Job gradually transforms this stubborn man into one whose generous spirit makes him a hero in the eyes of the woman he loves.Full of raucous humor, great fishing lore, and surprising plot turns, Guiding Elliott blooms into a rich and vibrant evocation of the new West.

Robert Lee’s stories and poems have appeared in Cutbank, The Talking River Review, and anthologized in Surviving the Western State of Mind: A Montana Writer’s Daybook. He lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, where he writes, works for the post office, and fishes. Guiding Elliott is his first novel.