Left Bank #1 (Writing & Fishing)

This is the first volume of a new literary magazine showcasing writers from the Pacific Northwest; each issue will be organized thematically. For this issue, the unnamed editors have chosen a wide-ranging group of authors from the region, including a few familiar names like Wallace Stegner and Craig Lesley, and turned them loose on the subjects of ``fishing as metaphor and writing as the naming of truth.'' The fishing pieces are uniformly excellent, with particular kudos going to Robert Stubblefield's evocative recollection of fishing the waters his grandfather had fished and learning not to kill thoughtlessly. The interviews with and homages to writers of the region like A. B. Guthrie (memorialized by Doug Marx) and William Gibson (questioned by John Domini) are useful and intelligently done, but occasionally have the feeling of special pleading--not for the subjects themselves but for the idea of regional writing. Much more effective in that vein is Penelope Reedy's piece; after deriding the notion of regional anthologies, she observes that ``writing in the provinces is a deathly lonely business.'' In that respect it's not unlike fishing. (Dec.)