Fishing and the Art of Activism

A lifelong activist, Stephen Duncombe has organized community groups, mobilized marches, staged direct actions, walked picket lines, and been arrested for civil disobedience more times than he can remember. Over the past decade, he has traveled the globe training activists to create more like artists and artists to strategize more like activists. An avid fisherman in his youth, he put down his rod and reel for over forty years. Looking for a physical retreat and mental break during the pandemic of 2020 he took them up again. After forty years, he had to re-teach himself how to fish and approached the practice with what Zen masters call Beginner's Mind. With no habits or tradition to fall back upon, every fish successfully caught or line hopelessly snarled provided a clear lesson. With hours spent doing little more than casting and retrieving - actually catching fish being a fraction of the time spent fishing - he had a lot of time to think about these lessons he was learning. One of the things he thought a lot about was activism. Fishing, he discovered, has a lot to teach about the art of activism.

Fishing and the Art of Activism is a collection of these lessons. The format is simple: one paragraph on fishing followed by another on what might be learned and applied to activism. Each mini-essay is accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration. Topics range from telling fish stories and the trap of activist nostalgia, to the impossibility of thinking like a fish yet the necessity of understanding one's audience, with detours through snarled fishing lines, meditations on self-care, catch-and-release, and taking responsibility for the human cost of one's political actions. Fishing and activism may be the ostensible topics of Fishing and the Art of Activism, but they're really just subjects to reflect upon to address bigger questions: How do I live in the moment? How do I understand the past? How do I spend time with myself? Where do I find community? How can I connect to those who are different from me? Where do I find excitement? How do I find peace? Fishing and the Art of Activism is a small and simple book, but its concerns are large.