Mending Holes

Description

Patrick Dixon conjures his past life as an Alaskan fisherman with his considerable poetic and storytelling gifts and a capacious memory for the perfect detail. That world’s thrills, exhaustion, danger, jonesing, friendships, boats, whiff of diesel layered over fish, and orange pink sunsets all feel close enough to touch. So does the push and pull of yearning, fear, and wonder that remain. This is a beautiful account of an old life lived completely in the crystalline present, and the cost and reward of giving it up in time.

-Kathleen Flenniken, former Washington state Poet Laureate and author of Plume and Post Romantic

Patrick Dixon, with decades of commercial salmon fishing behind him, has convincingly captured the reality of his time and place-the smells of fish, the light at the end of a day, wooden boats moldering on the beach, nets full of fish and empty nets holding the next year’s hopes, the greenhorn he was, the old man of memories. He asks, late in this alternately heart-stopping and heart-warming collection, “How did I get to be so lucky?” We are all lucky that Patrick has given us such an intimate, honest, literate look into his examined life.

-Nancy Lord, author of Fishcamp and Beluga Days

Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Patrick Dixon,Lana Hechtman Ayers (Editor in Chief)
Published: 07/01/2025
Publisher: Moonpath Press
ISBN: 9798989948826
Pages: 94
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 0.23″ H x 9.00″ L x 6.00″ W

About the Author
Dixon, Patrick: – Patrick Dixon is a writer/photographer retired from careers as an educator and commercial fisherman. A member of the board of directors of the Olympia Poetry Network, he has been published in several literary journals, including Cirque, Claudius Speaks, Linden Avenue, Mom Egg Review, Oberon, Panoplyzine, The Raven Chronicles, Soul-Lit, The Tishman Review, and World Enough Writers among others. His workappeared in the anthologies Examined Life, The Madrona Project #7, FISH 2015, and WA 129. He was included in the Washington State Book Award-winning anthologies Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles, 2020) and I Sing the Salmon Home (Empty Bowl, 2024). Mr. Dixon is a past poetry editor of National Fisherman magazine’s quarterly, North Pacific Focus. A member of the FisherPoets Gathering organizing committee, he received an Artist Trust grant to edit Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology (2014). His chapbookArc of Visibility won the 2015 Alabama State Poetry Society Morris Memorial Award. His poem “Western Washington November” was selected as a winner of the 2023 “Poems of Place” competition by Cirque literary journal. His poem “Twilight on the Boat” and photograph “Dancing Sky” were selected by the Alaska Department of Parks and Outdoor Recreation for an interpretive sign at Bird Point Park, a beluga whale viewing spot south of Anchorage along the Seward Highway. Mr. Dixon spent his childhood in Logansport, Indiana, but grew up when he moved to Kenai, Alaska in 1975, where he lived for 23 years. Mending Holes is his first full-length collection of poetry.Ayers, Lana Hechtman: – Lana Hechtman Ayers, a former New Yorker who made her way to the Pacific Northwest via a dozen year sojourn in New England, has shepherded over a hundred forty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Lana’s latest collection, The Autobiography of Rain, is available from Fernwood Press. She lives in Newport, Oregon on the unceded lands of the Yaq’on people with her husband and several fur babies. She writes in a room over the garage with a view of the Yaquina river. Say hello at LanaAyers.com.