The Sky Fisherman is a boy’s coming of age story, set in a Northwest river town; it is full of drama, river and fishing stories, rural humor, and American Indian lore. The main character, Culver, lives with his widowed mother; his father drowned in a boating accident while on the fabled Lost River with his Uncle Jake, a guide. As the novel begins, Culver’s mother is shedding her feckless arsonist second husband to return to the town where Jake lives; the guide becomes Culver’s surrogate father. After a young Indian man’s apparent drowning is revealed to be murder and a terrible fire threatens to engulf the entire town, Culver’s world grows darker, and secrets about race relations, betrayals, and Uncle Jake’s own past end his innocence. During a dramatic flood, Culver comes to understand forgiveness and gains the healing that he needs to survive.
Craig Lesley earned a B. A. from Whitman College and M.A. at the University of Kansas and settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1970 to teach English and creative writing at Clackamas Community College. With the help of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he earned his MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His first novel, Winterkill, the story of a Native American rodeo rider, was published in 1984 by Houghton Mifflin. His second, River Song, is a sequel. The Sky Fisherman, Lesley’s third novel, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He calls it his favorite novel. Lesley’s fourth novel, Storm Riders, won an Oregon Book Award and is based on the true story of Lesley’s family’s attempt to help a young Indian boy damaged by fetal alcohol syndrom and abandoned by his parents. Lesley has also edited two anthologies of short stories and has published his own stories in various little and literary magazines. He has served as the chair of creative writing at Willamette University and as Writer-in-Residence at Whitman College and Portland State University. He lives with his wife and daughters in Portland.
1. Culver has mixed feelings about his mother throughout the book. How are those typical of the ones that any boy of his age might have, and how are they distinctive to his family situation?
2. How does living near Jake change his life? Do you see him copying Jake as a role model? How?
3. What symbolic role(s) does the river play in the book? Is it distinctive enough to be called a “character?” Does what you decide help explain why Jake feels so at home there?
4. How does the book depict Native Americans? Does the portrait seem fair and rounded to you? What does their presence add to the narrative?
5. The novel has a great deal to say about how men in the rural west relate to each other. What assumptions and values seem to govern these interactions? Is there a “code of the rural west” implied in this book?
6. Lesley uses the archetypes of fire and water liberally in this book. What do those add to the narrative? Do you like the use of them?
7. What does Culver learn about life by the novel’s end? Has he matured, do you think? What do you make of the ending, where he looks up into the sky and imagines his family there, saving a place for him?