Search results for ""author bill heavey""

For more than twenty years, Bill Heavey has staked a claim as one of America’s best writers and most passionate—if not necessarily most skilled—outdoorsmen. In his new collection, Should the Tent Be Burning Like That?, Heavey takes readers across the country to experience his triumphs and failures as a suburban dad who happens to love hunting and fishing. He nearly drowns attempting to fish the pond inside the cloverleaf off an Interstate Highway four miles from the White House. He rents and crashes a forty-four-foot houseboat on a river in Florida. He accompanies a shaggy steelhead fanatic named Mikey on a thousand-mile odyssey on the California coast and comes to see him as a purer soul than almost anyone he has ever met.Whatever the subject, Heavey’s tales are odes to the notion that enthusiasm is more important than skill, and a testament to the enduring power of the natural world. Whether he’s hunting mule deer in Montana, draining cash on an overpriced pistol, or ruminating on the joys and agonies of outdoor gear, Heavey always entertains and enlightens with honesty and wit.

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Whether he is accidentally cooking his brain with hand warmers or yanking his lure away from a trophy fish just before it takes the bait, Bill Heavey can do no right. For almost a decade, he has chronicled his incompetence on the back page of Field & Stream, where his hilarious dispatches about life as a hapless outdoorsman who lives in suburbia have earned him legions of fans. But Heavey is more than a humorist. The stories in this book range from amusing tales of a modern dad struggling to navigate the finer points of parenting and married life to longer and more serious narratives that involve travel, adventure, and tragedy. No matter what he's writing about, Heavey is a master of blending humor and pathos--and wide-ranging outdoor enthusiasms--into a poignant and potent stew.

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In two decades at Field & Stream, the nation's biggest outdoor magazine, Bill Heavey has become America's everyman outdoorsman. Why? Because he believes that enthusiasm trumps skill. When he forgets his hat on a freezing winter hunt, he improvises, cutting open the juice-stained plush golden retriever puppy his daughter left in the car and using it as headgear. Trying to impress a lady, he flips his canoe and loses everything in the boat. Heavey takes you along with him as he nearly freezes to death in the 30-below cold of Alaska, and he also survives a divorce, plans deer hunts around his duties as a single dad, and defies a back doctor who tells him his tree-stand days may be coming to an end. Throughout, he is alive to both the ridiculousness and poignancy of life. Collecting more than sixty of Heavey's best stories from Field & Stream, the Washington Post, and the Washingtonian, this far-ranging and enlightening volume traces a life lived outdoors through the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious.

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For more than twenty years, Bill Heavey—a three-time National Magazine Award finalist—has staked a claim as one of America’s best writers. In feature stories and his Field & Stream column “A Sportsman’s Life,” as well as other publications, he has taken readers across the country and beyond to experience his triumphs and failures as a suburban dad who happens to love hunting and fishing. Should the Tent Be Burning Like That? gathers together a wide range of Heavey’s best work. He nearly drowns attempting to fish the pond inside the cloverleaf off an Interstate Highway four miles from the White House. He rents and crashes a forty-four-foot houseboat on a river in Florida. On a manic weeklong deer archery hunt in Ohio, he finds it necessary to practice by shooting arrows into his motel room’s phonebook (the blunt penetrates all the way to page 358, "KITCHEN CABINET—REFACING & REFINISHING"). Accompanying a shaggy steelhead fanatic—Mikey, who has no job or fixed address but owns four boats—on a thousand-mile odyssey up and down the California coast in search of fishable water, he comes to see Mikey as a purer soul than almost anyone he has ever met.Whatever the subject, Heavey’s tales are odes to the notion that enthusiasm is more important than skill, and a testament to the enduring power of the natural world. Whether he’s hunting mule deer in Montana, draining cash on an overpriced pistol, or ruminating on the joys and agonies of outdoor gear, Heavey always entertains and enlightens with honesty and wit.

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