Out fishing

Matt White

James Prosek ’97, pictured atop Lancaster Hill near Sheffield in West Texas, doing research for his most recent book, "Grasslands." The first of Prosek’s thirteen books, "Trout: An Illustrated History," was published in 1996, when he was an undergraduate. View full image

James Prosek ’97 has been called the Audubon of trout—even by this very magazine. Our April 1996 issue featured undergrad Prosek on the cover, just after he had published Trout: An Illustrated History, a book with watercolor portraits of around 70 varieties of the titular fish. Now the author of 12 more books on nature and an artist exhibited all over the world (including a 2020 show at the Yale University Art Gallery), Prosek lives half an hour from Yale in Easton, Connecticut, on the street where he grew up. He is married, and his son Cody, 7, shows a similar interest in the natural world. Except instead of catching fish, he likes digging holes.

Lenore Skenazy: Apparently you started working on your first book at age 10?

James Prosek: My mom left when I was nine years old, and I didn’t see her for about four years. A friend of mine, Stephen, introduced me to fishing, and it became my whole life—I think because it was totally mine. Like, “Screw you, adults! I don’t need you anymore.” I was feral.

LS: And for some reason you decided to categorize what you caught?  

JP: I couldn’t find a book on the trout in North America. So I started writing letters to wildlife departments around the country saying, maybe, “I heard there were trout in Nevada, but can you tell me more information?” I can’t think of anyone who didn’t respond to my goofy, handwritten letters.

LS: Maybe there weren’t a lot of other fifth graders writing to them. What did you tell them you were doing?  

JP: I was trying to put together a list of all the fish. I wanted to paint all the species. But no two biologists could agree on how many species there were—or what a species even was. That blew my mind.

LS: It sort of seems like something you’ve been thinking about ever since: the idea of no real boundaries between plants and animals, art and artifacts, history and now.

JP: Everything’s integrated. Everything’s influencing the evolution of everything else.

LS: Speaking of: What influenced you at Yale?

JP: Sophomore year I saw these beautiful posters announcing the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize. The committee used to come to your dorm room and look at your book collection, and if you won the prize you’d get money to buy more books. So I submitted my collection of trout fishing books.

LS: Slam dunk?

JP: Yes. And that’s how I met a curator at the Beinecke Library named Stephen Parks, and he became an important mentor of mine. He’s the one who encouraged me to write my senior essay about The Compleat Angler, which was written in 1653.

LS: A very old fishing manual?

JP: Essentially. But also a sort of coded polemic about the English Civil War.

LS: But of course. Who else loomed large in your Yale life?

JP: Harold Bloom. And I took a class about poetic verse forms with Penelope Laurans. During shopping period, when we were choosing classes, we had to go up and tell her our names and why we wanted to take her class. And she’s like, “Oh, James Prosek. I read your [Yale] application.” We became friends, and she told me the whole story later. I’d been in sort of an “in-between” pile, because my SAT scores weren’t perfect. But I’d submitted some of my poetry, and watercolors of my fish, and she was good friends with Chip Long, who was then deputy provost. And he loved fishing. She’s like, “What do you think, Chip?” And he’s like, “Let him in!”

LS: I read that you’ve observed thousands of trout across America. Are you still painting them today?

JP: Right now I’m working on a project for the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth. I’m making a tree stump out of bronze, but the full shadow of the tree is still visible on the ground; it’ll go through the wall of these two galleries. The shadow represents that we can keep the memory alive of things that have passed, through stories and song and books.