Voices of Rivers

Dickerson's lovingly crafted narratives take us to waters from sockeye spawning streams of Alaska's Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks, to Rocky Mountain rivers in the national parks and forests of Montana and Wyoming, to the little brook trout creeks in his home waters of Maine. Along the way we will fall in love with arctic streams, glacial rivers flowing green with flour, alpine brooks tumbling out of melting snow, and little estuaries where lobsters and brook trout swim within a few yards of each other; with wide deep lakes, little mountain tarns with crystal clear water, and tannin-laden beaver ponds the color of tea. The narratives are creative, personal, and compelling, yet informed by science and history as well as close observation and the eye of a naturalist. The characters in the stories are fascinating, from fly fishing guides to fisheries biologists to wranglers to Dickerson himself who often explores the rivers with a fly rod in hand, but whose writing transcends any sort of fishing narrative. But the most important characters are the rivers themselves whose stories Dickerson tells, and whose music he helps us to hear.

Matthew Dickerson was a June 2017 artist-in-residence at Glacier National Park and a May 2018 artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park. He is the author of several works of fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as literary explorations of mythopoeic literature with a particular focus on environmental aspects of the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S.Lewis.

His previous narrative non-fiction nature writing includes several books about rivers and the trout that dwell in them: Downstream and Trout in the Desert. His most recent novel is a work of medieval historical fiction titled The Rood and the Torc, set in 7th-Century Europe and inspired by a fragment of the medieval poem Beowulf. He is also the co-author of Ents, Elves, and Eriador: the Environmental Vision of J.R.R.Tolkien, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: the Environmental Vision of C.S.Lewis, and From Homer to Harry Potter: a Handbook of Myth and Fantasy.

Dickerson is a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont where he has had affiliations with the Computer Science Department, Environmental Studies Program, Writing Program, and the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf.