My Father, My Friend

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Arthur Mayse, an experienced newspaperman and popular West Coast
columnist, spent many years fishing the Oyster River, a Vancouver Island
stream, with his dad, Will Mayse. Will was an itinerant Baptist preacher
whose relations with congregations, as well as with his own wife, were
not always the happiest. Fishing allowed him to escape into a beautiful
world that he could share with his son as an equal.

Ironically, it was on one of these fishing expeditions that Arthur
Mayse met the woman who would become his wife. Fishing was one of the
bonds that united the couple over many years of happy marriage. Both
died within weeks of each other in 1992. Their daughter Susan, also a
journalist, saw her father’s reminiscences to press and contributed an
afterword. In these pages, fishing is just the hook on which two very
special people have come back to life.