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Perhaps one of the first things that will strike readers when picking up Leigh Seippel’s novel Ruin is its unusual subtitle: “A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy.” Yes, you read that properly.

Ruin is an engrossing novel about a young couple’s struggle back from a financial catastrophe that so many of us dread. Having fled their urban life, they begin to build a new life together in a rural setting, far from former friends and colleagues — only to have it fall apart all over again in ways that could never be predicted.

Fly fishing is a prevalent metaphor in the book. And no wonder: the author is the past president of The Anglers’ Club of New York and now heads up its fishery conservation activities. He gave us more insight into Ruin in this recent interview.

Q: What inspired you to title your book Ruin?

Writing Ruin seems to trace back to when fish first evolved. After a lifetime of fly fishing, so many perceptions had opened up that I wanted to take readers astream vividly, book in hand. The driving story of a couple who suddenly become broke and homeless roots in a real-life situation of rural neighbors. And the strong but sensitive and vulnerable husband reflects early Hemingway figures who, when young, I hoped to find again.

Q: The opening of Ruin is reminiscent of current court cases brought about by the misdeeds of the rich and famous. What was it about these cases that inspired you?

A: I wrote Ruin aware that the twists and reversals of earning a living, or for that matter seeking a fortune, are dangerous in modern society. Some sudden financial catastrophe is most everyone’s silent dread since no one is immune to such a chance. Frank was just unlucky in too large of a speculative investment, not guilty of wrongdoing.  But he is guilty of carelessly allowing his wife to guarantee debt which led to her own loss of an inherited fortune. This novel is about the unpredictable progression of character in a world of chance.

Q: Fly fishing is the prevalent metaphor in the book. What inspired you to choose it and what does it represent to you?

A: A real fly fisherman only experiences it properly when his mind and surrounding nature are in sync. Thus, he moves intelligently within the large clockwork of a stream on a day in a season of a year. That true fisherman understands he cannot demand success and must learn from all that occurs, including errors. For Frank Campbell, whose confidence as a man  and husband was badly shaken after foolish decisions, this is an understanding that speaks to him as he teaches himself the sport.

Q: At times Frank and Francesca seem like two sides of a single person rather than two individuals. What do these protagonists represent to you?

A: Francy and Frank had a harmonious marriage for years.  Living in wealth in elite Manhattan, they shared an easy life. Graceful, even, and both were young and good-looking. But when rudely cast out of their upper class world by bankruptcy, they begin to grow into their new life differently. Their new home in Time Farm is echoing the biblical Eden story, though it remains to be seen whether they were cast into or out of the life best for them as individuals and as a couple.

Q: Many of your scenes are realistically rendered. Are they based on any real-world locations?

A: Ruin is a fiction woven of real places, though colored to reflect the characters’ emotional presence. My wife and I long lived in Manhattan and also on a rundown farm that we revivified diversely, goats included. The fishing scenes are almost all drawn from my personal experiences, but for artistic reasons were intensified through the troubled narrator’s vision, memory and voice. The personalities of the characters rooted in West Texas, the Deep South, New York and London come from my observations in those places.

Q: Your prose evokes Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Pynchon at different times. How have these masters influenced your writing?

A: I had a good literary education at Columbia and later. But the voice of Ruin just happened, no master in mind, with the exception that I started writing in my personal disappointment with influential writers. For example, I regretted Hemingway’s novels drifting away from admirable, damaged Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and losing the chord of real life in all the exotica that followed.  Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby created Nick Carraway as the young narrator of a romantic tragedy a bit like that of Ruin, but Fitzgerald left that narrational voice a sketch of a mirror, passionless. So I suppose master influences on Ruin were as much a negative as they were a positive.

Q: What would you like readers to take away from the novel?

A: Basically, I hope people decide to go fly fishing. To really enjoy it, mind and body.

 

 

About Leigh Seippel:

Author Leigh Seippel lives in the worlds of Francy and Frank. He has worked a small farm in the Hudson Valley, complete with officious goat herd. Fly fishing has taken him across four continents. He is a past president of The Anglers’ Club of New York, where he now heads its fishery conservation activities.

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