Return to Elkins Creek combines a series of fishing stories, descriptions of changing cultural norms, and the peculiar history of freshwater fishing gear. Beginning with subsistence fishing in very rural Mississippi at a time “when the poorest among us in the Deep South still took our water from holes in the ground and high school was considered an optional step along the career path,” the stories continue chronologically, with descriptions of learning to fish with rod-and-reel combos and artificial lures; coming-of-age angling misadventures with dubious backwoods characters; swapping fish for toilet paper during the Pandemic; a cheerfully inept expedition to a Florida bay where things were enlivened by a hurricane; and a return to where it all began, alongside a small creek in the hills of the Choctaw County backwoods, cane pole and bait jar in hand.

Part memoir, part cultural history, and part historical vignette, Return to Elkins Creek is held together by the common thread of fishing as a touchstone in changing times. One need not be a fishing enthusiast to appreciate the stories or descriptions of the many colorful characters therein, including the clever and eccentric inventors of modern fishing gear.