Return to Elkins Creek

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1960s
1970s
A01=Evan Peacock
artificial lures
Author_Evan Peacock
bream
Category=DNC
Category=FXE
Category=SV
Category=SVF
catfish
coming of age
crappie
creeks
Deep South culture
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_sports-fitness
farm ponds
fishing gear
freshwater angling
humor
inventor
jon boats
largemouth bass
Legion Lake
outdoors
pandemic
plastic worms
reservoirs
rod reel cane poles
rural Mississippi MS
spinnerbaits
tackle
Tombigbee River
top-water strikes
trot lines
vignette

Product details

  • ISBN 9781496862785
  • Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 30 Mar 2026
  • Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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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.

Evan Peacock is a former archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. He is author of the acclaimed Kudzu on the Ivory Tower: From the Backwoods to an Academic Career in the Deep, Deep South and Mississippi Archaeology Q & A and coeditor with Patricia K. Galloway of Exploring Southeastern Archaeology, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi.

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