For Everything There is a Season: Stories From the Porch

Softcover, 235 pages.
Special Signed Edition*

A fresh collection of twenty-three sporting essays gathered over nearly five decades in the outdoors. Each passage within represents a short segment of time from that lengthy measure. Each a small memento plucked from the hourglass sands of seminal experiences.

For Everything There is a Season commemorates a select handful of life experiences that lived on to become the fabric of traditions – mementos of victories and vestiges of failures. A homage to pleasures and pains, fears and frustrations, trials and triumphs. The ones we taste in a cup of coffee poured before a winter trek in the big woods, and smell in the first, fresh days of spring. Those we hear in the soft chuckle of a summer river and see in the silent sip of trout or the staunch point of a seasoned dog. The ones we wear like a trusty old flannel beside a campfire, where they become tall tales, or even legends, celebrating our common bond with wild places and each other.

I hope you’ll enjoy our time together on the metaphorical “porch” – that uniquely American symbol of gathering. Where embellishments as thick Mississippi mud and as deep as an old well are not only forgiven with a knowing nod, but as expected as rain on the opener.

Reviews:
"Stories From the Porch made me smile, it made me pause and think, it made me laugh out loud and, most of all, it made me want to pack up my gear and head off an adventure of my own. What more could you ask for from a book about hunting and fishing? Crater writes with the easy confidence of someone who's been there, done that, and lived to return a little wiser. It's well worth a read." —Mark Kenyon Author of That Wild Country

"Allen Crater's writing is as sharp as his knives, as true as his casts, and as tight as his bond with friends and family. Through adventures in his beloved Michigan, west to Montana, and north to Canada, his terrific collection of essays, observations, and recipes—yes, recipes!— enables us to see a remarkable world of woods, wind, and water through the eyes of a man who knows where and when to look." —Tim Schulz Author of A Cast Away in Montana. 

"Allen's passion for the outdoors is contagious and he writes damn well. Who can resist an author who invites us to join him on his porch so he can tell us with great joy about catching a 13-inch trout that had a "serious Napoleon complex." This book demonstrates beyond all doubt that fishing and hunting are far superior to golf and other petty and frivolous pastimes." —Jerry Dennis Author of The River Home and Up North in Michigan