Reading from the book for about 25 people on Tuesday, Aadsen described her “origin story of coming into fishing” with an excerpt from “First,” the first of 26 essays that make up What Water Holds.

“As I roamed the tidelines as a feral 9-year-old, my parents struggled to stop time,” Aadsen read from her book, recalling a winter between the fishing seasons of her youth.

“Not knowing it was impossible to transform a 54-foot bare hull into a seaworthy fishing vessel in nine months—in time for the upcoming salmon season—that was exactly what they did,” Aadsen read. “They labored for the uncompromising hours, days, months required to indeed launch a newly born boat that spring, seemingly unaware that, though a seaworthy vessel emerged, our family’s stability eroded. They named the Willie Lee II after one of their veterinary clients, a man who’d told my dad stories about hand trolling for king salmon in Sitka Sound.”

Aadsen includes her mother’s logbook entry from the fishing season that followed: “Caught six kings all day. Lost line of gear. Bought battery $97; sold fish $17. Ocean nasty as cat s__t.”

“Struggling to make ends meet, my dad grew anxious that fishing wasn’t a sustainable way to support a family,” Aadsen read of her family’s fishing journey. “My mom disagreed. In the summer of 1991, the Willie Lee II headed north with my mom alone at the helm, with me as her 13-year-old crew.”

“That is how I got into this,” Aadsen said Tuesday to the cozy crowd in the library.

Aadsen throughout the reading described how she has seen the commercial troll fishery change in her lifetime. She addressed how trollers are carrying on this year despite a market crash that tanked fishermen’s earnings for chum and pink salmon throughout Alaska.

“I see that folks are being incredibly resilient, more so than anyone should have to be and diversifying where they can, getting involved in other fisheries where they can, people are trying to make it by direct marketing their catch,” Aadsen said. “This fleet has been through a lot.”

Aadsen recalled “fleet elders” throughout her career warning that “‘this fishery’s got five years left in it.'”

“I’ve always heard that,” Aadsen said. “Sometimes it feels more like ‘here we are,’ coming up on that. … We keep our heads up, keep doing what we’re doing, stay active and organized.”

Aadsen touched on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., where she lobbied congresspeople with a group of fishery representatives from Alaska, Washington and Oregon against a springtime U.S. District Court order in a lawsuit filed by the Wild Fish Conservancy that would have shut down the summer troll fishery for chinook salmon. In June, the Ninth Circuit Court issued a stay that allowed Southeast Alaska trollers to catch their share of chinook this summer.

Aadsen expressed disappointment with a “public misinformation campaign that is happening down south” that pegged hook-and-line salmon troll fishermen as the primary culprits for an unhealthy group of orcas that live in the Puget Sound, and became the substance of a lawsuit that could have practically wiped out trollers’ livelihood.

She said that groups like Wild Fish Conservancy mislead “folks to think that any king salmon they are buying is straight out of a southern resident (killer whale)’s mouth, and it’s not.”

“The kings that we’re fishing on up here are, almost none of them are those Puget Sound kings,” Aadsen said. “That’s documented, but having that conversation with people down south is very challenging, especially when there’s a ton of money and misinformation being spread.”

Aadsen said that as the industry weathers new challenges, relationships among commercial fishermen are changing. Reading from her story “Hearing Voices,” Aadsen recalls her younger years when “the VHF was lively” and “trolling was a self-professed gentlemen’s fishery.”

“Radio chatter was language immersion school, and I was a diligent student,” Aadsen read. “I absorbed fleet norms and etiquette among the dropped consonants and cadence, identifying partner boats and striving to crack their secret codes. ‘We’ve got a purple apple over here.’ ‘You’re smoking us, we’ve only had a blue banana all morning.’ I tuned my ears to hear what they said and everything that they didn’t. The balance of being able to whine for days, with an underlying optimism that kept their hooks in the water. The artistry of casual, unself-conscious profanity. I aspired to mimic the precise weary intonation of a perfectly groaned ‘Christ on toast.'”

She said that satellite texting has changed the game for trollers.

“What with everyone texting, the radio’s mostly silent now,” Aadsen read. “The culture’s changed. The general consensus is that serious fishermen don’t talk on 16. The exceptions are crude — cussing somebody out for gouging on the tack — and don’t much sound like the gentlemen trollers once believed themselves to be.”

Aadsen said that she still finds many “kindred spirits” among commercial fishermen, especially by attending the annual FisherPoets gathering in Astoria, Oregon. Her book is, in part, a collection of work that she’s prepared and performed for the annual event that she’s been attending each year since 2012.

“Since 1998, in the last weekend of February, fisherfolks from all over the country, some around the world come to share written work that celebrates commercial fisheries,” Aadsen said Tuesday of FisherPoets. “The way that our written work appears can be poetry, prose, music, so it’s kind of that convergence of commercial fisherfolks who are writing about their lives.”

“I immediately fell in love with that experience of being with people from all different fisheries, all different areas but all with that commitment to articulating parts of our experience and things that set you apart and make you weird among land people,” Aadsen said.

Aadsen said that her new book of stories came to life thanks to Holly Hughes, a fellow fisher poet and former commercial gillnetter who recently took the helm of Empty Bowl press with her partner.

“It’s a tiny, tiny literary press that publishes four books a year,” Aadsen said. “Holly asked me if I would be interested in doing a collection of essays with them. She was very honest from the beginning that ‘we can’t pay you, but we’ll put out a beautiful book.'”

Aadsen commissioned art from Sitka artist Lisa Teas Conway and worked with her to create the cover of the book.

“That was the right place for these essays to land, with people who value them and understood them and then also honored my authority over them,” Aadsen said.

One attendee during the Tuesday reading asked Aadsen whether or not she writes stories during commercial fishing trips.

Aadsen said that while it can be helpful for capturing sensory details, she rarely writes at sea.

“You’re out on deck, everything is wet, you’re exhausted, your hands are all swollen and the last thing that you want to do is hold a pen,” Aadsen said.