Author Kao Kalia Yang once fished to help feed her family. Now she shares the pastime with her children.

Kao Kalia Yang cast her line into the water, hoping to catch bass.

Then she yanked her hook out of the water too soon after a nibble, preventing her from reeling in the prized fish. A missed opportunity because of impatience, she said. Instead, she caught a green sunfish, and released it.

“When we were younger, we used to eat them all the time,” she said. Now she considers them too bony.

Yang, an award-winning Minnesota author who was born in a Thai refugee camp, wrote about how her family relied on fishing years ago in her latest book, “Where Rivers Part.” The book, about her mother’s survival in Laos and the United States, earned her one of three Minnesota Book Awards this year.

More than 35 years after Yang moved to Minnesota, she lives in St. Paul, near a place she grew up fishing, Lake Phalen.

In this month’s edition of “How I Get Outside,” Yang, 44, talks about her passion for angling, a magical trip to Voyageurs National Park and why she wishes she could ski. Her responses have been edited for lengthy and clarity and:

Q: Why is fishing your favorite outdoor activity?

A: I love the anticipation. When I was young, I came here as a refugee kid at the age of 6. Fishing, I thought, was a way to procure food. I could catch a little sunny and my mom and dad would say, “That’s dinner,” and partly they’re saying that because you’re young and you believe them. You think, “I’m contributing to the family.”

As new refugees in America ... it felt like I was doing something useful and beautiful for the people I love. Like, I’m taking care of them.

I’ve also always loved that combination of the wind in your hair and the scent of the water and sometimes I feel like I can even smell the fish.

Q: How did you get into fishing?

A: [While a student at] Como Elementary School, we went on a field trip. Many of us didn’t have fishing poles, but the teachers taught us how to tie a fishing line around an empty soda can. The wait for the little sunnies to come get your bait, I just fell in love with it.

My dad had two girls, my older sister and I. Mom had a lot of miscarriages after us, so the rest [of my siblings] came later. So whenever my boy cousins said their dads went fishing, my father would take us along.

Q: What have you learned about yourself from fishing?

A: While I’m not very patient, I think one thing that I’ve learned through fishing is just how persistent I am. I don’t give up. Some people, when they don’t catch anything, they give up or they’ll say “I’m tired,” but not me.

I have a great time contemplating all of the nibbles that might be coming as well as the ones that are there. It’s been great training for being a writer. You know, every book that you have into the world, it is just another line that you cast. Fishing gave me the metaphor, the simile, to begin to understand myself.

Q: What was your best day outside?

A: I have a memory — and I don’t know where this place is anymore — but I was maybe 9. My older sister is 11 and we are with Dad and Grandma. Grandma is in her 80s. We’re fishing for sunnies. We’re sitting on a fallen tree and the tree goes over the water. The sunnies are coming right to our feet. We’re just pulling them out of the water.

We caught a whole bucket and we said, we’re gonna let them go. Grandma says, “No, no, no. You worked so hard today.” So we took all these tiny little sunnies home and my poor mother had to make dinner out of them. That was a beautiful day. It was so quiet and so magical and I miss my grandma the most.

Q: What was your worst?

A: It was one of our first family vacations ever, and my older sister and her husband had rented these cabins for all of us. We went out on a boat that they had available to rent.

It started storming and then there was a blue spot, and my sister says, we have to go to the blue spot because the blue spot, we thought, would be like the eye of a storm or something. We were wrong — the blue spot was where the storm was the worst. And this is a huge lake and I can’t swim. I love water, but like so many Hmong refugee children of my generation, swimming was way beyond my means. And so I thought about my death and I thought, let it not be here.

Q: What’s your favorite place to be outside in Minnesota?

A: Voyageurs National Park. We found this all-women team to take us all to this little rocky island and we just camped there and it was a mystical experience. You wake up and everything is covered in clouds so it’s like you’re living in a cloud and everybody you love is just an outline.

So the wetness of the ground, the wetness in the air, the water all around — it was incredibly magical. I don’t think I’m ever gonna go back. I think I’m gonna hold onto that memory forever.

Q: What’s an outdoor activity you wish you knew how to do?

A: I wish I knew how to [downhill] ski. Growing up as a child of the ’80s and ’90s, we only saw them on music videos and stuff like that. I’ve only been once, on a public school field trip to Buck Hill in Burnsville. That was really scary because, naturally, I went to the high hill and then I couldn’t come down. I cried.

Q: What’s an outdoor activity you think is overrated?

A: The electric scooters that people ride around downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis. People love them, but it’s kind of dangerous for me because I’m directionally challenged. I don’t walk straight on a sidewalk, so it would be a hazard for others and for me [if I were on a scooter].

Q: You’ve been given the chance to go on your dream outdoor adventure: What is it, and what three people would you bring with you?

A: First, my mom, because my mom loves adventures. She’s up for anything. There’s a loneliness in her heart and I think adventure speaks to that in a beautiful way. The second [and third] person I would bring is my [9-year-old] twins. They’re identical twins, but they’re so different from each other.

These three, it would be great fun. I would love to go down the Mississippi River. I grew up reading the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and the mighty Mississippi is such a daunting river in the landscape of my life here.

It would be so lovely to be able to go down that river with my mom at the helm and my two little ones on either side.