For more than a decade, Katie Ives has been a force in outdoor adventure publications. Her desire to reach beyond stereotypes baked into traditional adventure narratives has led her to amplify the voices of writers whose stories have been previously overlooked. She is the former editor in chief of Alpinist Magazine and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 2021 she published her debut book, Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams.
In this conversation, Katie and I talk about her past role as editor at Alpinist, a highly regarded literary magazine in the climbing and mountaineering world; how she balances her work as a writer and work as an editor; the emergence and history of adventure writing in the literary world; and about the development of her first book.
Rosie Bates: The first question I had, to bridge the gap between climbing and writing, came about when I was thinking about your success as both a writer and an editor. I am curious how you’ve come to understand the relationship between writing and editing. I think it’s hard to do both, and not a lot of people can do both well. How has your understanding of the relationship between the two evolved over time?
Katie Ives: I have occasionally met editors who don’t do any writing, and of course I’ve met plenty of writers who have no interest in editing. I think there’s a kind of truism that people will repeat, “If you want to be a writer, you shouldn’t get a writing-related day job because you’ll burn out.” But I had the opposite experience. I felt that editing made me much more enthusiastic about writing.
And I also learned how to write from the process of editing. When a writer gives you a draft, particularly if it’s a very rough draft, you spend a lot of time thinking deeply about how to solve various writing problems — whether these issues are related to structure, characterization, plot, or pacing — and every time that you arrive at a solution, you’ve acquired another tool that you can apply to your own writing. It’s similar to training for climbing in the sense of practicing how to do individual moves and then later piecing them all together on a cliff.
For example, I struggled a lot with dialogue when I was starting out as a writer. But as I tried to help other writers figure out how to create better dialogue, I began to understand some of the methods for the first time myself: how to pick phrases that convey something of a person’s individual habits of speech and character; how to hint at what’s unspoken through facial expressions, gestures, actions, and silences; and especially in outdoor stories, how to let descriptions of the landscape itself reflect the underlying mood and become a quiet part of the conversation.
Of course, people can get similar benefits from teaching. I think the main difference, for me, between editing and teaching is that editing is often more one-on-one and more intensive. As an editor, I actually get to see a draft all the way through to its completion and publication — ideally to the point when the writer and I both feel as if all the elements have come together and nothing more can be added or removed. Whereas a teacher might review a couple of drafts from a student and then have to give them a grade.
Editing has also allowed me to be immersed in stories all the time. I might be fact-checking someone’s history article and randomly come across an interesting, forgotten bit of climbing lore, and that unexpected story could become the topic for my own next article. And maybe that story has nothing to do with the writer’s article, but it’s something I never would have encountered if I hadn’t been digging that deeply into archives, or spending that much time interviewing people to double-check information.
Most of all, by working with so many different writers’ voices, I’ve felt freed up to experiment with my own voice. I’ve become less stuck in the rut of one kind of story, one kind of structure, or one kind of prose style, because I’m constantly being exposed to very different ones. My writing has become much more creative and more fluid.
Bates: I guess I had really never thought about editing a literary journal like teaching. You do start to learn different things from working with different writers. Do you feel like there were times where it has been hard to strike a balance, or hard to focus on your own writing, while deep in editing work? How did you manage the load of editing that was on your plate while also working on your own writing?
Ives: I think, for me, the main challenge had to do with time constraints. The workload ebbed and flowed at Alpinist. At its worst, there were years when I was regularly spending 90-hour weeks at the office. Then, I didn’t have time to do anything except work, and the only writing I was doing was writing for Alpinist. But there were other years when I could more easily figure out how to find time for personal writing outside of my job.
When I was finishing the book — that last year of doing the revisions, fact-checking and copyediting, while still putting in long hours at Alpinist — for a few months, I barely slept. I’d be working on the book until 3 a.m. and then I’d switch modes and go back to working on Alpinist. I’m not sure that is something I could ever do again.
Bates: I can’t imagine — being so immersed not only in writing, but the climbing world in general, and all of the climbing stories and mountain literature.
In an interview you did with Outside Online, you mentioned that initially you were writing fiction about climbing. When you submitted those stories to literary magazines though, they said something like it’s great writing, but we can’t publish this stuff. I was curious if you think that has changed over time? Do you think there is a place for climbing and mountaineering narratives and stories in the mainstream literary world?
Ives: I think there’s a lot more openness, now, not just to climbing writing, but to adventure writing in general. When I was in graduate school in 2004, much of the mainstream literary fiction I encountered appeared (at least to me at the time) to be stuck in the mode of what a friend called “dysfunctional suburban families.” I came from the suburbs, but my family wasn’t particularly dysfunctional, and I had no interest in that topic whatsoever. I wanted to write about people who did things — whether that activity was climbing, science or art — not about people who seemed mostly trapped inside their houses and inside their own emotional lives.
Back then, my efforts to write literary stories about characters who went on outdoor adventures either seemed to come across as genre fiction or as “experimental” or “radical” — to quote some of the reactions I received. Or as one classmate once told me, my work was “unmarketable,” because I wasn’t entirely within a specific category with a well-defined audience. Adventure wasn’t the kind of topic that many people appeared to recognize as literary fiction. But my approach to the subject matter wasn’t fully that of a genre fiction writer either.
Today, there is so much wonderful literary fantasy and science-fiction that seems to be getting published at an ever-greater rate. And so many literary adventure stories as well. I just read Peter Heller's novel The Guide, a literary thriller that takes place at a fishing lodge. Heller writes in a way that brings somebody like me — who doesn’t know anything at all about fly fishing — into the wonder, the focus and the flow of that experience. I feel as if there’s a lot more scope for that kind of writing now than there was when I was in graduate school. Or maybe I’m just noticing it more.
There have also been some excellent climbing fiction books that have appeared in recent years. In his latest short story collection, Points of Astonishment [published this autumn], David Stevenson continues to blend an elaborate imagination and elegant style with his close firsthand knowledge of climbing. Earlier this year, I bought Kim Fu’s collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century because I am a fan of Tin House books, and to my surprise, there was a climbing story in it, intricately crafted and full of critical insights about the effects of social media and human desire. Fu has become one of my favorite writers. Back in 2012, Tanis Rideout published a book called Above All Things, a retelling of the mountaineer George Mallory’s disappearance partly from the point of view of his wife, Ruth — and the prose is haunting. So, yes, there is great climbing fiction out there. It is just a matter of finding it.
I don’t know what your experience is, of course. You’re in the throes of the literary world in grad school and at The Normal School. I haven’t submitted anything to a mainstream literary magazine since around 2004. I don’t really know what the landscape is. I just see what’s getting published, and I know that I’m much more excited about literary fiction than I ever was in the past. And a lot of that excitement has to do with the increasing number of new voices —especially those of previously underrepresented writers. There’s so much change and creativity happening in the field now that that wasn’t necessarily present to the same extent in 2004.
Bates: I’m less familiar with fiction, because I think I’ve been immersed so much in nonfiction. But editing and even just reading for The Normal School, I’ve seen stories come through about climbing or surfing, or something adventurous, and I’m encouraged to see people out there writing it and sending it to literary journals. So that is exciting for me as well. I think if you can do it in a way that brings somebody who has no idea what is going on into the world of it, that should be the goal.
The appetite for writing about mountains and climbing does seem to be growing. Living in Fresno, and being close to Yosemite here, I think people have more of a context for climbing and what it means. Which leads into my next question, about the book you published last year: Imaginary Peaks. When you were writing the book, who were you imagining as your audience? Did you think about people outside of climbing and mountaineering?
Ives: When I was working on the book, I hoped it would be accessible to a non-climbing audience. Something that I do — and that I also encourage other climbing writers to do — is to try to eliminate jargon as much as possible from stories. There’s a clutter of overly used technical terms and climbing clichés that often appears in modern trip reports, and this clutter can detract from a writer’s personal style and experience, as well as from a sense of place.
If you take that same jargon and those same generic phrases and rearrange them into different combinations, you could be talking about any mountain or any cliff or any climber. And your style could become identical to that of any number of climbing writers. It’s crucial to get back to your own voice and to describe routes and ascents in a way that’s more natural and more sensory: to convey the specific colors, textures, shapes, lights, and shadows of a cliff; to suggest how each climber moves in an unique way that can reveal something of their inner self; to remember what a rock feature actually looked and felt like when you encountered it for the first time, before you filed it away in your mind under the abstract category of repeated terms such as crimper, bucket, dime-sized edge, and so on. There’s an intimacy with the natural world, a respect and caring, that can emerge when you invoke the particularities of an individual landscape — otherwise you might as well be talking about plastic holds in a climbing gym.
As a byproduct, if you can translate abstract climber-speak into more natural and sensory language that any reader can understand, you have a much better chance of reaching beyond a climbing audience. And in the process, you can also make your story more interesting to climbers. Because if you’re a longtime climbing reader, you get tired of encountering the same kinds of descriptions over and over. I don’t know how many times during the past eighteen years I’ve read sentences like, “We climbed six pitches of mixed terrain to the obvious corner.” I never want to read a sentence like that again. I want to read passages in which someone transforms a familiar experience into something that feels new and fresh and alive for me. So, yes, I definitely tried to accomplish that aim with the book.
I don’t know the extent to which I succeeded. The answer depends, ultimately, on how readers respond.
Bates: I think you succeeded. I’m working on my thesis manuscript about climbing. As I was reading your book, I kept asking myself, “How is she translating this to somebody who doesn’t climb?” Fortunately, the people who I share a lot of my writing with aren't climbers, so that can help.
Were the editors working on your book with you, or the people helping you — were they climbers? Did you have editors and readers who were outside of the climbing world as well?
Ives: Most of the people helping me with advice or edits were climbers, but not all. Others were at least hikers. It’s probably a measure of what my existence has been for the past couple of decades that everybody I know takes part in some regular outdoor activity, even if it’s just going for a walk.
There are certain topics in climbing writing that are inherently more accessible to broader audiences. Every year at Alpinist, the other staff and I would nominate stories for The Best American Sports Writing anthology (when it still existed) and for The Best American Essays, and we always faced the question of how to pick a story that non-climbing readers could understand. We’d often submit free-soloing stories. There’s no rope in those tales, no belaying, no pitons, no cams — nothing that has to be explained, no words that have to be defined. Or else we’d choose articles about exploratory mountaineering in which the main purpose is to encounter a place, to learn about it and possibly reach the top of an unclimbed peak or wall. In those kinds of narratives, the experience has less to do with the technical aspects, with what gear you used, whether you aided the route or free climbed it.
Otherwise, if you are trying to write about more technical ascents for a wide audience, you have to figure out how to introduce non-climbing readers to the information they need to understand what’s going on without cluttering up the narrative — and without irritating any climbing readers who might also pick the story up. To craft that kind of balanced prose seamlessly is a delicate art, and some writers are really good at it. Mostly I just tried to avoid the problem altogether by not including any passages in my book that required technical explanations.
Bates: As I was reading your book, people (mostly non-climbers) would ask me what I was reading, and for the most part they were intrigued because you’re not just writing about the act of climbing or mountaineering, but about adventure and the history of colonialism and the need people have had to explore uncharted territories. I’ve always thought about climbing, or the climbing industry, as a microcosm that highlights, on a small scale, the larger issues going on in the world, or a bridge to other important conversations. An example that mountaineering has largely been dominated by men with an appetite for exploration and discovery.
Another question has to do with your role as editor in chief at Alpinist, which is at the intersection of two worlds — publication and climbing/mountaineering industry — that have historically been led by men, specifically white men. I am curious what challenges you came up against as a woman, leading one of the most widely recognized climbing publications?
Ives: When you talk about the mountaineering world as being largely dominated by white men, you have to be very precise about which mountaineering world you are describing. It’s important to remember there are many international climbing communities beyond the United States.
For example, when I was reading through the Himalayan Database, I came across this interesting statistic: from the 1950s to the 1980s, the predominant nationality of foreign mountaineers in the Nepal Himalaya was Japanese. In fact, Japanese teams were the first to climb many of the world’s seven-thousand-meter peaks. And of course, many historically significant Himalayan ascents would not have happened at all without the work and participation of Sherpa high-altitude mountaineers. So it’s important to think about whose climbs and whose stories get emphasized within the English language media and whose don't.
There are, indeed, many accounts of women climbers, of climbers of color, and those of other underrepresented groups — as well as many stories of Indigenous people who have climbed up mountains since time immemorial — that generally didn’t appear in mainstream, English-language mountaineering history books. In the past, most of the people writing and publishing those books were white men and they frequently tended to emphasize the ascents and the accomplishments of other white men. There’s a lot of re-examining of written history that needs to be done: a restoration of tales that were forgotten, ignored, or erased. Trying to support that effort has been an ongoing project for me over the years. It’s something that I want to continue to do in the future.
What makes the current moment in climbing media in the U.S. so exciting is that there are now more writers of color, more women and nonbinary writers, more writers from all kinds of previously marginalized groups. And they are transforming mountain literature — moving it away from old stereotypes and assumptions, and toward new forms of creativity, new approaches, new kinds of storytelling, new values. They are working to decolonize the genre, bringing about a paradigm shift that is long overdue. In an essay for Alpinist 72 [which made the Notables list for Best American Essays], Endria Richardson described the need to seek new means of expression: “I am searching for a way to talk about climbing that incorporates what I know as a Black and Malay queer, femme climber. … To be a climber, I realize, is not to feel less of anything, but more of everything: to feel the joy of dancing on the rock, and to feel the rage of the exclusion of Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latinx people from the outdoors. In order to talk about climbing, I need a language that is as un-simple as the body.”
This growing movement is what kept me feeling so passionate about my job for so long. As an editor, you have an opportunity to help open the gates to those changes and to amplify those voices.
Bates: As you worked to diversify the voices and stories featured in Alpinist — amplifying underrepresented writers — was it hard? Did you receive pushback from any part of the readership?
Ives: I would say the majority of our readers supported increased diversity. There was pushback from a vocal — but small —percentage of readers, and probably some of those people dropped their subscriptions. But what can you do?
I remember one reader complaining to me that there were too many women writers in the magazine. I replied that about fifty percent of the people pitching stories are women, so about fifty percent of the people who are going to appear in the magazine will be women, and that's just how it is. It’s not only that I was including women writers because it’s the right thing to do. It’s also an actual reflection of the demographics of the people who are working in the genre now.
Bates: As an editor you’ve worked with and mentored a lot of writers. How did you balance helping the writer tell their story, or the story that they wanted to tell, while also meeting the stylistic needs of the magazine or your own preferences?
Ives: It was really important to me to publish a wide range of voices and styles. I didn’t select articles based solely on my personal writing preferences. Instead, I tried to find a mix of different kinds of storytelling. As one of my graduate school teachers, Elizabeth McCracken, said, every story has its own set of internal rules. So, as an editor, you’re trying to figure out what the internal rules of a particular story are and how to be certain that it fits those rules — rather than attempting to impose a standardized notion of literary style from the outside. Or if the story breaks its own rules, you want to ensure that it does so in a way that feels deliberate, that contributes something meaningful to the reader’s experience. That said, like the staff of most magazines, we had a style sheet for copyediting that we followed. As an example, for better or for worse, we generally didn’t use the serial comma in Alpinist.
Often, I worked with people who had accomplished some incredible mountaineering ascent, but who hadn’t written a story since high school or college. As a result, I frequently received first drafts with somewhat rough prose, and I faced the intriguing challenge of how to turn a confusing or an awkward sentence into something that’s readable and elegant, but that still preserves the unique quality of the writer’s voice. I thought of the process as similar to that of solving mathematical equations, trying to find a solution that’s as simple and as elegant as possible.
Bates: One of the things that I noticed when working with you on an essay I had published in Alpinist was the high-level attention paid to editing and fact-checking. Was that something that came from you? Or is that something that had been a part of Alpinist before you came on as editor in chief?
Ives: That high level of attention was certainly a tradition of the founding editor, Christian Beckwith. He used to say that every story we published in Alpinist should be the best story a writer ever wrote. So if the writer was experienced and well published, Christian’s expectation meant that the bar could be set very high. From the start, it was part of the ethos of the staff to work closely with every contributor to try to achieve that goal.
Bates: Since we have developed this understanding and narrative of climbing history based on the stories that have been written and told — in the English language, at least — as you conducted research for your book, did you come across stories that surprised you because they hadn't been more widely shared or acknowledged?
Ives: That’s an experience I had continually when I was working at Alpinist, as well as when I was writing the book. The more you dig around in mountaineering archives, the more you find all kinds of fascinating stories about significant ascents that slipped out of history. With the book, I was surprised by how many stories about imaginary mountains there were, and how these peaks existed almost everywhere. After the book came out, readers kept sharing tales of their own: “Oh, you know, there’s this legend in my backyard about this hill.” There’s something about mountains that draws human dreams and aspirations and fears and legends, and in places where there aren’t any mountains, people often seem to invent them. But I was also surprised by the stories about real people and real travels that don’t seem as well-known as they should be — such as the life of Arthur Clore, an early twentieth-century Black prospector and explorer, for whom the Clore River and Mt. Clore in British Columbia are named.
On another topic, back in 2019, when I began doing research for an Alpinist article on women’s climbing fiction, I was startled by the sheer amount of it that I found. I had no idea so many women of past generations had written short stories and novels about climbing, and I wanted to understand some of the reasons why the topic might be so appealing to them. The late Victorian Age, I remembered, also overlapped with the era of the “New Woman,” when women were pushing back against the traditional gender roles of their society and exploring new possibilities. Climbing was a traditionally male field. And so, perhaps narratives about entering that field — and having adventures there — could have an inherent, alluring symbolism for a fiction writer who’s trying to deal with larger gender issues.
For instance, in 1885, Annie French Hector wrote a novel called A Second Life about a woman climber who escapes her abusive husband by faking her own death in a crevasse fall. After she crawls out of the crevasse, she creates a new identity, appearing “strangely, fearlessly composed, as if conscious of some power within herself,” a wildness and strength she seems to have absorbed from the mountains.
Bates: Alpinist is one of the few remaining print publications in the mountaineering and climbing world. Maybe this is too much of a hypothetical question — but what do you think about the future of print magazines, in general? Do you think there's still a place for them, especially in a relatively small community like climbing and mountaineering?
Ives: I think there’s still an interest in print publications. And I think there’s still an interest in the kinds of stories that do better in print, in immersive long-form journalism, as well as in the quality of photos and art that print can showcase. There’s also a tendency, particularly among climbers, to be interested in collecting tangible objects — whether old pitons, rare books, or other relics — things that you can associate memories with, and it’s harder to fulfill that desire with online publications.
Other people have likewise said that the future of print may be in journals that resemble works of art, with high-quality writing, high-quality images, high production value. Rather than in more cheaply made magazines that you might throw out after reading—because that latter kind of ephemeral experience resembles what you might easily find online, as opposed to a beautiful physical object that you’d want to keep on a shelf, something that could have lasting meaning for you, full of stories and illustrations that you could lose yourself in again and again.
Bates: Totally. People I’ve met who read Alpinist often have a stack that they’ve saved, like a little tribute to climbing.
Ives: The magazine still has a number of subscribers who have been with Alpinist from the beginning. When I was going on my book tour, people would emerge from the audience to tell me that they’d been a subscriber since Issue 0. It’s really special to have such long-term connections with readers.
Bates: When I first started reading Alpinist in my early twenties, I was immediately hooked. And knowing that a woman was at the helm was always inspiring for me, as a young climber and writer. I could tell the amount of care that was put into each publication and into helping climbers find their voice and tell their stories.
In my experience, it seems like there is an urge to exaggerate a climbing experience because you want people to understand what you experienced. I don’t think you have to make up some grand tale to get the point across, though. Something about the real experience of climbing — and all the emotions, fears, natural details — is enough. What do you think?
Ives: Climbing can be an enticing pursuit for writing because a climb is a natural story: you leave your house, you start out at the base of a peak, you experience a series of conflicts and obstacles, and you (ideally) reach a summit, which might be the setting for a climactic moment. And then you have the resolution of returning back to your home.
Basically, any time you go on a climb, even if it’s just at a backyard crag, you’re tracing the form of a traditional narrative arc with your hands and your feet. Also, because of the nature of climbing itself — the sense of heightened focus and perception — you become attentive to the kinds of details that result in vivid prose. You have memories of the sunlight flashing off tiny flakes of mica, or the cool sharpness of a quartz crystal against your hands, or the familiar thunk of an axe point when it finally sticks in a solid patch of ice and you know you’re going to be okay. And because of the potential risks, you see your climbing partners and yourself in moments of vulnerability when hidden aspects of character might be revealed. For all those reasons and more, climbing is a story-generative act. And I think that even people who aren’t writers, even people who aren’t natural storytellers, once they’ve done a significant amount of climbing, want to tell stories about their experiences. And they want to share those stories.
I’ve always felt that there is something about climbing that transforms people into writers. And when people who are already writers get a chance to try the pursuit, they sometimes find themselves obsessed. Because it’s an enactment of a story, both physically and mentally.
Bates: That's a really beautiful way to think about it. I’ve always felt like the Mountain Project Forum is a place where people get their start in storytelling about their mountain experiences.
As far as your own personal climbing is concerned, have you found that you had to consistently climb in order to write about climbing, or to be an effective editor for a climbing magazine?
Ives: I definitely think I have to climb to do a good job of editing climbing stories. If I’m working with a writer and they’re struggling to express what it feels like to be forty feet above their last piece of protection, or to depict some other intense moment from an ascent — when I can draw from my own experience to help them with that description, I can be much more helpful. If I can’t find time to climb, then their narratives begin to feel more and more abstract to me. The same is true with my own stories. Moreover, climbing has become a necessary part of my creative process: it’s how I find the sense of rhythm, flow and joy that I need to write, to access my imagination, and to feel as if I’m fully alive.
Bates: Now that you’ve left Alpinist, what is next for you in writing and editing? Any personal climbing objectives now that you will be living in Colorado?
Ives: I’m writing another mountaineering history book, which is probably going to take up most of this year and the next. I’m also working on some personal essays and a fantasy novel. Most of all, I’m enjoying being immersed in my imagination, learning more about craft and seeing where this new adventure leads. Beyond that, I don’t know for sure. I haven’t given up editing. To help someone else find their voice, to accompany them throughout their creative process and to witness those moments when all the pieces of their story merge together into an unexpected, radiant whole — it’s one of the most remarkable experiences I know. I’m going to be copyediting at least one book and doing developmental editing on a couple of other books this year.
But I have to do more climbing. I think moving to Colorado [from Vermont] will definitely help, because I’ll be in a place with a larger mountaineering community. The Flatirons are within walking distance from my apartment. It’ll be really easy to just get out for short bits of time, even if I’m working. I’ll be able to see them out my window: a constant reminder of that wild realm of air and stone and light.
Bates: Wonderful. Thank you so much, and good luck with your move and your climbing! I look forward to reading your next book.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program, Katie Ives was an editor at Alpinist for nearly eighteen years, and the editor-in-chief for more than a decade. Her work has also appeared in numerous other publications, including The New York Times, Outside, Atlas Obscura, LitHub, Adventure Journal, and The Rumpus, as well as Rock, Paper, Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing (Banff Centre Press, 2013) and Waymaking: An Anthology of Women’s Adventure Writing, Poetry and Art (Vertebrate Publishing, 2018). Her articles have made the Notables lists for Best American Sports Writing and Best American Essays. In 2016, she received the American Alpine Club’s H. Adams Carter Literary Award for “excellence in alpine literature.” And in 2022, her first book, Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams (Mountaineers Books, 2021) received a Special Jury Mention at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
A nonfiction candidate in Fresno State’s MFA creative writing program, Rosie Bates is the Managing Editor at The Normal School and a teaching associate in the English Department at Fresno State. She has been published in Alpinist Magazine.
Author photo by David J. Swift.