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In Praise of Specificity in Climbing Writing
By: Katie Ives | This essay previously appeared in the June 2026 Newsletter Over a decade ago, a ski magazine editor told me that he envied climbing writers because the experience of ascent seemed to lend itself readily to precise, vivid descriptions. As we make our way up a cliff, we
And We Became Our Landscape
In this second Desire Lines newsletter, we're pleased to share poetry from Madaleine Sorkin and Amrita Dhar, prose from Shirin Shabestari, artwork from Isabella Bates and Rebecca Sherer, a craft essay from Katie Ives, and a tribute to Junko Tabei from Julie Rak.
Desire Lines - a new movement, home and community hub for mountain writing and art
Hello and welcome to the first Desire Lines newsletter! We're launching Desire Lines Collective, an online mountain writing community, a newsletter, and a print journal dedicated to elevating women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming writers of mountain literature. A counter to clickbait and the status quo in outdoor media,
How to Pitch an Editor
Book Review — Flow: Women's Counternarratives from Rivers, Rock, and Sky
By Katie Ives | A version of this review originally appeared in Alpinist 90. Beneath old formulaic tales of men's dominion over mountains, rivers, and air, there have always been more varied stories by people of all genders — at times flowing like underground streams or bursting forth with a
Writing Like a Mountain: Climbing Literature in the Anthropocene
By Katie Ives | Originally published in The Himalayan Journal 79 and a finalist for the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Festival Mountaineering Article Award There's a canyon near my home that I like to visit on winter dusks, where the shadowed ice seems bluer and more luminous than anywhere
The 30-Detail Challenge: How to Immerse Readers
By: Laurie Gwen Shapiro Strong feature writing thrives on specific, concrete details that immerse readers in a scene. This exercise will help you generate 30 vivid details for your story — forcing you to go beyond vague description and uncover the richness of your subject. By the end of this exercise,
Book Review — Tap Dancing on Mt. Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure
By: Katie Ives | Originally published in Alpinist 89. May 1988: For days, Mimi Zieman stared into a void of whirling snow. Somewhere behind the mists, her teammates Robert Anderson, Stephen Venables, and Ed Webster were staggering down Chomolungma (Everest), after the first ascent of the remote Neverest Buttress, far from
Strange Places: Finding a Voice through Climbing and Writing
By: Katie Ives | This essay previously appeared in the February/March 2025 edition of Gripped. It feels strange to defend the human art of writing, yet with the rise of generative AI, I find myself having to do so — even at times among fellow climbers, though by nature, we love