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Desire Lines
Book Review
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
Craft Essays
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
Craft Essays
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
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
Craft Essays
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
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Where Can My Writing Go?
Writer Resources
2026 Recommended Readings
Book Review
Book Review — Mountains Before Mountaineering and Other Everests
By: Katie Ives | A version of this review previously appeared in the 2025 American Alpine Journal. Ghosts haunt the pages of mountaineering history: names of the innumerable dead recounted in litanies of loss; blank spaces between the lines, recalling those forgotten, silenced, or erased. And there are also what historian
Book Review
Book Review — A Line Above the Sky
By: Katie Ives | Originally published in the 2023 American Alpine Journal. Beyond the crisp lines of streets and rivers, beyond the typed names and elevation points of cities and mountains, beyond the ripples of hillside contours and the dots of marked trails, there are other tracks of passage, invisible on