Making Me Cry Katie Ives
Back in the early ots, when I was freezing my buns off in a 1973 RV parked for the winter in Victor, Idaho’s Teton Valley Campground, I held tenure of working as Alpinist’s first intern. A far cry from what the position eventually grew into, my job mostly consisted of filing paper, editing mailing lists, packing boxes, and organizing an office library.
A few years later, Katie Ives would come on scene–an immensely talented writer and editor who would not only become Alpinist’s eventual Editor-in-Chief, but is among a handful of writers who have had a key role in helping the genre of climbing writing evolve. I can speak to Katie’s talent firsthand as she edited a number of my pieces over the years. It was the epitome of teamwork–that beautiful experience a skilled editor brings to a writer’s piece when the final result feels like a true collaboration. The words are still all your own, but they’ve made you a better writer/thinker/storyteller in the process through a sixth sense of knowing where to ask for more, and where to suggest less.
So, what a thrill when I read Katie’s last editorial as Editor of Alpinist and she quoted one of the first things I published when I first started writing, an essay called “Angle of Grace,” published in the now-defunct She Sends magazine started by visionary bad-ass Lizzy Scully in the same early 2000s era.
It was particularly meaningful, as Katie doesn’t know that it’s been a long time now since I’ve been able to tie in. What a gift to feel a part of the climbing ecosystem again, the tangled web that I miss tremendously. After so many years, the essay still holds true. I’m still working on finding my angle of grace.
