Gripped Magazine
New Journal For Underrepresented Voices in Mountain Literature
Experienced climbing editor and author Katie Ives, formerly of Alpinist, has announced the launch of a new newsletter, journal, and organization, Desire Lines, dedicated to women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming mountain storytellers.
Along with experienced UK magazine editor and writer Natalie Berry as co-editorial director and American writers Rosie Bates, Holly Yu Tung Chen and Juliet Kennedy, they intend to offer workshops, community events, mentoring, professional advice, and other resources for emerging climbing and mountain writers.
Ives spoke to Gripped about the genesis and mission of Desire Line: “Holly Chen and Rosie Bates and I taught a creative writing workshops for women and nonbinary, storytellers at the WomanUp climbing festival, in LA, and we came away with a sense of how incredibly powerful it is to. create these affinity spaces where writers can feel safe to take creative risks.” “Eventually, that turned into the idea that we wanted to start a publication.”
The staff of Desire Lines share a growing sense of a mission to publish the work of what Ives described as “writers with approaches and styles and visions that are bolder and more experimental than what would fit into traditional, male-dominated climbing literature.”
The new journal’s editors are working with women, nonbinary and gender non-conforming writers, who, Ives said, “have been historically relegated to the margins of mountain literature.“ The project is built around the voices coming to climbing literature with paradigm-shifting ideas. Desire Lines seeks to transform a genre which, they propose, has yet to draw adequately on the experiences of women, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people, or people from non-European backgrounds.
The result has been the repetition of some kinds of tales and tropes of mostly white male climbers and the neglect of others. “There’s nothing inherently wrong” with traditional climbing stories, Ives said, “but they’re not the only kinds of stories that can be told.”
Over the past decade, the climbing community has become more diverse, and hence the stories they have to tell often do not fit familiar molds. The journal will give voice to those who wish to challenge the assumptions found in traditional mountaineering literature. For some climbers, even basic goals like reaching the summit or having a powerful personal experience are no longer primary goals. Immersion in nature and a sense of harmony with the entire natural world—a philosophy that has long existed in mountain literature but has not always been the dominant one—is of greater importance.
Desire Lines aims to expand mountain literature with more reading, more voices, more ways of understanding what it means to move through the mountains. It can only deepen the conversation, making the literature itself as varied and alive as the landscapes it describes.
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