What Inspired THE ASCENDITURE: Part 1
THE ASCENDITURE’s origin is a story of two parts. The first is a love letter to the mountains and my parents. The second is a strict condemnation of sexism and misogyny in traditionally male-dominated fields. I will share part one, the delightful bit about mountains and family now, and tackle the heavier inspiration later.
To truly understand the genesis of this book series, you must understand my parents.
I grew up hearing my dad’s stories of scaling the peaks of the Teton range in Wyoming and climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State. He was a ranger there in the 1970s, and even at a young age, I was hooked when he’d talk about navigating treacherous glaciers to recover bodies or attempting to break the fastest winter ascent records. I loved it when my mom brought out her slides from her trip around the world and was especially drawn to her photos of Everest. The tallest mountain in the world. The queen of summits. I was smitten, drawn to the forbidding slopes and the absolute challenge they presented. To the men, and especially the women, who stepped out from the basecamps of the world’s great massifs. Someday, I wanted to see what they had seen.
In 2011, my family endeavored to climb Mount Rainier together. The average summit rate is 50%. All four of us made it, including my two incredible parents, who were 65 and 57 at the time. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, physically and mentally. I thought I knew what exhaustion was. I thought I knew what it meant to be in shape. I thought my mind was unshakable. Mount Rainier taught me that I knew nothing, and that lesson of humbleness endeared me even more to the mountains.
A few years later, I sat in an El Paso Writers’ League meeting with a prompt (I have the urge to clear the ground…) where I had fifteen minutes to write a short story based upon that one opening line. I wrote about slogging my way up the Disappointment Cleaver at 1 AM on the side of Mount Rainer, unable to breathe, wanting to be left in my sleeping bag bivouacked in the snow, feeling the rope pulling me ahead, my crampons slipping on the pyroclastic rock, mumbling gibberish to distract myself on the way to the summit. When I read the piece to the group, they loved it and wanted more. The idea of Klarke Ascher was born in that library room in West Texas, and I went home from that meeting knowing I had to bring this woman and her love of climbing to life. I wrote the first 4,500 words (what is now chapter four) and entered it into a writing contest. It won first place, and I knew I had something good on my hands.
Fast forward another two years to a writing conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I was sitting in front of an agent named Shannon Orso, pitching a book series I’d already written and published. She fell in love with the series and my writing but told me she couldn’t sell something that was already out. She asked, “What else do you have?” I sent her those 4,500 words, and she said, “I will sign you right now based on this chapter, but I’m going to need you to turn this into a book now.”
I traveled to Mount Everest base camp for my 30th birthday in 2018, completing a lifelong dream of laying eyes on the queen of all peaks. The sixteen-day trek, which we did completely self-supported, carrying all our own gear, dealing with illness, altitude sickness, and extreme fatigue, but also with camaraderie, warm and colorful people, breath-taking vistas, and adorable baby yaks, was also one of the hardest and most incredible trips of my life.
I had finally encountered those two great peaks my parents introduced me to as a child.
My experiences in Nepal gave me the necessary tools to complete THE ASCENDITURE. I returned from Everest, finished the book, and it has been on a journey ever since. Through many rounds of edits and rewrites. Submissions and rejections. Through the passing of Shannon, my main cheerleader and agent, the woman who said, “This is amazing, give me more,” in the fall of 2021. Through a pandemic and a divorce. It has broken apart and grown stronger as I did to be the book it is now. Which only makes sense. As I learned on the slopes of Mount Rainer in 2011, the only way to make it to the top, to the finish, is to go on the hardest mental and physical journey of one’s life and to humbly accept the labors that come with it.
This book has been twelve years in the making. It is a labor of love and absolute passion, combining two things that fill my soul: writing and challenging oneself in the great outdoors. Klarke is me; she is every person who dreams of rocks and mountains and a better world. I hope you all will love her as much as I do.
THE ASCENDITURE, book one in the Daughter of the Summit and Sea Trilogy is available for pre-order from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you like to purchase your books, though I will always encourage you to shop indie. It will be released on May 14, 2024.
