Astra Lincoln is a freelance writer who lives in Portland, OR. Two-time winner of the Banff Mountain Book Competition’s ‘Best Article’ award (2022, 2024), her work has been supported with several residencies, including the Banff Centre Mountain and Wilderness Writing residency. In 2024, she was an Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow. Astra has taught creative nonfiction workshops for Write Around Portland and the Juneau Icefield Research Program. A draft of her first book was a finalist for the 2024 Yale Nonfiction Book Prize.
Q&A with SJ Contributing Editor Astra Lincoln
Summit Journal: How did you get into writing, and about climbing specifically?
Astra Lincoln: If I could be anything other than a writer, I would be. Climbing writing was incidental — when I started publishing my work, the only people I knew working at magazines were climbers. That was how I got my shoe in the door. The first thing I ever published was a prose poem about having a panic attack while top-roping a 5.8.
Summit Journal: You describe the work you do (as a writer, editor, cultural organizer, and strategist) as being at the intersection of people, power and place. What does that mean to you?
Astra Lincoln: I’m really interested in the way that ideas — about a place, a community, or whatever else — can constrain or expand what is possible in the future. For the last several years, in addition to freelance writing, I’ve also been working as a private consultant for Indigenous communities — mostly Canadian First Nations and Alaska Native Villages living in the arctic — to help them negotiate and then implement what are essentially land-back agreements with governments or industrial proponents. The heart of this work is working with communities to determine what has to be protected now in order for their cultures to remain practicable in the future.
I carry this same way of thinking into my writing and other work, too, by asking: How do we work towards a future in which as many of life’s organisms as possible can survive? Am I being negligent or lazy or making compromises by telling the easy version of a story, or by accidentally reinforcing some paradigm that actually limits the expansive possibilities of life? I think about science and policy and cultural norms as sites of interrogation, as opportunities to think more spaciously about who gets to survive, and increasingly this is what I’m trying to focus my writing on.
Summit Journal: As you’ve developed your voice, who else have you looked towards for guidance (whether directly or from afar) and who do you admire as a writer?
Astra Lincoln: I’m obsessed with Jon Mooallem right now. He has this way of turning a story in on itself, with these incisive surprises. His comic timing is brilliant. There’s a story he did years ago about a rescue mission for a kayak trip in Alaska that’s one of the best rescue stories I’ve ever read, and I’m a rescue story junkie.
I’m also a compulsive reader of Hanif Abdurraqib, who isn’t a climbing writer but does do sports writing, and whose work shows more than maybe any other working writer that rigorous moral accounting is an act of service, an act of love. And I just finished inhaling Marisa (Mac) Crane’s ‘Sharp Endless Need,’ about obsession in athleticism and queer love and I can’t wait to read everything else they’ve ever written.
Summit Journal: You have a unique beat within climbing writing — it’s cerebral, deeply introspective, often considers one’s role within society, and seems to emphasize sensemaking. How did you develop your focus? Were you seeing anything in the climbing sphere that led you in this particular direction?
Astra Lincoln: I’m not particularly invested in climbing writing writ large, or at least I think of my own work as being situated in a broader literary canon than within ‘sports writing’ or ‘climbing writing’ only. If there’s anything within climbing I find myself responding to often, it’s the idea that climbing (culturally or in its literature) exists in a silo or is divorced from its greater cultural context.
What I care about most is being a kind and good person, and to me that means that I want to work in the ways that I’m able to improve the material conditions for all life forms on earth. It just so happens that writing is the tool that I’m best at to make that happen. And because the climbing community is a community that I belong to, and it’s something that I’m already thinking about often, I sometimes write essays about climbing. It’s a space that I have access to, basically.
Summit Journal: Your work has featured in three issues of Summit Journal, what do you look for in stories generally, and what do you look for in stories you want to tell through SJ specifically?
Astra Lincoln: I have a pretty classical approach to the essay, which comes from the French essayer — “to try.” My best writing happens when I am writing about something inside of me that has been festering, something that I’ve been magnetically repelled from, because these topics require that I change to be able to understand or process.
The stories I write come from friction points in my own life. The first piece I wrote for Summit was about a land surveyor, A. O. Wheeler, whose work was the entire basis of my master’s research. I spent years of my life obsessing over and repeating his work. And I learned at some point along the way that he had been instrumental to committing genocide during Canada’s colonial expansion in the late 19th century. This contradiction — that I loved his work as a photographer and as a mountaineer, that I was capitalizing off of it myself, and that he was individually responsible for murdering Indigenous peoples — made me really uncomfortable. I didn’t feel like I had a clear framework for orienting myself within that. I felt guilty.
It’s deeply uncomfortable to put oneself in a compromising position in public, i.e. by admitting to fault or to guilt. But in my writing practice, I find that an acknowledgement of this location and an effort to work my way out of it can be really compelling.
And I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with Michael, who’s given me a really long leash in each of the pieces we’ve worked on together. I’m terrible at pitching. I don’t like pre-reporting. Most of the pitches I’ve sent to Michael have been incoherent little paragraphs that are basically like, “hey, this obscure and morally complicated problem that’s only obliquely related to climbing has been really bothering me, can I have several thousand words to figure it out?” That’s an insane pitch to accept from anyone, but especially from someone you’ve never worked with before, about a politically contentious issue, in a magazine you’re just getting off the ground.
I don’t take for granted that Michael took a risk on me with that first piece especially (but also with all of the pieces we’ve done together since). That he’s done so has enabled me to take huge creative risks, too, and it’s absolutely benefited my work. The short version answer of your question is: I send Summit the work I know I can’t send anywhere else.
Photo from “Maker of Mountains,” a feature article from SJ 322, by Astra Lincoln. “It’s deeply uncomfortable to put oneself in a compromising position in public, i.e. by admitting to fault or to guilt,” shares Astra. “But in my writing practice, I find that an acknowledgement of this location and an effort to work my way out of it can be really compelling.” In the piece, Astra grapples, publicly, with her relationship to one of her photography and mountaineering idols, after making a complicating discovery. Photo by A.O. Wheeler (Courtesy of the Mountain Legacy Project)
Summit Journal: One throughline in your stories is the concept of responsibility. And the way you talk to this happens at different scales, both inwards and outwards, for individuals and as representatives of groups. It seems like it may be an idea you are grappling with yourself (as evidenced from your recent newsletter). So, to start, how do you think of responsibility? And how has your relationship to responsibility developed over the years?
Astra Lincoln: I studied critical theory in college which left me with an enduring, if abstract, sense of intellectual responsibility to, like, be a rigorously ethical person. Being responsible to ideas was easy. Being accountable has been harder for me to learn.
Over the course of six months in 2019-2020, I had a near death accident, four of my climbing partners died, and the pandemic started, and I came to realize that I had been mostly avoiding doing the messy work of taking responsibility for the way I existed as a friend, a partner, or a community member. In the years that have followed it’s become clear that the only thing I want out of my life is to love as well as I can, every chance that I get, and that doing so frequently requires that I acknowledge that I’ve acted imperfectly and then change. This is a lot harder than having an inflexible moralistic view! But the pay-out is also tremendous, and worth it, no matter how emotionally clumsy it makes me feel.
Kind of relatedly, I think one thing that these intense experiences of grief have revealed to me is that life is a miracle. And so I’m now interrogating the extent to which it is possible for art to reveal that miracle to people — whether it’s ever possible for someone to experience the miracle without having to endure tremendous suffering first.
Summit Journal: Extending from there, what does it mean to care for something, and not only that, but to care for something well? “To follow through with the minutiae,” as you’ve written.
Astra Lincoln: I love this question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several years as I’ve been working on my first book, the working subtitle for which is “a memoir of care and consequence.”
As I’ve been writing, I have been thinking a lot about the difference between care and control. I think I used to believe that to care for something or someone was to know it completely. But I’ve come to think about knowledge as a form of domination. Instead I’m thinking now about the choice one makes anytime they encounter the unknown, whether in another person or an idea or what have you. Are you going to approach the limit of your possible knowledge with fear or wonder? I think a lot of what gets labeled as care actually comes from an impulse to insulate yourself or the object of your care from risk.
To experience wonder, to reckon with where your self ends and another creature begins, to exist with genuine curiosity and the reflexivity it demands — these are all incredibly risky states, because they expose you to the possibility of your own wrongness or incompleteness, and therefore they sometimes invite change. And changing and learning and growing is deeply uncomfortable. It’s so unpleasant. But I think that’s what care requires.
Summit Journal: To care is a choice, and many of the characters you write about (including yourself) grapple with the weight of this decision and how to enact it in the real world. What are you seeing that makes this a key feature of the characters you write about? Said another way, how are you thinking about our responsibility to caring?
Astra Lincoln: I don’t know that I’ve ever articulated this to myself before, but your question has made me realize that a throughline of the characters I write about is that they are all so deeply entangled with their community or their environments that what they do has the potential to cause tremendous harm. Not just harm — I’m also often writing about characters that are literally in life-and-death contexts, they have the potential to change things for the better, too, and sometimes to literally save a life.
I did a lot of reporting a few years ago about regional-level emergency management policies being implemented during extreme weather events, and the ways people were learning that these policies totally failed to anticipate the needs of disabled people. And so in those contexts, community members and neighbors were having to step in and make really complex calculations about how to prioritize their own safety alongside the safety of someone on dialysis or with a mobility condition.
And the reason they were put in these positions to potentially literally save someone’s life, or not, is because at some point along the way they made the decision to enter into relationship with their neighbors, to get to know them, to feel curious about them, and to consciously or subconsciously accept all of the complication that comes with being in relationship.
Summit Journal: Perhaps this is all summed up in questions you proposed yourself. How do you answer the following? “What if we instead understood freedom as a question: What are we going to do with it? How do you teach someone that what they have isn't power and privilege, but rather burden and responsibility?”
Astra Lincoln: I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to answer that question. If the body of work I produce over the course of my life can get a single reader to think about this question differently, then I will be satisfied.
Summit Journal: What is your next article in SJ about? (Not to give it away, but to tease the story)
Astra Lincoln: There have been a lot of really flashy protest movements in and around parks this year. The piece is kind of about that. But more than that, I think it’s also asking: Why is it so controversial when people who belong to a community, who find a sense of belonging in a community, whose entire identities or professional lives are entangled with that community, try to speak to that community about what matters to them?
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Feature Image: A spread from “Maker of Mountains,” a feature article from SJ 320 (Spring 2024) by Astra Lincoln. In the article, Astra contemplates the ways that the advent of photographic surveying in North America at the turn of the 20th century had direct effects on the growth of mountaineering — and much more sinister, tragic consequences, too. Photo by A.O. Wheeler (Courtesy of the Mountain Legacy Project)