Owen Clarke is a writer and editor based in Alabama. His work often focuses on rock climbing and motorcycling, but he has covered a range of outdoor adventure sports — from kayaking and surfing to skydiving and caving — and also writes about climate and environmental conservation. Owen is a contributing editor to Summit Journal and the American Alpine Journal, the founder of the collaborative writing community Dead Foot Collective, and author of the serialized fantasy series Void Injection.
Q&A with SJ Contributing Editor Owen Clarke
Summit Journal: Climbing writers tend to be a fairly adventurous bunch but you take it to a new level with your motorcycling world travels. How does your preferred mode of migration influence the stories you like to write?
Owen: One thing I love about traveling by motorbike is that you’re outside the bubble. In a car (or bus/train/plane), you can pop in a podcast, listen to music, sip coffee, crank the A/C. You’re closed off. On a motorbike, you’re forced to focus on the world around you. Partly this is because you’re exposed to snow, wind, rain, whatever, but it’s also because there’s no margin for error. If you go down on a bike, there’s a good chance you’re getting pretty jacked up.
So unlike trekking or bicycling, you can actually travel pretty efficiently and make good time on a motorcycle (with great gas mileage, too). But unlike other forms of motorized transport, you’re still out there in the world. To answer your question, I’m not sure it influences the character of my work, but it keeps my head in the game. I pick up on more nuance in the world around me, in the land, the people. I’m feeling the heat of the sun. I’m getting bit by the bugs. I’m smelling the dead cow on the side of the road.
Also, you stick out. When I’m on a motorbike, almost every time I stop for gas or a bite to eat, someone comes up to talk to me, asks me about my bike, who I am, where I'm going. That doesn’t happen with any other mode of transportation, in my experience. Usually in journalism you have to chase stories and subjects. On a bike they come to you a bit easier.
Summit Journal: You might write more than anyone I know, and I’ve seen your craft progress by leaps and bounds. What have been the biggest lessons you’ve learned about the writing process?
Owen: First, read as much as you write. Read regularly and widely. If you want to write climbing stories, read climbing stories. If you want to write dark fantasy, read dark fantasy. Reading is the best training for writing.
Beyond that, if you asked me this question a year or two ago, I would’ve said something like, “Write and publish as much as you can, quantity results in quality.” Nowadays, I’m not so sure. High output certainly isn’t a bad thing, and it’s a good way to keep money coming in, but it’s not the best way to hone your craft.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned recently is the importance of working with professional editors, real artists who can separate wheat from chaff. Good writing can be made alone—you’ll find plenty on blogs and social media—but great writing is almost always a multi-person endeavour. Even legendary writers will submit dogshit now and then. And we’re in an era when most digital magazines don’t have the time, budget, or bandwidth to really hone stories. Editors often focus more on headlines, imagery, and SEO than actual writing. As a result, a lot of emerging writers don’t get to experience working with an editor focused on bringing out the best in their work. (If you’re trying to make a living by writing, it’s obviously easier to have editors who give minimal feedback and just run whatever you send them, but you don’t improve or grow via those relationships.)
So, when you find an editor who is willing to really grind through a piece with you, to toy with it line by line, value and cultivate that relationship. Print magazines are one of the best ways to find this dynamic. You have longer deadlines, (often) higher budgets, and a focus on the meat of a story being quality as opposed to simply making someone click on a headline.
Photos from “The Middle Finger Master” (SJ 321) by Owen Clarke. On the left, Robert is below the Skyper building in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2019, before soloing it. Robert wore cowboy boots as he felt the climb was “too easy” for rock shoes. Photo by Fred Moix. On the right, Robert showing off atop Cayan Tower, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2015. Photo by Emmanuel Aguirre
Summit Journal: Your dream is to write fiction full time, and your main foray seems to be dark fantasy inspired by “pulp sword & sorcery and old-school horror.” What are you concocting with Void Injection?
Owen: I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, and I’ve written fiction in my free time since I was a kid, but after graduating college and starting a full-time writing career, I let it slip for quite a while. There’s a limit to the amount of words I can type per day without turning my brain to mush. I have to crank out thousands of words per week to keep money coming in. In short, I find it hard to come home at the end of a long day staring at my laptop, writing about the outdoors, and then settle down for an evening of staring at my laptop, writing fiction.
Void Injection is my attempt to change that by publishing fiction constantly, in serialized format. It’s a catalyst for me to keep fiction in my wheelhouse. I write and publish one ~1,000w “chapter” per week, and as opposed to a novel being this big project I have to keep in my back room, toying with in my free time over a period of months or years, I’m committing myself to put a little bit out there each week, and crowdsourcing feedback along the way. Void Injection contains a handful of other spin-off fantasy and sci-fi stories, but the eventual goal is to take the chapters of the mainline narrative, edit and repackage them as a novel, and go the traditional publishing route.
Summit Journal: Let’s talk Alain Robert, the godfather of climbing buildings without a rope. First off, how much money did you spend on champagne when reporting the story?
Owen: Whew. If we’re purely talking champagne, maybe $350 or $400?
Summit Journal: He’s an eccentric character whose reputation precedes him, to say the least. What did you know about Robert prior to working on this piece? Did you have to manage your own preconceptions while reporting the story?
Owen: I knew of Alain from childhood, but had only heard of him as this “stuntman” type guy, not a rock climber. I never knew he had such a staunch resumé (5.13d free solo) on rock. But in the past few years he really started to blow up on social media, and people started taking notice. In fact, in 2020 or 2021, the then-editor of Gym Climber magazine, Francis Sanzaro (a mutual friend of ours), mentioned he was interested in me meeting Alain for a story. Unfortunately, nothing came of it because Gym Climber was soon shuttered.
I connected with Alain personally a couple years later, when I was asked to interview him for a small rock climbing website, Climbing House. This would have been early 2023. We did a couple of phone interviews, and from those first interviews, I remember thinking, “This dude is wild,” and knew there was a bigger story there.
I wouldn’t say I had to manage preconceptions. I liked Alain from the jump. He’s an inspiring guy, and a funny person to hang out with in many respects. We’ve become good friends. But he’s also a tough subject. Most public figures have a social media personality and a real life personality, the side they share with the world, and the side that’s real life. With Alain, the divide is very, very blurry. He’s hyper-fixated on his own mythos. So it wasn’t as much about managing any preconceived notions, as it was remembering that my job was to dig out the Alain behind the showman.
Summit Journal: In the article, you suggest (partly through the words of Alex Honnold*) that he doesn’t have the notoriety in the rock climbing world that he probably deserves (he free soloed up to 5.13d in the ‘90s). Why do you think that is?
Owen: There are probably a few reasons, including his personality. But largely I think Alex is spot-on, the big ones are the timing and style of those hard rock ascents, and the fact that he muddied the water by spending the next 30 years illegally climbing skyscrapers. Alain was born too soon. He would be killing the Instagram / YouTube game right now if he was about 30 years younger and a bit savvier on social media. His style of climbing was made for the GoPro / selfie-stick era.
His hard free solos on rock were also insane, but (unlike Honnold, Peter Croft, Dean Potter) they weren’t as visually inspiring as they were technically difficult. He did some hard stuff in the Verdon, but even those were rap-in climbs of one or two pitches. Free soloing a 30-meter route just doesn’t have the same allure as free soloing a 500-meter one, even if the former is far, far harder.
I also think the switch to buildings—which is more digestible for a mainstream audience, or certainly was at the time—naturally covered up all the (arguably more impressive) stuff he did on rock in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Core climbers saw him as a sellout, and although he got serious fame and cash in the mainstream (more than he ever could have as a rock climber, in that era), the mainstream audience could never really appreciate what he was doing on rock.
“In some ways, [Robert’s free solos on rock] haven’t even been matched. Yet nobody really knows about him [in climbing]. I don’t know if that’s because he’s been forgotten or because he rewrote his own story by focusing on buildings.” - Alex Honnold
Summit Journal: That segues into a theme in the piece, there are all sorts of seeming contradictions about Robert and which you sum up this way: “[He] is at once the quirkiest character I’ve met in my life and perhaps the most quotidian.” You compare him to a flamboyant provocateur and an everyman. He’s one of the most famous climbers yet many climbers don’t really think of him as a climber. How do you think about presenting diametric points of view in articles?
Owen: Hell, I didn’t go to journalism school man, you’re the guy to answer that one : ) But in all seriousness, I think you have to focus on presenting reality as you experienced it, and not bend over backwards trying to make stuff line up for the reader. They’ll do that work themselves. Just because two descriptors may appear diametric doesn’t mean they aren’t both true. All of the above examples you listed—though they may appear contradictory—are accurate, at least to my experience hanging with Alain and getting to know him over the last couple of years. They give the reader a pretty good launchpad to begin understanding him as an individual.
Summit Journal: Your next article is about grading. Without spoiling the piece for readers, what’s the article about and why should readers care?
Owen: The article is about the current state of grading in our sport, and some interesting (perhaps controversial) techniques being used to ascertain the difficulty of climbs at the highest level.
You should care because if you climb—whether V2 in a stinky gym or 5.13 on a Yosemite big wall—grades are the metric by which you interact with our sport. The experience of trying hard, failing or succeeding, and attempting to understand the difficulty of what you have (or haven’t) just done on the wall, is universal.
Both the world’s best climbers and worst climbers have a surprisingly similar time there. This might make the article sound a bit esoteric and cerebral, but it’s also (in my humble opinion) one of the wackier pieces I’ve written in a while (Alain’s profile included), and I had a hell of a lot of fun working on it…
Summit Journal: Why were you interested in this topic?
Owen: There’s a lot about climbing at the upper echelon that just isn’t relatable. Writing about a V17 crusher who can pinch marbles into dust and do one-arm pullups on monos, a stoic alpinist soloing a 1,000-meter line in a frozen wasteland… those stories are rad, but they aren’t particularly relevant to most of us except in a symbolic, “inspiring” way. Grades, on the other hand, affect us all, from the gumby to the pro. We interact with them every time we go to the gym or hit the sport crag. But unless you’re a routesetter, beyond saying, “This is soft,” or “This is sandbagged,” you probably haven’t explored your relationship with grades all that much. It’s worth it.
Summit Journal: Since AI is going to eat everyone’s lunch, are algorithms really the best way to propose grades?
Owen: Shit man, I think you know and I know, so I’ll speak to the reader here. Hey, YOU! Read the story and let me know what you think!
There’s only one way to read 📖
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Feature Image: A spread from “The Middle Finger Master” (SJ 321) by Owen Clarke. Here, Robert is dialing in hard moves on Séance Tenante (8a/5.13b) in France’s Verdon Gorge in 1995. Photo by Robert Boesch