The stories that hook us
THE FIRST “EPICS ISSUE” I worked on at Climbing was in summer 2002. I was just a few months into a job as a desk editor here, getting a feel for how stories come together. I’d been writing for the title for years, but was new to helping others craft their prose. We were a young, fairly green staff: guys in their early 30s who had, as climbers tend to do, avoided real work. Things like spreadsheets and meetings and invoicing were like a foreign language. The Climbing job came through when I’d been on the cusp of taking a part-time job at a bagel shop. I’d just finished graduate school in Boulder, Colorado, where teaching undergraduate creative writing gave me health insurance and a stipend. But then grad school ended…
