Katie Hill's Next Act

...is this thing on?

My name is Katie, and I’m learning a lot these days. 

I’m learning that Texas is hot. Really hot. Western Montana is my chosen home, but I moved to Austin at the end of January to get a change of scenery for 16 months.

Here, I’m rediscovering what it means to miss a place.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder, and I was still fond of the mountains and pine trees and cold winters when I left them. Now the humidity makes 98 degrees feel like 113 degrees, I have a sunburn, and my cup runneth over with fondness for everything and everyone I left behind. Luckily, I’m joined by my beloved fiancé and our asshole cat, Moo. Certainly we’re enjoying ourselves, but we have plans to return to Montana next year.

Here’s everything you need to know about my journey to the here and now. I’m a new hunter and, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively new outdoorsperson after spending most of my Connecticut upbringing on a softball field. My fastpitch career ended after my sophomore year of college and I worked on a dude ranch in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming for the three summers that followed.

This experience cemented a desire to live, play, and write in the West, so I moved to Montana to get a master’s degree in environmental journalism in August 2019. I graduated two years later and, by way of some divine intervention, landed at MeatEater for 14 months and then Outdoor Life for another 20. I wrote over 400 articles about topics like the impacts of the shrinking Great Salt Lake on waterfowl hunting, a wildlife laboratory that ages tens of thousands of animal teeth every month, the complicated nature of river access law in Montana, Arby’s limited-run elk burger, and the giant larvae that take up residence in a deer’s nasal cavity. I became the youngest and first female recipient of the National Deer Association’s Signpost Communicator of the Year Award. Few career achievements will ever feel as good as that one did. 

Hill reporting on drought and wildlife in the Bear River Basin of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

In May, I left Outdoor Life to freelance full-time. After all that structure and output, this leap to self-employment is terrifying. I loved my Outdoor Life team and learned so much from them. Besides, who was I to leave a job that I wasn’t sure I deserved in the first place?

But the bedrock of the unknown is proving to be made of possibility, not anxiety or chaos. I landed on terra firma and I still wake up breathing every morning, so things are going okay so far.

I’m also learning that I’m not what I do, nor what I’ve done. This is a tough one. I work from home, in the same confines where I also sleep, eat, drink a glass of wine, and decompress. It’s where I completed my master’s degree, where I work on a fiction manuscript and read a personal library of books and spend time with my loved ones. It gets hard to separate my identity as a worker from my identity as a life-liver here. Much of my work revolves around something I love learning about and doing in my free time, making that compartmentalization even harder. Where’s the space for healthy separation? How is my heart supposed to grow fonder of my work when I live on top of it? 

In Wyoming, the mornings have golden hours too.

To get away from this stuck-at-home feeling, I’ve been spending time at the Austin Public Library. I don’t need to buy a latte or a pastry to hang out there, and they have this outdoor patio on the sixth floor with a million-dollar view of the city and the Colorado River. (The Texas one.)

No one charges rent for the desk I work from, although I do have to pay for my parking space when I leave. I don’t feel like a commodity. I feel like a welcomed guest.

Could putting writing and ideas out into the world feel like that? Like you don’t have to justify their very existence with a return on investment for someone other than yourself, your immediate team, and the reader? That’s the kind of place I seek for my work, and that’s why I’m so excited to be in the orbit of The Westrn.

Hill’s hidden obsessions include horses and the occasional date with her film camera.

I’m still learning what I want to accomplish with my writing. But I also have a vague idea of how I want to be remembered when I disappear into the ether someday. I want to write stories that help shape the future of conservation practice and policy in North America, that shake up society’s perception of the American hunter, and that posit hunting as part of a solution to problems like food access insecurity, the climate crisis, plummeting biodiversity, shrinking habitat, and vicious polarization with all its harmful outcomes. I want my stories to draw good humans closer, decode the latest wildlife science and policy matters for concerned readers, and usher the pursuit of being a responsible outdoorsperson into its next era. 

Our society is quite literally dying for connection and mutual understanding, and storytelling has been one of the most weight-bearing pillars for both since the dawn of time. Our team is ready to harness its power for good again. Thank you for supporting The Westrn as we work to bring you stories that inform, entertain, and provoke thought. And in reading my writing, I ask that you be open to learning and evolving with me. We all have a long way to go, and our stories can help us get there.

To see more of my work, check out my website here. Get in touch with me at katiehillwriter@gmail.com.