Margot Talbot at the Wilkinson Public Library
Meet Glitter Girl Margo Talbot at the library THIS Thursday,
January 12, at 6pm, for a reading, a visual presentation, and discussion of her first book “All That
Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression.”
Sometimes you have to go through a little hell to get a
piece of heaven. Or to at least achieve enough peace within to greet
each day
like a chipper chirping bird. According to the interview I read about
Margo in
this year’s Ouray Ice Festival program, she woke up one morning in 1988
with
blood on her hands but no memory of why. “I felt like a hollowed-out
shell,
eerily empty and devoid of hope. For months I had barely been
functioning. The
hardest thing was waking up and realizing I had to make it through
another day.
On this morning, birds were chirping outside my window, and I told
myself that
if they could be so thrilled about the new day, surely I could get out
of bed.
Yet within hours of comparing myself with the birds, I was calling the
suicide
crisis hotline.” What led up to that bleak point, from childhood on, and
then
the journey to the moment when a client she was guiding in the mountains
of
Antarctica remarked that she, Margo, was living “the dream life,” is the
story
that unfolds in her startlingly candid book. In November, it was a
finalist in
the Banff Mountain Book Competition, a long-held literary tradition
during the
annual Banff Mountain Film Festival. (It was through Banff’s Mountain
Writing
Program that this Glitter Girl put pen to paper and enough spilled out
to be a book.) Her website lists her acomplishments as "authoring
numerous first ascents in Canada, competing in
the ESPN X-Games, running a guiding company for women called The Glitter
Girls,
and instigating/contributing to the 4th edition of 'Waterfall Ice Climbs
in the
Canadian Rockies.'"
The connection to the San Juans is a bevy of friends and steep sparkly ice. As
a former competitor at the Ice Fest and now clinic guide with Ridgway-based
Chicks With Picks, Margo’s face-wide smile and now-clear eyes are a fixture in
the world-renown park of bluish blobs and icicles. Hailing from Winlaw, British
Columbia, she and her Aussie partner Warren Macdonald, a former Mountainfilm
guest and extreme double-amputee athlete featured in the film “The Second Step”
and book “A Test of Will,” are a formidable example of perseverance through
inward evolution. We in Telluride know all too well how fleetingly easy it is
to lose a dear friend to inner demons, ones that are often masked behind big
smiles on Main Street. Pain can grow to outsize even the biggest personality,
and the attempt to dull it with drugs and alcohol is too often the path taken.
In addition to her rough-n-tumble journey up to now, we’ll touch upon the joys
of her positive addiction—icy mountains—and the wonderful people she has met
(and sadly lost) along the way. In Margo’s self-empowered healing words, “I have known darkness and have chosen the light.”
Here, here, Glitter Girl!
