Acting

Andrew Bisharat

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Westchester, Bisharat lived with his grandfather for the first decade of his life. “He was my main connection to Palestine. I was embarrassed by my Palestinian heritage growing up in New York, I felt like I had something to hide, but he and my father taught me to be proud from my roots. When he was 16, Bisharat's high school girlfriend gave him a rock climbing lesson as a birthday present. It was the start of everything. "I was pretty much hooked right after that." When he left for college a few years later, Bisharat found other people to climb with. He spent his free time learning to climb by reading books and browsing the internet. After graduating, he picked up and moved to Yosemite for months at a time, living in a tent and climbing as much as he could. As he became more involved in climbing, Bisharat, who always said he was introverted, turned to writing to process the strong experiences he was going through. It wasn't long before his two forms of expression, climbing and writing, merged into one. I spent a semester abroad in New Zealand and mostly rock climbing the whole time I was there. I was listening to the radio and heard the story of a climber who had recently climbed the highest mountain in New Zealand. Both legs up that mountain. I don't know what made me do it, but it felt like an opportunity to write something about someone. I had no real knowledge of what I was doing, but I figured out how to get in touch with him, and asked him if he would do an interview with me. It was such a cool experience. It took a few days to get to him; the biggest softball questions you could ask, and then I went home and spent the next three months making every mistake possible in journalism and writing. I must have rewritten that first paragraph a dozen times. When it was finally done, no magazine even published it because it was so horrible. But this process of failing on my own was very instructive. It was the beginning of writing about rock climbing and writing professionally for me.