Mountain Echoes beyond Boundaries

Abstract/Description

For 21 years I was the founder Director of this annual one-day festival at Bretton Hall Campus of the University of Leeds. It was not a mountain festival, but one focussed upon climbing culture as represented in all forms of writing. From the beginning it featured new books and commissioned new writing, always including women writers (Janet Adam Smith, Alison Hargreaves and Alison Osius, Senior Editor at Climbing), poetry, music and songs, and unpublished writers (including a 14yr old poet). The cultural diversity of modes of representation of mountaineering encouraged debate and controversy. The day was curated as a long conversation with audience participation a key feature, with notable regular attendees who were publishers and writers offering experience and opinions. A writing competition was launched each year by High Magazine with the winner announced at the festival and published in High. We also featured the Boardman Tasker Award winner each year and the Chair of judges offering their adjudication address for discussion. Despite the international stars who talked about their writings like Chris Bonington, Doug Scott, Kurt Diemberger, Arlene Blum, Walter Bonatti, Allen Steck, Steph Davis, and Harish Kapadia, the show was often been stolen by the old-timers like Tom Weir from Scotland or Charlie Houston and Bob Bates from the USA, or by unexpected discoveries such as the Irish storyteller Dermot Somers and witty Hodder and Stoughton editor Maggie Body. The audience never exceeded 250 (for Catherine Destivelle), but it was reported in High and the Alpine Journal, so the interest it generated in mountaineering literature in the UK went beyond the event itself. The festival can be theorised in the context of the history and trends in climbing writing in the UK as progressive and expansionist as against the rather staid, guarded and repressive tradition in pre- and post-war British mountaineering literature that I critiqued in Chapter 11 of my book Reconnecting With John Muir titled ‘Towards a Post-Pastoral Mountaineering Literature’ (University of Georgia Press, 2006).