with Anna Fleming. A climber’s Time on Rock: community, life changes, and vomiting seabirds.
First broadcast 14 August 2022
Anna Fleming is a climber and a writer. In January 2022 she published Time on Rock – A Climber’s Route into the Mountains, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing.
In Anna’s words Time on Rock is a nature writing book about rock climbing. In it, she traces how she learnt to climb, and she shows how being a climber can give you a privileged and distinctive physical understanding of different landscapes.
Time on Rock does a wonderful job of illustrating how climbing is an ever-changing, ever-developing way of life: in other words something that very much can’t be finished.
In our conversation we talk about how climbing can be affected by other aspects of life, such as different relationships with climbing partners, where you live, and death and injury among members of the climbing community. We also talk about climbing as ‘embodied chess’, parenting, and how climbing demands a perfect balance between introversion and extraversion. (And, right at the end, Anna has some tips about vomiting seabirds).
Links of interest
More information about Helen Mort’s A Line Above the Sky can be found here: A Line Above the Sky (penguin.co.uk)
More information about Faye Latham’s British Mountaineers is available here: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/literature/between_the_lines_of_british_mountaineers_-_climbing_erasure_poetry-14319
And if you’re intrigued by Joe Simpson and Touching the Void, follow this link: Touching the Void (2003) - IMDb