Introducing Faye Latham and her debut poetry collection, British Mountaineers

We are very excited to share more information about one of the books we will be publishing later this year - British Mountaineers by Faye Latham.

Faye is a writer, visual poet, rock climber, cyclist and all-round mountain enthusiast based between Snowdonia and London. In January 2020 she was awarded the Literature Wales Bursary for Writers Under 25 to support the development of her poetry, which resulted in her work being published in various literary journals and online magazines including UKClimbing.com, Lumin Journal, The CTC ‘Rewilding’ Anthology and the Cambridge Literary Review.

We've been working with Faye as she develops her debut poetry collection, and are incredibly excited to see how it's taking shape. Here's a bit of Q&A where Faye discusses her inspiration for British Mountaineers and provides more details on what we think is going to be a beautiful, unique collection.

Please introduce yourself - where you are from, where you live, where you have lived etc.

I grew up in Snowdonia and left to study English at the University of Bristol when I was 18. Ironically, it was when I left North Wales that I became obsessed with climbing. In search of a hobby which didn’t involve stumbling out of a club at 3AM, I joined the Expedition’s Society in my second year of four years at Bristol. Looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made and is where I met my closest friends. Since leaving university, I have lived back in North Wales and am now living in London and doing a mixture of remote work for a manufacturer of climbing equipment, freelance teaching and writing.

Could you please briefly describe your collection British Mountaineers?

My debut collection, British Mountaineers, is made up of a series of poetic erasures - a form of poetry where words on a page are redacted and the remaining text is framed as a poem. Using this process, I transform F. S. Smythe’s biographical text, British Mountaineers (1942), into a series of found poetry. I pick, paint and stitch together words from Smythe’s history to present a new, dream-like narrative from an untold perspective. Akin to following a narrow Alpine ridge, each page treads a delicate line between poetry and visual art linked together by the imagined experience of an avalanche victim. Buried under the snow, this lost spirit is guided through the strange and elemental landscape of the page from word to word, trying to make sense of their surroundings which appear to collapse around them.

Engaging creatively with classic tales of adventure to find its own story, British Mountaineers is a book which explores the different ways a mountain might change us; what it might reveal, and what it might erase.

What is your inspiration for British Mountaineers?

I came across Smythe’s British Mountaineers while looking through a collection of my dad’s old climbing guide books and was immediately captured by the sublime and stunning scenery depicted and described. I am fascinated by the history of mountaineering and I wanted to create a book which plays with our experience of this history and offer up new ways of engaging with it.

Hidden within Smythe’s words, my collection reveals the fictional story of a figure trapped beneath the snow. The white paint which I use to create the poems becomes a visual metaphor, not only for the avalanche itself but also for the ways in which the history of mountaineering tends to be written about, erasing landscapes by transforming them into moral testing grounds for the human soul. Whilst my collection does not tackle these themes directly, I hope it goes some way in raising questions regarding our complex relationship with a sport which has historically glorified the conquering of lands and mountains in ways which rewrite or remove the stories of so many.

What book are you reading at the moment? What's your favourite book about place/mountains/climbing?

At the moment I’m reading a poetry anthology titled Poems from the Edge of Extinction and Robin Hobb’s Assassins Apprentice. I don’t usually have multiple books on the go, but I do like to keep a novel and a poetry collection on my bedside table. This way I can read depending on my mood – if I want to lose myself within the pages, I’ll pick up a book, but if I’m in the mood for unpicking words slowly, a poem will do nicely.

In terms of a favourite book about landscape, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet comes to mind. With her explorations of nature and human connection, her books are a must read for anyone interested in the ever changing political landscape that we live in. I also love Charlie Gere’s critical text and travelogue, I Hate The Lake District, which writes a harshly realistic depiction of the landscape and contrasts the Wordsworthian image of the Lake District with stories of UFO sightings. My favourite poetry collection about place is Robert Minhinnick’s The Diary of the Last Man – I remember finding it in the bookshop at Kendal Literature Festival in 2019 and was immediately captured by the apocalyptic descriptions of Wales which are as beautiful as they are terrifying, showing us an image of the natural world if we continue to abuse it.

Where are your favourite places to climb? Do you find they inspire your poetry and artwork? If so how?

My favourite place to climb has to be North Wales. Having grown up there you might say that I’m a bit biased, but it truly does have everything – from the rugged coastline of Anglesey’s sea cliffs to the scarred slate quarries above Llanberis – it is a place I am glad to call home.

Poetry has become my means of engaging with the mountains when I can’t get there, an outlet which has become especially useful in the past few years. It has also become a means by which I can engage with these landscapes imaginatively. If I’m out climbing I’m often trying to think practically about the environment, but I also think its important to notice the sounds around me or how the rock feels on a more emotional level. For me, these different ways of thinking feed into each other beautifully.