Over the last six weeks I have had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with a number of people involved in the Dark Mountain project. These meetings have generated a whole host of ideas and opened up new conceptual areas to explore – I am in currently digesting all these inputs. I feel it is worth, at this stage, to reflect on the process of doing these interviews. 'Interview' almost seems like a misnomer because I felt that the interactions were much closer to a conversation insofar as this connote bi-directionality in the interaction. So, I will refer to the 'interview' as a conversation and the 'interviewee' as a narrator in order to convey the conversational quality of our interaction and highlight that 'the Dark Mountain narrative' is not singular but contains multiple viewpoints, interpretations and understandings.

What strikes me, sitting here looking back at these conversations, is how they interacted with each other, not only in my memory of them but also when they actually unfolded. Imagery or concepts that I had been discussing with one narrator would come up in conversation with others, partly because some concepts, like 'uncivilisation', are well established among mountaineers, but also because I brought with me different figures of speech across the conversations. In this way, it was a recursive process which was both exploratory and theory generating while it settled – and unsettled – meanings between us. This points to my role as a participant in the creation of the narratives rather than an external onlooker that 'discovered' the narrative through a set of predefined questions.

It was interesting to notice how my own narrative developed throughout the conversations as my understanding of some of the underlying concepts and thinking became clearer. I was fortunate that my first conversation was with Andrew Taggart who, as a philosophical counsellor, is a very skilled conversationalist. He prompted me to give an account of my own understanding of many of the ideas and concepts I was asking him about. Together we developed shared accounts and understandings. This mode of conversation was a very fruitful way to unearth the many shades of meaning we both attached to the terms we were discussing. I have learnt a lot from having this kind of conversation both in terms of opening up the interview situation so that the narrator can co-narrate his or her stories without being straight-jacketed and in terms of letting go of my own feeling of a need to control the conversation.

I had prepared a few questions for each conversation (usually between five and eight) which served as a map of the ground I intended to cover. These questions were intended to make connections between my own research questions and the work of each of the narrators. I had been reading a lot of their work prior to my conversation with them and tried to situate the conversation in different strands I had picked up from their writing. I was interested in exploring these strands in relation to Dark Mountain. The questions were an anchor for the conversations as well as a kind of safe ground that we could return to if the conversation strayed too far away from territory that I was comfortable with. In this way, I would say that my interviews take the form of 'prepared conversations' where there is a loose but predefined structure (my background reading and questions I had prepared) around which an improvised exploration of different aspects of the Dark Mountain narrative takes place.

Over the course of these conversations I gradually became more confident of my own narrative and I noticed a slight shift in my own attitude as I began to 'feed back' some of the insights and concepts that had emerged during earlier conversations. Sometimes previous co-narrated terms would fit the meaning discussed in a present conversation, or a particular figure of speech I had talked about earlier would present a topic or a concept in a new light. This would often be very useful for making sense of different ideas and brought a quality or depth to the discussions that I think would have been absent if the conversations had occurred in isolation. In this way, the meanings of different concepts was co-produced not only between an individual narrator and myself, but by all the narrators (including me) together. My role in this context was also one of a 'seeder' or someone who takes meanings and concepts across different perspectives.

During this process I have also become more of an 'insider' who can navigate the conceptual and symbolic landscape of the Dark Mountain Project (although I am still sometimes referred to as someone with an 'outside perspective'). I guess this will only become more apparent as I continue to have more conversations and start engaging with more aspects of Dark Mountain. With the permission of the conversationalists, I intend to write up the conversations as interviews and publish them on the blog. This will allow them to have a say in how their narrative is presented (hopefully introducing greater communicative equality) and make more of the core material of the thesis available (adding another interpretive layer). It will also contribute to the continued production of the Dark Mountain narrative.

One of the terms which came up frequently in the conversations was 'improvisation'. As a mode of being in the world and engaging in conversations about it, this implies openness to the unexpected, detachment from outcomes, attention to means, perceptiveness, honesty and patience. In this sense, the conversations I've had over the last couple of months have been markedly improvised and as a result I have learned not only a great deal about how different people engage with the Dark Mountain Project but also about a way of interacting where meanings and insights emerge in places I could never have foreseen or planned for. It is also in this spirit of improvisation that I open up my own research process. In the coming months I will write more about the content of my conversations around Dark Mountain, publish parts of the conversations I've had and begin clarifying how an attitude of improvisation can provide a foundation for doing fieldwork.