Travel Writers Online

Travel Writers Online Magazine ISSN 2753-7803 is published as a weblog mainly for writers of narrative non-fiction and for educators who want to integrate this writing into their teaching and research. Our particular specialisms, as the name suggests, are: literary travel writing, blogging about place, and dialogue journaling during research. This all emerged from teaching travel writers and supervising at PhD level in higher education with the aim of exploring ideas of value and the literary in writing as a research inquiry. From this research we ran our first summer school for writers in June 2020, during the first lockdown, and one publication came from that. It is a portable vade mecum listing the Methods for Travel Writers. This is now available as an eBook on all main online stores and in 2022 was converted into a small paperback version through Amazon Kindle Direct. 

Over our first two years, I also worked with Jasna through the EU’s ERASMUS+ mobility initiative for university teachers. This allowed us to share our teaching and pedagogy in creative tourism management and English language initially at undergraduate level at the University of Plymouth and the University of Maribor, but later through joint supervision at doctoral level for PhD candidates. We also completed a cooperative writing research project, called 'Both', to investigate remote travel writing whilst supported by an author's editor. This explored technologies for scanning handwritten text and our own design of Web 2.0 platforms for engaging in affirmative dialogue to support the writer in the field. Jasna has published more about the experiences of working with groups of Masters postgraduates using travel writing for improving writing skills in English language teaching, too, reference below. 

Our research output and the lessons we had learnt from our experiment and the processual practice led to discussions with the tourism editor at Routledge, part of Talyor and Francis publishers. With encouragement from this new quarter, we committed our transdisciplinary approach to a new book. The book lays the foundations for a process approach to writing as inquiry within the disciplines of tourism, human geography, place-making and city branding. Its key innovations are first, the collection of data through trust-building and dialogue journaling, to form a managed knowledge base. Secondly, we propose ways forward for valuing creative non-fiction as part of assessment at degree level and in the doctoral thesis. This book is now available as Mansfield, C. Potočnik Topler, J. 2023. Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Potočnik Topler, J. 2021. Teaching Writing Skills in English for Tourism by Employing Travel Writing in Jezik in turizem, Language and Tourism, Sprache und Tourismus Univerza v Mariboru & Univerzitetna založba pp.177-195. DOI: 10.18690/978-961-286-549-8

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We have been exploring form in literary travel writing here on Travel Writers Online. When we discovered Tim Hannigan's deep-mapping of a field near Athenry in Ireland, the form of Shelley's 1818 sonnet, 'Ozymandias', echoed throughout the piece. The story is called, 'A Circle on a Map', and can be found over on the blog called: The Clearing.

The rhyme-scheme of 'Ozymandias', shows how new notes are seeded, and then repeated to hold the verse together:

AB AB /  AC DC /  ED EF EF 

This form can be put into a travel piece to produce seeding and progression. The repetition of an item of content should give continuity to the travel piece, in the same way that a rhyme-word provides connection to an earlier point in the sonnet form. The literary travel writer, W G Sebald does this seeding and progression in his story set around Lake Garda. The hotel owner, whom he meets in Limone, returns in the travel story like an echo or rhyme as he continues on his journey. This provides a narrative link and gives the whole piece cohesion. It becomes a story because the readers begin to know the character of the hotel owner. Long after reading, the significance of the hotel owner grows in readers' minds. 

I wanted to understand this narrative knowing in literary travel writing and so I treat it in greater depth in the book 

Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies

I met a traveller from an antique land,                    A

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     A

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Please cite our posts like this:

Mansfield, C. (2020). ‘The Black Notebook’ Travel Writers Online ISSN 2753-7803 [Online  <travelwritersonline.blogspot.com> Accessed: 13.8.2022].

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Founded July 31, 2020