Travel Writers Online

The RedISS network of researchers provides a multidisciplinary perspective on a set of transformations in social practices that modify the meaning of everyday life. Please see this page on the Google Blog for publications by the members of RedISS ... http://sociologiasensibilidades.blogspot.com/p/ultimas-publicaciones.html This network aims to : To open a theoretical exchange area  To promote research that takes into account sensibilities  To promote the creation of collaboratives projects (publications, research projects, congresses, seminars)  To  promote multi and pluri disciplinary dialogue  To give visibility to the work done by the members of the RedISS  To preserve the richness of the reflections on sensibilities which are here taken into account in a broad and non-reductive sense.  To encourage connections with other spaces and institutions that communicate with the previous objectives

With a free Google Account you have access to the Apps that we use here at TRAVEL WRITERS ONLINE to manage the blog, to explore maps, to share slides, and to publish eBooks, new audio books and broadcast on YouTube. All these are accessible to you, too, through a single, free sign-up at accounts.google.com/signup Once you have your free Google Account, sign-up also as a Local Guide on Google’s Maps site here https://maps.google.com/localguides/ to help you plan and save walking routes for your travel writing projects. We do. With your Google Account you can quickly create a free website with Google Sites.  Finally, please take a look at our eBooks for travel writers and tourism graduates on the Google Play Book Store. Especially interesting for 2022 is Google’s launch of an audio-book creator that converts your published eBooks into a separate spoken version. Please take a look at the methods book converted into spoken voice here play.google.com

It is official from 9 o’clock this morning, Wednesday 27 July 2022, TRAVEL WRITERS ONLINE has its own International Standard Serial Number from the British Library. Ours is ISSN 2753-7803 which means that you can use it in citing articles and travel stories which are published here in our online magazine. Take Philipp’s story from last week for example, it can now be cited as:   Wassler, P. (2022). ‘Déjà-vu’ Travel Writers Online [Online Accessed 27.7.2022] < https://travelwritersonline.blogspot.com/2022/07/deja-vu.html > ISSN 2753-7803    

"O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?"               Shakespeare (c.1596) Henry IV Part 2, Act III, Scene 1, ll.1709-1712. This is Henry IV of England, speaking these lines, (1367-1413) with all the worries of how he will make good his grandfather’s claim to the throne of France.   Shakespeare was writing these lines a couple of hundred years later, around 1596, when Elizabeth I was on the throne, still styling herself as the Queen of England and of France.   Meanwhile, across the Channel, Continue reading on Toureme  for Henri IV of France (1553-1610), known as Good King Henry, Nature’s soft nurse is kinder:   "Sleep hears his voice, and slow to Henry's bower, On lazy pinions moves the drowsy power. The zephyrs scarcely breathe as he goes by, Hope's children, airy Dreams, around him fly."                        

Do researchers discover destination knowledge or create it? This question has been at the heart of our discussions since 2009 and gradually, through conferences and lab meetings, travel writing has emerged as both a method of inquiry for us in tourism and area studies and as a professional practice for the synthesis of new knowledge, thanks, often, to the use of narrative.  This travel writing blog TRAVEL WRITERS ONLINE is our discovery instrument and, we hope, a research practice that will yield new knowledge on place, destination image, visitor practices and literary tourism. Please cite us, using the title of the post as an article title to help your readers find the post again, along with our ISSN 2753-7803: Example citation Mansfield, C. (2020). ‘The Black Notebook’ Travel Writers Online ISSN 2753-7803 [Online   < travelwritersonline.blogspot.com> Accessed: 24.9.2025]. ____________________________________  

I am just finishing reading Rossi’s Régine ; the story did drift into an autobiography with no real plot. From a literary tourism point of view the streets in the district to the east of the city centre of Nantes might hold a fascination for followers of Rossi’s writing or for the diaspora of those who grew up during the twentieth century in the city.  I plan to start his later book before the fieldtrip to Nantes. 

The hike up to the castle was familiar. I used to call it a déjà vu because I had done it innumerable times since one of my university classmates brought me here almost 20 years ago. The entrance to the theatre area was rather unassuming - a narrow little alleyway squeezed in between yellow and brown stone buildings, facing one of the busiest roads in Verona. Like a little door to another planet I thought. Or better, like a little door to the past. My past and Verona’s past. Or the other way around.  I smiled as I entered the alley, remembering the many visitors I brought all the way up to the castle. How many times we had to stop with the Asians, taking pictures of the bright pink orchids growing from the old, cracked stone walls. Apparently the occasional foreigner found its way here also without me, I thought, as I passed sweaty-looking and rather heavily breathing visitors of Northern European appearance on the first set of stone steps, winding narrowly along the buildings. Here w

In our research on how to turn literary travel writing projects into research projects, Jasna and I have developed a process of journaling with dialogue at the centre. This dialogue might start with reading an academic article that proposes a new theory in tourism or it could be an interview with someone in the industry.  Capture the Catalyst As promptly as possible, this catalyst is captured in the online file-card index, and a section of affirmative journaling is written up while the idea is still stimulating and challenging. In our experiments I have made a page template for MS OneNote with named cells in a table of prompts to gather the journaling process, please see the picture of my Zettelkasten template below for MS OneNote: Next, of course, we need to test our processual methodology over and over again in professional projects for DMOs and with destination stakeholders to make it robust for the industry. We are planning to explore a few tourism towns, beginning with Zadar. In t

A busy week this week, I am still reading Paul Louis Rossi's 1990 book, Régine , which is more like an autobiography of Rossi living through the 1930s and 40s, at least, so far.  I suspect that the character, Régine, will start to take on a more prominent role.   Rossi gives us lots of street names and, as readers told me last week, the district to the east of Nantes city centre which still exists today, the quartier de Doulon. And even a mention of Plymouth! But this morning La Voyageuse immortelle arrived.   Rossi's later collection, which was published in 2001 by the French publishers, Le temps qu'il fait in Bazas. 

Finding novels set in Nantes is proving much more difficult than I thought.  C S Forester's Hornblower barely touches the ground in the city of Nantes. I need a narrative where the French urban space is almost a character itself.  This morning, though, with Google and Amazon, I found these two novels by Paul Louis Rossi (b.1933 Nantes): Régine (1990) and a later one, La voyageuse immortelle (2001) and they are now on order.  It is hard to judge whether they will create that elusive toureme for Nantes.  As my readers on Audible will know, I've been addicted to Patrick Modiano since 2015, and these two novels by Rossi do have a faint hint that they might have a similar quest for a missing character that Modiano's stories often recount. 

  This weekend is turning into a reading feast of travel writing on Finistère.   I subscribed to the travel writing magazine, hidden europe , back in 2015 and in my third issue, actually issue number 48, the central feature covers the chapels of Finistère, contributed by Patricia Stoughton.   A thoroughly researched piece, in keeping with the stated aims of editors, Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries, Stoughton lets us meet a local history enthusiast and shows us the chapelle Sainte-Barbe on the headland at Roscoff.    We in Tourism know the little granite-built chapel very well; it has been our first stopping point on our fieldwork in Brittany since 2009, my own review still survives on Google Places at https://goo.gl/d8j2fT The coincidences do not stop there, though, Zoë, our very first Travel Writing Research Master, has just re-drafted her travel article on our field trip to Quimper in, yes, Finistère.  And I’ve been enjoying the new version of that, too.  Like Stoughton, Zoë Rober

Our field trip to Nantes is all set, again; this time with a group of undergraduates who are studying on one of the many modules in French language studies.  Crossing the Channel in January was perhaps rather ambitious of me, so this journey is set for 4 th May 2016.  We travel to Southampton by train from Plymouth on the Tuesday, staying overnight in the Premier Inn on the airport and then fly FlyBe direct to NTE on Wednesday.  Bénédicte and Xavier at Le Voyage à Nantes have been very patient after my first research visit was postponed, and they have stepped in to help us to find venues and attractions for our students of French.  For example, they have found this wine bar to host our WSET training afternoon (Wine & Spirit Education Trust): La Comédie des Vins.  I am looking forward to reporting back from there on this blog: Travel Writers Online Our French lesson for this post is taken from our lunchtime series of teaching quality talks at the university today, since it fit

Agnès Varda In my preparation for the travel writing research work in Nantes I am by this stage, allowing myself to read, talk about, and watch anything and everything on the city.  My most recent discovery, after viewing Agnès Varda's 1991 film on director Jacques Demy, called Jacquot de Nantes , is that Demy directed his first New-Wave feature using Nantes as the setting.  The film, Lola , was released in 1961 and is an urban story of everyday life restored to gorgeous glossy black and white by Varda herself.  I wish I could show you some stills from the film; I asked UniFrance, for an image but to no avail.  I still hope you are inspired to see the film.   Passage Pommeraye  At least two scenes unfold in the covered arcade called the Passage Pommeraye; they are key moments in the drama, too.   And, my favourite shot is on the steps of what must be the Graslin Theatre, which fills the whole screen with geology and architecture with our two protagonists in the foreground.   Is M

I have just presented this guest lecture to a group of Masters postgraduates on my development of Microsoft OneNote as a journaling template for travel writing projects. I was inspired by the Zettelkasten concept of keeping your journaling and returning to it to index your pages so that you can find older notes and develop them into travel stories. I am very pleased to be able to share this talk as a narrated MS PowerPoint slide-show converted to mp4 for YouTube, here: You can click below on the  Link to view slides in Google Drive

Le Voyage à Nantes Stendhal stayed in Nantes and documents it in his travel book, Memoires of a Tourist (1838).  A friend and colleague at the CNRS in Paris, Darwin, had recommended I read Stendhal’s travel writing many years ago but I first had to complete Le Rouge et le Noir (1830). Stendhal’s opening section on his first entry for Nantes in June 1837 serves as a good reminder for the flying passenger today; while the other travellers scramble for their suitcases Stendhal, with just his night-bag under his arm, strolls off the landing board and, thus, is one of the first to set foot on the paving stones of the great city.  Where does he go?  What advice would you give? What is the very first place to visit on any trip to Nantes? ... please add your Comment below... LVAN Le Voyage à Nantes  

 Place Branding starts with inquiry  Reading the conference paper of António Azevedo (Azevedo 2009) I realise from his methods that I need to ask people who live in Nantes, why they love or hate their city.  This is technically, the first step in a Place Branding exercise.  Place Branding starts with an inquiry into what the city already represents for its inhabitants.  I need to discover, 'What is Nantes?'  Only, then can I begin to unpick the components of what has value.  But how do I determine what has value for a respondent to my research question? André Breton declares in his surrealist novel, Nadja (1928), that Nantes is (quoted in Garrett 2010, 193) 'perhaps, with Paris, the only town in France where I had the impression that something worthwhile could happen to me.'  Martin Garrett explains that André Breton was sent to Nantes in July 1915, to work as a medical auxiliary at 2 rue du Bocage (Garrett 2010, 193); that is almost exactly 100 years ago. Close-readin

Back in the lab, Zoë and I often bemoan the lack of a single good book on how to write travel literature. Zoë has compiled and edited a collection of peer-reviewed research papers on the subject (Roberts 2016), you can find the book in Kindle format on Amazon. Of course, hidden away in collections and anthologies we have found a chapter by Tim Hannigan.   Spending a day writing with Tim is easily equal to reading a writing manual in itself.   And manuals do exist, Nomadic Matt offers a set of PDFs along with his travel blogging course.   But what we seek, I think, is an academic approach for use at university, I imagine it would have examples of travel writing, in clearly annotated extracts with a commentary on how each component can create place or communicate the emotions of the travel writer as she encounters the next step in her journey.   French Lesson continued Replying to the question from the end of the previous French lesson, may I photograph the book, please? She replies:  

The terroir of Finistère satisfies the busy lunchtime diner with two key products, le blé noir and le lait ribot.  Both masculine nouns.  Blé means wheat and noir means black but the US word for the crop is buckwheat.  Buckwheat is not a wheat. In fact, it is not a cereal but a fruit which yields a starchy flour darkened by specks of broken seed coat.  In Brittany the flour is made up into savoury pancakes with milk and eggs, and called une galette.       We all enjoyed our galettes at Crêperie Chez Mamie, at number 4 Impasse de la Gare, 29000 Quimper, France.   In fact Mamie's pancake house is just across the road from the two stations, the bus station and the railway station.   Joined-up thinking by the Finistère authorities to place the coach and train station on the same site.   Crêperie Chez Mamie prides itself on being bio, that is organic, and reducing food miles by using local producers, which it boasts on the reverse of its menus.   The service is super-fast if you ask

Interrogate, mediate, articulate Interrogate, mediate, articulate, are the three steps we practise for tourism knowledge transfer.   And the same three steps when out in the field as a travel writer, too. The three steps fit neatly into the acronym, I'm a […] showing how your own identity changes as you discover and process new data during your travels.   Museum Docent In the museum or gallery the travel writer can practice the process as they encounter pieces of work that they have never seen before. If the work is totally new then use ekphrasis as a standby, giving the piece two stars and a wish, as you describe it to your audience of museum visitors or rainy-day tourists. The full set of training slides for museum docenting using the theme of - I'm a ... - can be viewed on our Toureme website here on Google Sites. Please click on the icon below...  

We encounter space but we make place.   Back in my collection of verse, Europa (2006), I first began to form this idea, prompted by poet, Yves Bonnefoy, who, incidentally, was born in Tours on the Loire in 1923.  When we travel, it is clear that unknown towns and ports offer opportunities for the relief from space, not only the undifferentiated space of the ocean but also the possibility of an encounter that will relieve the isolation of the visiting researcher.  An isolation felt even in the space of a noisy crowd.   Max Jacob - Poet in Quimper, Brittany Max Jacob makes this encounter.  His drunken sea captain is the beginning of a story that will make a place out of the space of Quimper's crowds.  Where is that coffee house?  Why does the action move to there?  A demand is set up in the literary tourist.  I am drawn to those urban European places, coffee houses.   Intention and Expectation But we embark on fieldtrips and holidays with intention and expectation.   Ajzen (1991

Heading for Brittany We should go to France in this post. You've been waiting for some travel writing for long enough, n'est-ce pas ? Is that not so?  In this trip we are heading for Brittany, by sailing from Plymouth to Roscoff on Brittant Ferries.  Brittany - the Reading & Writing Region.  The tourist development organisation of this huge Région, to use the French spelling, used to promote Bretagne as the place for reading and writing.  Many organisations took this to heart and began publishing projects, specialist libraries and even the écrithèque in Quimper.  L'écrithèque is a made-up word, think of the French for writing, écriture, and add the ending from discothèque.  Brittany has its own ferry service from Plymouth and Portsmouth, Brittany Ferries, which is only a continuation of the migration of Britons to Brittany that began when Brythonic Celts from Devon and Cornwall began to sail over as Roman, and then Anglo-Saxon occupation, spread across the Westcountry o

The Google Play Bookstore The Google Play Bookstore is open to anyone with a long-term Google Account. You can buy audio books and e-Books once you have established an account with a card. To publish your own travel writing or text-books, you need sofware for converting wordprocessed documents in .EPUB format. I use Calibre eBook maker. You will also need to register for, and buy a series of ISBNs for your publishing house. Then simply tell your readers about your books, like this  play.google store books by Charlie Mansfield

Ethnography in Tourism Studies My PhD training made me an ethnographer, so the way a people's culture has been formed in relation to its terroir, climate and habitat is always uppermost in my encounters when travelling.  Ethnography describes how social groups make meaning from their knowledge of the environment and the cultural artefacts they create. Like anthropologists, we examine what people make and do; in French this is just one verb, faire .  And French has given us a whole host of anthropologists and ethnographers, including Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).  But two contemporary academics have developed approaches that are exciting for the tourism researcher today, especially in my field of tourist autoethnography, these two are Americans: Kathy Charmaz, in grounded theory, and Catherine Kohler Riessman for her work on narrative analysis.    Narrative analysis  Narrative analysis is such a powerful tool that once you have used it professionall

 Students and colleagues have asked me to upload my Zoom lectures. Please find them on my YouTube channel at  Youtube.com CharlieMansfield  As you will see, they mostly explore literary travel writing and blogging in a tourism management context: Please subscribe when you are in the channel

 Amazon have launched their new Author Central zone for writers to present more background information for their books sold through Amazon. Simply join up and then add your publications to the list. You can add portrait photographs and videos at  Author Central  or follow your favourite authors to hear about their latest work Visit Author page on Amazon Follow to get new release updates, special offers (including promotional offers) and improved recommendations, and to read the full bio. 

Fieldwork for Literary Travel Writers Exploring theory to improve fieldwork Salazar (2011) looks within cultural production to investigate regulation and power relations.  His motivation is that a failure by the DMO and tourism scholars to understand how imaginaries are embedded within powerful institutions, for example, the state and local government, results in a loss of the development of new tourism practices (Salazar 2011).  He shows that imaginaries can be studied even though their workings are hidden (Salazar 2011) by developing a research methodology derived from ethno-methodology which uses field-notes in a very similar method to Edgar Morin's work on Brittany (Morin 2013).  Salazar presents what he calls, ethnographic examples.  These are short narrative sketches of encounters between a local tourist guide and the tourists to whom he is providing a service (Salazar 2011).  Neither Salazar nor his research fieldworker appears in the sketch, not even as the explicit narrato

Travels with Charley John Steinbeck’s travel writing, from 1962, called Travels with Charley: In Search of America has always made me want to publish a travel journal. Naturally, it was the name that caught my attention initially, Charley, Charlie, but then the sense of quest.  You could search forever.  The travelling need never end.  In 2003 I proposed this title as a research project to my Masters supervisors at Newcastle University: In Search of French America.  But you might not find it, they said.  Twenty years on and I realise they knew something about English-speaking cultures.  It is impossible to find French in the UK, in the US, Australia, New Zealand, or in the Anglophone communities of India and South Africa.   Why is French so well-hidden?   In Britain there is no free French-language TV channel.  No French newspapers sit on the racks in W H Smith; Le Monde is only stocked in major airport newsagents.  That's because no one knows any French in the UK, you might thin