Travel Writers Online

Keats and Teignmouth - Literary Tourism in Devon.  If you are planning to visit the seaside town of Teignmouth in Devon be sure to take some poems by John Keats with you. Keats stayed here in 1818, just over 200 years ago, and leaves us some journaling in his correspondence to set the scene: 1818 letter from John Keats: March 13th 1818, to Benjamin Bailey – you may say what you will of Devonshire:  the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy,  misty snowy, foggy, haily floody,  muddy, slipshod county the hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ‘em the Primroses are out, but then you are in the Cliffs are of a fine deep Colour,  but then the Clouds are continually vieing with them Two houses down towards Rat Island claim to be the place that Keats rented when he lived here. Of course, he could easily have rented them both for himself and family. Number 36 and the house called 'Old Place', on Northumberland Place, Rat Island, Teignmouth, South Devon UK. It...

This methods book is for travel writers and bloggers who are developing their professional and creative practice with key practical methods. Alongside developing your growth and confidence as a literary travel writer it provides an approach that forms the framework for a longer project. For your career, when writing commissions are sought, the book will help you to professionalise your practice so that each new project that you approach is productive from an earlier stage. If you would like an eBook copy for your iPhone to take with you on field trips, then you will need a free Google Account. If you have gmail then you already have one. Just login to Google in your Chrome browser and go to the Google Play book store to browse at the link below or click on book cover to see more  The eBook is also available from the Google Play Bookstore as an audio book, please click on details below to see more on the Google Play Bookstore  

My experimentation with travel writing styles and layouts dates from the turn of the century. I was in Dresden on a German language course at the Goethe Institute. It was the end of August 1999, all the talk in Germany then was all about the process to welcome Poland into the EU.  I had taken a huge step in my career and was going to spend five years in industry, to lead a web development team for British Airways in Europe.  I had been teaching European Cyberculture at Sunderland University so my mind was full of HTML and how it could make writing more visual without using photographs. HTML sounds so artisan now as I write this. Please click on cover to download a PDF My piece of writing from Dresden, called ABC.HTM, celebrates its own influences and roots: Roland Barthes’ autobiography written in alphabetical order, the tradition of French song taken up by rappers, and most of all, the conceit and wit of a travel piece where the journey is unexpectedly short.   Remembe...

King of Chefs The tradition that French cuisine is special can be traced through the written tradition to the work of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his quotation 'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.' and the first celebrity chef, Marie Antoine Carême (1784-1833), known as 'The King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings'.  Both these chefs left written legacies and this, in French culture, has helped to fix them as founders of French cuisine.  Amy Trubek, too, points to this written tradition and explains how, what she calls, codification, through books and written recipes has built a strong foundation for placing French food preparation at the centre of worldwide professional haute cuisine, ... to read on, please download my free working paper on French Food.  French Food The tradition that French cuisine is special can be traced through the written tradition to the work of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his q...

 Europa   City   So this is city, is it?   Dug earth, its water fired to air.   Rust rocks smoothed to steel,   Shouldering elm,   And sand for eyes.                      Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa After long travels, the final arrival in the city is always worth celebrating in writing.  The Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Ruin’ in the Exeter Book here in Devon does just that; the writer unfamiliar with the great urban works of the Romans arrives in one of their British cities 300 or 400 years after they have left.  Ruin expresses the poet's understanding of the deserted urban space.  In ‘City’ from my collection Europa, I try to convey the wonder of a traveller who has never seen a European city and its buildings.  The travel writer makes sense of the scene using only the elements of nature, bricks are not in the writer’s word ho...

Proust in Brittany Marcel Proust was born just weeks after the Paris Commune in the summer of 1871. His life reaches into the twentieth century and through the First World War.  Born into one of the successful bourgeois families that emerged from the revolutions in France, his documented life and his own novels present readers with a leisured social class in which a young man could choose to become a writer.  His narrating character in his major novel, À la Recherche du temps perdu (published over the period 1913-1927), is called the young Marcel, and with Proust's declared intent to scientifically investigate personal memory, the volumes of À la Recherche hover between fiction and autobiography.  Actual key figures from the time are mentioned in his novel, for example, Viollet-le-Duc, renovator of Notre-Dame cathedral. This further connects the narrative with the real history of this era.   Even though Proust's own critical writing challenged nineteenth-century...

My first major investigation of contemporary travel writing practices focussed on Paris. I examined the work and the writing methods of three important figures in French literature: Annie Ernaux, François Maspero and Jean Rolin, writers normally studied for their fiction writing.  Along with a documentary photographer, Anaïk Frantz, who worked with Maspero on his prizewinning travel book Passengers of the Roissy Express (1990). Maspero challenges travel writing by situating his journey on the Paris train that serves CDG airport. In travel writing, this conceit of the unexpectedly short journey is taken up by the other two authors discussed here. Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux was born at Lillebonne in September 1940 but now lives near Paris. During the 1990s she published two collections of what appear to be diaries of everyday life. They are documents of her daily commuting on the RER and metro from a suburb of Paris, Val d’Oise in Cergy, into the city centre. The two books in this ...