Ouistreham

The Port

Ouistreham is a port, and home of the Riva Bella seaside area on the Normandy coast of Calvados in France. It has a population of a little over 9,300. It is bordered by the Canal de Caen à la Mer, which connects Caen city with the English Channel.

In 2024, I focused on researching Ouistreham for literary and creative cultural connections after completing the Millbay Residency the year before. I am hoping the town will begin to reveal catalysts for a new piece of literary travel writing or a place-making meta-fiction along the lines of ‘Millbay & Mill Bay’.

Residencies for Writers and Artists

My first discovery was that the town, La Ville de Ouistreham Riva-Bella, had renovated a building and created La Maison des Artistes, specifically to host residencies for artists and writers. On contacting the director, I was very kindly invited to go along for a visit in November.  Here was a starting point around which to build a visit and fieldwork.

Research Rewarded

Then the first literary connection came from a source which I used before for my PhD on Concarneau. A Maigret detective novel exists which is set in Ouistreham. Using a free resource, I’ve relied on before, the French National Library’s Gallica, I found the original feuilleton publication of the story by Georges Simenon in a Paris morning newspaper called, Le Matin. Here is a short taster:

You can see in the newspaper's banner that it was the 5am edition on Tuesday 23rd February 1932

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☙ Ouistreham Riva-Bella, Saturday 16th November 2024

My full day and overnight stay in Ouistreham in November 2024 has given me a huge resource from fieldwork, from my meetings and from the WhatsApp Community Group that kept in-touch live during the travel and my time in the town. 

Sophie Eugène, peintre

It was the travel story of Clarisse that first gave me the courage to experiment in meta-fiction as a place-making practice. We did more with this approach during the Millbay Residency where we worked with the photographer, Mark, to put sketch-booking into journaling.  My meeting with the painter, Sophie Eugène, thanks to the ‘Maison des Artistes’ initiative in Ouistreham Riva-Bella, has suggested new types of creativity in writing about urban space, too. A detailed walkthrough the artist’s books with Sophie shows that the artist can build their experience by working with more materials than their main medium. I wondered if this enjoyment of the material led to the lino-prints of a seashell over the page of an old novel.  Please see example, below:

If I applied that to the place-making work I was doing in Ouistreham Riva-Bella, what would happen to the writing? I do not mean creating a photo-montage of the town’s lighthouse on top of a page from the Maigret novel set in the town. But, rather, finding a purely textual montage, in the same way that sketch-booking was welcomed into the writing process. 

Points of Colour in Painting and in Writing

To go further with this, if we explore Sophie’s rich and complex estuary painting, where she uses acrylics applied as points of paint, then what can this suggest for the experimental writer? The work by Sophie is inspired by the river Orne and its companion, the canal de Caen à la mer, as they emerge into the English Channel at Riva-Bella. Not only is the initial mark-making done in points of colour, but a second step then cuts the parallel waterways into smaller square panels, cases, and rearranges them onto the canvas. It is another montage process but not using found images this time. What can this do to a written piece? Can a whole document of the narrator walking along a street be cut and re-framed into a form that is still coherent and legible? What else will this form of montage recount? - Thank you, Sophie for spending time talking through your practice and your own learning. These are wonderful and inspiring pieces and processes.  ❧ 

Heading back on-board at 8:30am on Sunday morning 17 November 2024

☙  ❧

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Le Bourg, Ouistreham Riva-Bella 

Thanks to research by ‘Ana teaches French’ - view on Facebook - and local knowledge from Brigitte, in our public WhatsApp Community Group, I have been able to attach a name to the area at the top of the slope which attracted me in my exploration of the old town of Ouistreham Riva-Bella. It is called « Le Bourg ». Does anyone know what type of rock has created that mound, or hill on which the older buildings still sit, please? « La Maison des Artistes » sits in a row of houses that were occupied by fishing folk, they look across the square called « Place Albert Lemarignier » towards a medieval barn called « La Grange aux Dîmes ». The grange was built in the 1200s for the nuns to keep ten per cent of the locals’ produce. This photograph, below, shows the corner of the tithe barn with the Saturday market stalls just outside. 

Here, below, is a photograph of « La Maison des Artistes ». It is the end house of 4 storeys, if you include the floor in the Mansard roof. Can you see it is lighter in colour? This is because it was recently renovated for artists’ and writers’ residencies and exhibitions.  I tried to show the slope of the road running up to « Le Bourg ». 

La Grande Rue

Le Bourg, and especially la Grande rue, really captured my imagination during my visit to la Maison des Artistes. First the street is home to an eclectic mix of shops and food outlets; the one that immediately caught my attention was Pizza du Bourg at number 30, you can see why below:

Remember, la Grande rue runs off the market square called Place A. Lemarignier. Lemarignier was the name of 2 mayors of Ouistreham. The spelling of the name Le Marignier is a variant of the French word for the sailor or the mariner. 

The Fromagerie - I could not quite make out what was sold here. Was it a café? Or did it sell cheese? I must go back to talk to them when I return to le Bourg. Please send a message or add a Comment if you know.

Then, what was even more intriguing were the side alleys running off alongside some of the shop fronts into yards and sometimes containing doors to additional housing. This was a place for the setting of a mystery. I thought I would be able to find the side of the house that had been renovated for the residencies, but the architecture and layers of history were far too complex for a simple investigation. 

I turned right when I reached this pink shop at the end of the parade and eventually found my way to the rue Traversière from where I could see a bus stop called Petit Bonheur

Is « Petit Bonheur » the name of the small green park behind the stop? It looks like a little spot of happiness:

  

 

This walk-and-talk, or Waytale documents my route back from the park called The Little Happiness across the road into the street called rue Traversière and eventually into La Grande Rue on the Bourg in Ouistreham old town, Calvados, Normandy, France. Recording made live on location on Saturday 16 November 2024. Click on image above to listen on YouTube (audio-only)