Travel Writers Online

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 ...

Millbay, Saturday 3 August 2024 Samedi. A decade has passed since Sam Ferguson published his question* on the innovative story by André Gide, called, Paludes . In English that book title could be rendered as Swamps, or, Sourpool, perhaps. Plymouth's Sourpool is recorded in 1439 when the town's boundary was fixed during its incorporation as a Devon borough. The record reads ‘between the hill called Windy Ridge – by the bank of the Sourpool – against the north all the way to the great dyke otherwise called the great ditch’.  Damp, mossy, ferny, even swampy boundaries blurred the edges of the space we call Millbay today. Paludes occupies a critical point of experimentation in the trajectory of published diary-writing […] exploring the possible relationship of the diary with the literary œuvre, and its capacity for addressing philosophical and aesthetic questions. The pertinence of this experimentation to the modern field of life-writing makes this a suitable moment for anothe...

SuDS, Stonehouse and Plymouth Stonehouse was a separate place, a neighbour to Plymouth, until the towns were merged in 1914. Since the turn of the millennium, former Ministry of Defence property in Stonehouse has passed into local city council and then private hands for regeneration of the dockside area, including our area of study, known as Millbay. The first notable leisure and housing project was to convert the Royal William Victualling Yard. Our mission is to find walking routes into and around this emerging tourist area as it changes use to leisure and becomes part of the experience economy. As the writing and photography took shape under the title of The Millbay Residency, a marshland regeneration scheme funded by the European Union's Interreg initiative also reached completion on Bath Street, Plymouth. The local government and the urban regeneration scheme gave this old urban marshland a new French-styled place-brand with the name Millbay Boulevard. How is that connecting wi...

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea , or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent .  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste ; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby: Thursday, 11.30 I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it ...

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 Brittany 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, sp...