Travel Writers Online

Caen and Ouistreham Group in WhatsApp Community Have you tried setting-up a WhatsApp Community, yet? If you have been using WhatsApp with work colleagues or with friends for a while, then it is easy to do. A WhatsApp Community is a dialogue space to share an interest. The Community can grow and so you can divide it into Groups. In October 2024 we started a WhatsApp Community called French Travel and Books , and designed a logo of open books in the colours of the French flag: WhatsApp Group Soon, we realised it was a broad topic and so began to create Groups within the Community to share news and ideas for regions and cities. The aim began to form that it would be a space for collecting favourite holiday reading for visitors to these places. I am interested in Ouistreham and Caen because I completed fieldwork in November 2024, and the WhatsApp Group ran live alongside the travel and my stay in the port town.  Fieldwork in Ouistreham During my fieldwork in the town I was drawn to...

Thursday morning, 27th July 2023. The research project on slow tourism for the Channel ports is still very much in Step 1, the Library Stage. The earliest step in our process methodology using the book for travel researchers. In the last few days, though, a literary connection with the city of Caen has begun to emerge. It's exciting enough to report here on Travel Writers Online. Using dialogue journaling a trustworthy link has been established with a fellow blogger, Claude at the blog Livres d'un jour . Claude had published a review of a detective novel, Canicule sanglante (2022) by Pierre Guinot-Delery (b.1949).  The title would translate as The Bloody Heatwave . The review starts like this: " The city of Caen is suffocating under the effect of a heat wave. One morning, the body of the vice-president of the chamber of commerce and business leader is found dead in front of the courthouse." That was enough to make me order a copy from Amazon. It's due to arri...

on  the rue Picpus in Paris.  Glance at the front cover of the US edition of Modiano’s novel. Can you see the street running diagonally through the background map? It is the rue Picpus. In that same edition of the evening newspaper mentioned in the previous blog-post, Paris-soir , on page 2 is the heading: Signé Picpus . It is an instalment from a serialised novel by Georges Simenon with his famous detective, Maigret as the main character.  What is the significance of Picpus for these two writers of mystery? Looking forward to hearing your literary detective discoveries... In the mean time, please re-read last week's post on Patrick Modiano and literary detective work at  Read last week's blog post   A 3-Step activity for travel writers online starts in the post for 28th October 2022. Please Follow this blog below to be sure you do not miss Step 1... 

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 ...