Travel Writers Online

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 fieldtrip...

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...