Travel Writers Online

Finding novels set in Nantes is proving much more difficult than I thought.  C S Forester's Hornblower barely touches the ground in the city of Nantes. I need a narrative where the French urban space is almost a character itself.  This morning, though, with Google and Amazon, I found these two novels by Paul Louis Rossi (b.1933 Nantes): Régine (1990) and a later one, La voyageuse immortelle (2001) and they are now on order.  It is hard to judge whether they will create that elusive toureme for Nantes.  As my readers on Audible will know, I've been addicted to Patrick Modiano since 2015, and these two novels by Rossi do have a faint hint that they might have a similar quest for a missing character that Modiano's stories often recount. 

Our field trip to Nantes is all set, again; this time with a group of undergraduates who are studying on one of the many modules in French language studies.  Crossing the Channel in January was perhaps rather ambitious of me, so this journey is set for 4 th May 2016.  We travel to Southampton by train from Plymouth on the Tuesday, staying overnight in the Premier Inn on the airport and then fly FlyBe direct to NTE on Wednesday.  Bénédicte and Xavier at Le Voyage à Nantes have been very patient after my first research visit was postponed, and they have stepped in to help us to find venues and attractions for our students of French.  For example, they have found this wine bar to host our WSET training afternoon (Wine & Spirit Education Trust): La Comédie des Vins.  I am looking forward to reporting back from there on this blog: Travel Writers Online Our French lesson for this post is taken from our lunchtime series of teaching quality talks at the univer...

Interrogate, mediate, articulate Interrogate, mediate, articulate, are the three steps we practise for tourism knowledge transfer.   And the same three steps when out in the field as a travel writer, too. The three steps fit neatly into the acronym, I'm a […] showing how your own identity changes as you discover and process new data during your travels.   Museum Docent In the museum or gallery the travel writer can practice the process as they encounter pieces of work that they have never seen before. If the work is totally new then use ekphrasis as a standby, giving the piece two stars and a wish, as you describe it to your audience of museum visitors or rainy-day tourists. The full set of training slides for museum docenting using the theme of - I'm a ... - can be viewed on our Toureme website here on Google Sites. Please click on the icon below...  

Travel Writers Online Magazine ISSN 2753-7803 is published as a weblog mainly for writers of narrative non-fiction and for educators who want to integrate this writing into their teaching and research. Our particular specialisms, as the name suggests, are: literary travel writing, blogging about place, and dialogue journaling during research. This all emerged from teaching travel writers and supervising at PhD level in higher education with the aim of exploring ideas of value and the literary in writing as a research inquiry. From this research we ran our first summer school for writers in June 2020, during the first lockdown, and one publication came from that. It is a portable vade mecum listing the Methods for Travel Writers . This is now available as an eBook on all main online stores and in 2022 was converted into a small paperback version through Amazon Kindle Direct.  Over our first two years, I also worked with Jasna through the EU’s ERASMUS + mobility initiative for unive...