Travel Writers Online

An Unknown Town On 20th February 2023 we started the process of deep-mapping from our tourism textbook (1). A team of young professionals in Slovenia began with Step 1, the Library investigation of the town of Brežice. Yes, for readers in Britain and the United States, Brežice fits the category of 'the unknown town'. Where is Brežice? And how can an English speaker even learn to say the name of the town? Our First Workshop for Travel Writers Our first workshop was to write about heritage. Underlying the training of new writers is the need to build confidence in the new writer's own emotional response to cultural artefacts when they encounter them. To that end we looked first at jpegs of paintings from the region around the town. This elicited stories in that past tense in English which does not really have a formal name in grammar, it is the used-to tense. It's rather like the imperfect in French. Listen to this from Kaja:          'The picture reminds me o...

Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies  Travel Writers Book Launch Totnes Totnes author, Dr Charlie Mansfield launched his new book for travel writers at Totnes Public Library, Devon UK at 11am on Friday 3rd March 2023.  The previous Zoom presentation for the European launch, on 10th January 2023, introduced the 3-step process for travel writers and researchers to engage with DMOs, city councils and tourism stakeholders. It gave an overview of dialogue journaling from Chapter 5 of our 2023 book, Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding , Abingdon: Routledge. Please click on the icon below to access the slides in Google Slides (works better if you have a Google Account).  Recording of Book Talk from Zoom Please fast-forward 4 minutes to avoid Zoom Admin Part 2 including question time

We are delighted to annouce the publication of Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies with Routledge, Taylor & Francis  Dr Charlie Mansfield and Dr Jasna Potočnik Topler  Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding provides tourism students with a practice-based approach to producing researched literary travel writing on an urban destination, using the writing process as a research tool in itself. The book is scientifically supported with full academic references for researchers. City councils and destination managers are seeking new ways to commission and sponsor professional authors as part of place-branding projects for tourism development. Given the increasing value of such content within the tourism industry, this book provides a cohesive overview of literary travel writing, presenting it as an inquiry process that can be applied by writer-researchers to spaces that have value to them. Travel writing is presented as a methodo...

Reclaiming the City US academic, Professor Kristin Ross spent periods of travel research in Paris in the 1980s (Ross 1988) to develop a new method of inquiry to link literary text and urban space.  Her findings will be used here to explain some of the key aspects of social space in French cities.  She chooses poetry as her data source quite deliberately, giving a challenging rationale for this decision.  Whilst the study of narrative prose in the nineteenth-century novel is conducted in French Studies departments of British and American universities with an unexplained assumption that these texts are a social production of reality, Ross argues that verse is considered to be 'a desiring production that is mere fantasy or wish fulfilment' (Ross, 1988, 11).  Her study values poetry as a discursive practice that can yield data on the social developments of an era.  Her key argument, or finding, from her textual analyses is that social space was transformed during th...

EACWP  The conference of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes is a biannual event devoted to foster a European and Worldwide dialogue on the different approaches to creative writing education. The VI EACWP conference will take place in Madrid, in the context of Escuela de Escritores 20th anniversary, from Thursday 4 to Saturday 6 May 2023. The on-line format for proposals will only be accepted for the Multilingual Workshops. The deadline for submissions is February 24 2023 Teaching the art and craft of writing is a wonderful challenge. Can talent be created or just trained? How to enhance creativity? How do we shape up our students as writers? What role do reading, textual analysis, intertextuality, multilingualism and other strategies play in our teaching? How to make creative writing an inclusive discipline for all people, literatures and literary traditions? How to open it up to the diversity of new writers? What role will technologies play in the evolution of...