7.00 Trailer

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This summer? Where are we going? Maybe a little side trip to see Stephen King’s old house, take in an Ontario literary festival, or travel hundreds of miles to stand on a certain porch on Prince Edward Island? This summer you and I look for the real  doors we might open, maybe catch a glimpse of Anne of Green Gables running across a field. But Lucy Maud Montgomery didn’t build a theme park for us: she wrote some books. This season on Literary Nomads, we pack our bags and ask a simple question: What are we tourists expecting to find, and why?

[We’re heading to the Island. Join us for Journey Seven of Literary Nomads.]

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This is Journey 7, a relaxing summer outing. After our long winter spent wrestling with structural complicity and moral basements, we choose a restorative rest, stepping into the fresh air of travel writing, history, physical geography, and tale-telling.

Imagine us, then, as literary pilgrims. We love the literature deeply enough to hope that out there somewhere we might find still more. Maybe it is a special lake, a writer’s den, a novel’s scene, or an author’s grave. Each episode we’ll ask why we’re drawn there, what we might gain, and of course what awaits us. It’s a line sometimes between the pristine ideal and the physical reality of the dirt, of the ghosts, and of the weather left behind after the gift shops close.

[“It’s a summer of history, mystery, and the secret side of Avonlea. Follow the Literary Nomads trail at WaywordsStudio.com.”]

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I have my own field notes from this search. Last year, in fact, walking along the coast of PEI, tracking Montgomery’s old paths. The gift shops sell us straw hats and raspberry cordials, but there is a lived reality there, too, of course: The mud is thick, the sun hot, and the wind cold. And even then, a century ago, we realize that Montgomery herself was navigating a profound, often painful solitary life. As she wrote in her own winter journals: ‘The world is a hard place to live in if one has a soul that can feel.’

So this season, we look at the broader history of literary travel. We’ll track the aristocratic evolution of the ‘Grand Tour’ and contrast it with the brilliant independent journeys of historical women like Isabella Bird and Mary Seacole. We’ll explore the modern ‘Wild Effect’—how movies and digital screens force physical towns to themselves perform like souvenirs for visiting fans. And by the end of the summer, we will look at one of the strangest historical trends of all, the—well, we’ll save that for now.

“I am writing this by the light of a very dim lamp… the wind is howling around the old house in a fashion that makes me shiver.” 

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“What motivates our call to literary spaces? Is it the same readerly solitude Montgomery experienced? And what can we find behind the scenic routes, the raw histories underneath the curation? We are readers, you and I. But this summer, we leave the libraries to interrogate the maps and travelogues others have left for us.

Journey 7 of Literary Nomads begins June 19. Find us at Waywords Studio dot com, subscribe on your favorite app, and get ready to step a ways off the traditional tourist paths. Go read something—and then, let’s go walk it. See you on the trail.