When I was three-quarters of the way into Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel Evil Under the Sun, I put the book down and tried to see if I could guess who the killer was. I was eleven or twelve, a hungry and rapt reader, and I often attempted to solve the mysteries I read about. My predictions were invariably wrong, but I enjoyed mucking around in the details of the books and eager for the facts from these fictional worlds to bleed into my own. I’d scribble notes, make diagrams of the characters’ relationships, and try to find telling inconsistencies in their alibis. I became especially invested in Evil Under the Sun, partly because the island setting is so carefully described, so enticing and full of morbid possibility. In addition to my amateur detective work, I drew a detailed map of the island, which featured the grand hotel, the long beach, the tidal sandbar, the winding footpaths, and the hidden cove. Seventeen years later, I can’t remember which character committed the murder, but I can still picture the island as if I had spent a week lounging in that hotel myself.
As it turns out, for around 450£ a night, I could spend a week in that hotel, or at least a close approximation of it. I recently discovered that Christie modeled her island after Burgh Island, a small tidal island off the coast of South Devon. Discouraged by the cost of flights and hotel reservations, I resorted to some avid Google Image and Street View searching. I daydreamed of visiting Burgh Island and walking its footpaths and bright beaches. The prospect of wandering a real place that shimmers with an overlay of a fictional world, especially a world I already felt so intimately connected to, delighted me.
I’m not alone in this strange desire. Academics, readers, and fans have spent countless hours mapping out fictional universes and trying to pinpoint the exact locations that inspired these settings. For example, thanks to the work of Professor Joseph Nugent, of the Boston College Department of English, people can map out and then walk the exact paths taken by the characters in Ulysses, imagining themselves in Joyce’s turn-of-the-century Dublin. The creators claim that the interactive online map, featuring descriptions of the various characters encountered and buildings seen, is intended to help readers gain understanding of Joyce’s difficult book.
In a slightly different yet no less ambitious vein, a UCLA geophysics and geology professor attempted to map Tolkien’s Middle-earth onto a map of Europe. The professor, Peter Bird, based his investigations on Tolkien’s claim that “the North-West of ‘Middle-earth’” is “equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean … If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence.” Bird’s map is full of approximations and admitted conjecture, but it’s alluringly convincing, matching up bodies of water (the Sea of Rhun with the Black Sea), mountain ranges (Ered Nimrais with the Alps), and plains (Gondor with the northern Italian plains). I was thrilled to discover that Bird situates Mordor, that dark and perilous realm, in Transylvania — a land whose cultural identity is already so strongly associated with eerie literary territory, notorious for being the home of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
A more encompassing attempt at tackling the task of mapping the literary universe onto existing geography is Placing Literature. Co-founded by a novelist and a geography doctoral student, this online project allows readers to add literary landmarks onto a digital map of the world. Users can plot any location that shows up in a published book, along with short descriptions and quotations or notes. Users have plotted places as specific as particular buildings, street corners or businesses, and as general as cities, regions or islands. Originally intended to include just three locations (U.S. cities where the founders had lived), the project expanded when the site attracted global attention and enthusiasm. The map is peppered with small black books, which reveal varying amounts of information when clicked. The website is still relatively underdeveloped, with large parts of the map lacking any entries, and other areas clearly dominated by a few users. Duluth, Minnesota is covered in landmarks placed by an avid Brian Freeman fan (or perhaps a handful of avid Brian Freeman fans). When marking a location from Freeman’s The Burying Place, a user notes, “I visited on a bitter, rainy day… water dropping through the holes in the roof… the perfect, scary locale.” In another entry, the user simply states that The Black Woods Restaurant, which appears in Freeman’s The Cold Nowhere, is “one of [his] favorite Duluth restaurants,” and advises, “Get the barbecue-crusted meat loaf.”
On Placing Literature I’ve added in the literary spots I know so well, especially in the places I live or have lived: The Columbus, Ohio home of James Thurber, which was the location of his comical ghost story, “The Night the Ghost Got In”; East Rock Park in New Haven, Connecticut where two of my favorite Amy Bloom characters carried out an affair; the Cambridge, Massachusetts locations from Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories.
Perhaps stranger still are places where the existing world has been changed to match a fictive world. The inspiration for Nathanial Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is a popular Salem, Massachusetts tourist attraction. On tours of this spooky colonial mansion, visitors can admire the austere architecture, count the seven gables, and imagine searching the shadowed corners for lost wills and family secrets. But the house did not always so closely resemble the mansion of Hawthorne’s invention. When the original house was turned into a museum in the early 1900s, it was renovated to more closely resemble Hawthorne’s vision and readers’ expectations. The owners added a secret passageway up to the attic where the mysterious Hosgrove would have lived. The house, which had belonged to a cousin of Hawthorne, never featured an adjoined store, but one was added so visitors could envision Hepzibah Pyncheon working behind the counter.
In 1996, the small village of North Tarrytown, New York officially changed its name to Sleepy Hollow, strengthening its connection to the Washington Irving story. The Tarrytown Cemetery, where Irving is buried, had already been re-christened The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery many years before. The village’s official website celebrates how the town was “immortalized in Washington Irving’s famous tale, and their school sports teams are “The Horsemen.” The banner for their website reads, “Visit Sleepy Hollow, Where the Legend Lives.”
Sleepy Hollow is not the only place using its literary associations to attract visitors. Norman Island, in the British Virgin Islands, is rumored to be the location after which Robert Louis Stevenson modeled his pirate-infested adventure tale, Treasure Island. Tourists are invited to search Norman Island’s beaches and darkened coves for real-life treasure. But the question of which island inspired Stevenson has been the subject of a lively debate. Aside from Norman Island, a handful of other islands vie for this peculiar honor, with residents and fans of the novel pointing out this one’s pine-tree lined beaches or that one’s oddly shaped shoreline. No one is arguing that the events of Treasure Island actually transpired, so it’s an unusual historical claim to fight over: “This thing that never actually happened, happened here.”
Growing up in Massachusetts, in a small town just north of Boston, I had plenty of opportunity to explore the nexus of real and imagined places. A disproportionate number of writers have called Massachusetts home, providing the state with a rich literary landscape. My childhood home is twenty minutes from Walden Pond and the town where Louisa May Alcott set Little Women. Esther Greenwood, Plath’s heroine in The Bell Jar, felt stuck in suburbs whose culture I recognized. When we read Ethan Frome in high school, my friends and I used Wharton’s dramatic descriptions of Starkfield’s harsh winters to jokingly refer to our December drives to school. On a miserable whale-watching trip off the coast of Nantucket, I thought, “Moby-Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” as I sat, green with nausea, on the open deck. Reading Denis Lehane’s Mystic River, I kept thinking, “Yes, yes, I know that place!” as if Lehane and I were two expatriates comparing notes in a distant land.
As a lover of horror, my understanding of small-town New England has been shaped by the way it’s been rendered in literature. Stephen King’s depictions of small Maine towns hiding dark secrets hang heavy in my consciousness, and King’s shadowed woods and craggy coastlines is the narrative I most associated with this landscape. When I think of New England, of its culture and character, I think of ghost stories and foggy lakes and winding, uneven roads, even though I have a life of ordinary, not-even-a-little-bit-supernatural memories and experiences to draw from. New England’s cultural identity has been shaped in countless ways by the works of Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, and, of course, HP Lovecraft.
Perhaps one of the most explored and discussed fictional universes is the region that fans and critics have described as “Lovecraft Country” or “Miskatonic County.” This shared territory includes the towns, woods and rivers that many of Lovecraft’s works are set in, and it matches up geographically with Essex County in northeast Massachusetts. Fan fiction, role-playing games, and online communities have explored the mythos and geography of this area. Although Lovecraft’s towns and rivers have invented names and the geography is slightly altered, Lovecraft is adamant about the importance of his rural New England locations. He nestled his fictional towns, such as Arkham and Dunwhich, in between real places, such as Newburyport and Plum Island. In his story “The Picture in the House,” Lovecraft describes the ghastly spell of the “ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England,” and the “elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance” which skulk there.
Setting was foremost in Lovecraft’s mind as he wrote, and his stories exist in a lovingly detailed universe. In a letter to a friend, Lovecraft explains, “It is the night-black Massachusetts legendary which packs the really macabre ‘kick.’” And while Lovecraft’s universe is inhabited by mutants, half-humans, and cults that worship mysterious gods, many Lovecraft fans are heavily invested in locating the “real” places in which these monsters live. Lovecraft described the fictional town of Innsmouth as a “considerably twisted version of Newburyport,” but Will Murray, a novelist and comic-book writer, has written several articles insisting that Innsmouth is actually located in Gloucester. Fans and readers have created detailed maps of Lovecraft Country by revising and reshaping maps of the Massachusetts North Shore, and each invented town has its own Wikipedia page.
Lovecraft Country isn’t the only fictional region so extensively explored by readers and fans. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County has been mapped twice by Faulkner and many more times by his readers. This region, too, has its own Wikipedia page, which explains the etymology of the county name and reports on the (fictional) history of the (fictional) area in extensive detail. Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia, is in the process of creating a digital map of the county. Although the exact details and geography of the county are invented, they correspond closely to historical accounts of Lafayette County, Mississippi, Faulkner’s inspiration for his apocryphal region.
Unlike Lovecraft’s Massachusetts North Shore or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Boston suburbs, which I’ve visited in person many times, Lafayette County fits into a repository of places I feel acquainted with solely from the literature set there. This peculiar collection of places consists of regions I’ve never seen, but which my favorite writers have made their own and defined: Stuart Dybeck’s immigrant neighborhoods of 1950s Chicago, viewed through the dreamy lens of childhood and teenage nostalgia; Charles Baxter’s desperate Minnesota suburbs; Flannery O’Connor’s gothic rural South; Louise Erdrich’s richly and thoroughly explored fictional North Dakota reservation and the apocryphal town of Argus; Daniel Woodrell’s stark and lonely Ozark mountain landscapes; Khaled Hosseini’s tumultuous and constantly changing Kabul; Alice Munro’s small, Southern Ontario towns; Junot Diaz’s dual worlds of a vibrant, corrupt Dominican Republic and a stagnating, stifling New Jersey. I have an uncomfortable relationship with my understanding of these places. Although I feel as if I know them well, I understand that the depictions of the cities are stylized, seen through lenses that strain out the parts of places that don’t serve the narrative’s purpose. Having lived in New Haven for two years, I know there’s much more to the city than Amy Bloom’s portrayal of professors and young professionals walking the elm-lined streets, living in the lofty colonials on Orange Street. She depicts the world of her characters faithfully, but leaves out the experiences of most people in the city, one of the most economically depressed in the northeast.
Perhaps this is why authors such as Faulkner, Erdrich, Wharton, and Lovecraft created apocryphal communities, avoiding accusations of misrepresentation by claiming liberties to a fictional place. Faulkner, in an interview with Jean Stein, revealed, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about … and by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top.” So, I wonder, why try to get it “right” at all? Why capture, in such careful detail, the real social, political and cultural conflicts that gripped Lafayette County? Why not take more liberties, adjust the culture or the people, instead of simply exaggerating an anecdote here or shaping a family history there?
When Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson visited Ontario to interview Alice Munro for the Paris Review, they noted, with what seems like delight, that the comfortable, small-town hotel they stayed in “would seem to lodge a librarian or a frontier schoolteacher in one of Munro’s stories.” When they observed a small plane resting in a field, they told Munro which stories of hers this sight reminded them of.
These observations strike me as similar to fandom, and to what I’m sure my reaction would have been. I can imagine sitting on the twin bed in that hotel and gleefully thinking, ‘It’s like I’m in one of Munro’s stories.’ And, unlike the beautiful tourist-destination island of Agatha Christie’s mystery, this is not an area of the world that I would normally feel a pressing desire to visit. The only pull the place carries for me is that it is an embodiment of something I love fiercely: the wonder of Munro’s narratives and the beauty of her writing. I think of that hotel, that lone plane in the wide-open field, as momentary portals into other words that could previously only be entered through the page. Munro is on the other end of that, offering readers a glimpse into the way she experiences the world, allowing readers into her small corner of the universe, her bit of native soil.
When an interviewer mentioned how Edward P. Jones doesn’t like to write about his own life in his stories, Jones insisted, “Well, all the places that I write about are real.” Place is the point at which Jones’ invented universes overlap with the real world. Jones seems to take it for granted that this would be true, as if it is the most obvious literary move. And, for the most part, it seems that readers are invested in faithful representations. We want to be able to count the seven gables, walk through the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, locate the port that Captain Ahab sailed from, and verify whether the author got it right, whether the storyworld resembles our own.
I suspect this impulse comes from the way that we already conceive of place as a collective experience, something shared and part of the public consciousness. We live our individual lives, believe in our own private truths, but we share an environment; we’re already inclined to interpret the world in this way. Perhaps we want to share our world—our real world—with invented characters, because that’s how we relate to the real people in our lives.
I no longer scribble in notebooks when I read mysteries, nor run my fingers over fictional maps while daydreaming about buried treasure or solving crimes. I’ve at least partially outgrown that unselfconscious, mooning type of fandom. But, still, when I read something I really love, I become absorbed and completely lost. For a time, it all feels real: Lovecraft’s monstrous gods and Bloom’s wry professors and Hawthorne’s mysterious strangers. And I want nothing more than to fall completely into the illusion and share a world with these characters. Or at least to stand, for a moment, in the place where their world meets mine.
Steinbeck in Monterey. It’s intense. I read Tortilla Flats while laying in bed in a hotel room off Cannery Row, and it was kind of a bizarre experience to be able to literally pinpoint every landmark and street he mentions in the book and know that they were all within a fifteen-minute walk of where I was right that second.
Even the banners on the lightposts in Monterey have Steinbeck quotations on them. “A poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
I loved that. And the big murals along the rec trail 🙂
It’s funny–you build an imaginary setting in your head when you read a book, and when you reread it a thousand times that setting gets burned into your head like a real place you’ve been. So this is why my imagination’s Green Gables is so different from the actual Green Gables in PEI (helpful hint if you’re ever in PEI, you can visit some of the other homes LMM lived in and they’re waaaay less popular than GG, Silver Bush was my favourite). I think that impulse to create in reality what usually only lives in our imaginations is one borne out of comfort and pleasure in an effort to transmit that to the real world, to continue stretching our limbs in that alternate universe. I love it, and I’m always fascinated when a real place turns up in a book in reading.
I want to roll around in this post. Place is my favorite thing in all literature. Faulkner, Neale Hurston, Hardy, Steinbeck, Lovecraft, Alan Moore (there’s an interesting interview with him about this here)…pretty sure it started with The Yearling when I was a kid. I was so enamored of the idea that I had been to all these places that the characters went to. Their world was reachable.
My partner got me into the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian and then immediately bought me the companion books, the ones that relate the stories to historical events and produce maps of all the journeys. It’s wonderful to me that there can be a sub-industry just mapping and annotating fiction like that (historical or otherwise). It always proves to me that my mental maps of these things are SO OFF. I apparently have no geography skills whatsoever, which is funny given what a generally good visual learner I am.
Soemthing in your last couple of paragraphs reminded me of “the most photographed barn in America” from Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I feel like there’s some sort of analogy there, like places in fiction create some liminal space where we all “join up” just to be with each other and say we were there, not due to the particulars of the place … but I haven’t had enough coffee to make that not-pretentious.
The Aubrey/Maturin companion volumes are super, super cool. MrChouffe has bunches of them.
As someone who grew up in Wakefield, MA the Salem and Walden Pond parts resonated with me. The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker were good at getting at aspects of Boston. I always liked Cell by Stephen King, where the main character walks from Boston to Malden, where I went to HS.
seriously, “a small town just north of Boston” is one of the best ways to pique my curiosity, there’s a voice in the back of my head chanting “which town which town WHICH TOWN?” Not that it matters, because clearly it’s close enough to us that I was nodding my head furiously at the entire middle section of this essay.
Same! In addition to everything about Salem, the north-of-Boston college my dad used to work at is where the Necromicon is supposedly buried (and it’s now a Christian college, ahaha)
Oh Spenser, how I love Susan and Hawk, and all the Massachusetts places. I became convinced Susan lived in Hamilton, and one whole book takes place entirely in Ware even though it is renamed – the bottle return place, the dreadful Chinese restaurant, everything.
Yeah – I grew up in Marblehead and Swampscott and driving in and out of Salem and Lynn (I was completely convinced in my infancy that “trot trot to Boston” was all about the Mystic River Bridge, and slightly horrifyed about the possibility of falling in) and later Boxford and Topsfield. All of Essex county, is what I’m saying. Louisa May Alcott did not speak to me the same way Jane Langton does, writing about Concord and Boston, both for kids and adults.
Wasn’t the university named Taft? And Parker (who went to the same college I did) so clearly disliked academia. Funny to read.
Does anyone else have the opposite reaction of intense annoyance when a literary landscape doesn’t match the real world for a non plot based reason? Thinking of Harry Dresden and The Case of the Chicago with Hardly Any POC.
things that bug me: name-checking a bunch of landmarks. I swear every character in DC goes jogging around the Mall/Tidal Basin even though they’re not at all convenient to get to from where most people live.
when the locations are not at all the locations in that city where the character would hang out. Mostly New York novels with magically affordable apartments so the character doesn’t have to spend the whole novel commuting to where the action is! (this is probably also a New York With Hardly Any POC.)
Actually I get more thrown off by the movie versions of places (Jaws – I am looking at you SO HARD, mashing poor old Martha’s Vineyard into an appalling pastiche of itself).
this is fascinating, just your lists of authors and books and settings pull up so many vivid mental images for me! I totally agree that one measure of a book’s quality is how much map-reading and (now) street-viewing time one devotes during the reading. I distinctly remember The Snow Child sending me into a good hour of OMG SO MUCH ALASKA, and The Sellout had me actually looking up LA transit maps. Currently reading A Brief History of Seven Killings and it’s doing the same. I could happily list books that do this all day 😀
American Gods is my favorite Neil Gaiman book not necessarily because it has the strongest writing, but because it’s basically a fairytale romp through my world – that is, the upper Midwest, both the big cities and the tiny towns. I squealed with excitement when the (very small) town where I went to school was namedropped. I imagine the ATM two blocks from my first Chicago apartment is the one Mr. Wednesday robbed. All those hours on the road in Wisconsin – I’ve spent them, commuting from my childhood home in Minnesota to my college on the south shore of Lake Superior, to Chicago to visit my partner. Whenever I feel homesick for the north woods, I pick American Gods back up.
Julian Barnes’ novel Flabuert’s Parrot has some beautiful writing on this subject, about going to places where your favorite writer lived and wrote and trying to feel a connection.
Listening to the audiobook of Kitchens of the Great Midwest was a trippy experience for me because it was full of specific places I know: that’s the farmer’s market I visit in the summer, that’s the restaurant where we celebrated my grandma’s eightieth birthday, that’s the lake where my dad and his brothers used to go fishing. It was hard to tell if the author was actually doing a good job with the use of place, or if I was just filling it in.
Kitchens felt like an extended inside joke with anyone who’s from/has lived in Minnesota. I don’t know either if it was really spot on or it just triggered memories!
I spent the last year in London and I really indulged in this side of the reading experience. I would read a chapter of Bleak House and then walk along Chancery Lane and I could trace the vast majority of the scenes to their original locations. I would read some Keats at night, and jog past his house on my morning run. I went to St. Paul’s and thought about that scene in Villette, when she first feels the freedom and adventure of walking alone in London. Now that I’m back in the states, mostly still reading stuff set in London, I still pull up google maps whenever a place is mentioned and orient it in my mind. I took trips to the Bronte Parsonage and Beatrix Potter’s house as well. You feel a weird energy. Like their worlds are just on the other side of some cosmic wormhole, and if you could just connect, you could transport yourself. I stood beneath the Harry Potter railway bridge in Scotland and felt like…if I could just take the right path, Hogwarts would be around the bend.
I love that feeling. It’s hopeful, and a bit sad, but it connects the book to something real and tangible.
That’s the exact feeling I got when I visited London. I was just so thrilled. All of the stories I grew up with were *right there*! I also took a class that semester on London in Literature where doing those sorts of walks was the main point (we did the “read Bleak House then walk along Chancery Lane” thing as a class, for example).
Yes! When I studied in London we went on literary walking tours for one of my English classes. Saturday by Ian McEwan had come out the year before and we read it, and it blew my mind that I was living about two blocks away from the Spearmint Rhino.
/socks away money for my eventual driving tour of The Dark is Rising
OMG TAKE ME WITH YOU
CORNWALL
WALES
TINY BUCKINGHAMSHIRE VILLAGE ON THE EDGE OF A ROYAL FOREST
This sounds like a great plan! Any particular books/walks to recommend?
I can’t wait to tell my mom that she lives in a macabre Lovecraftian hellhole.
What’s funny is that the books that so closely resonate for me with place are those that talked of familiar places that I read *when I was very young*. While I recognize and appreciate Place in novels I’ve read as an adult, it’s Anastasia Krupnik’s life in Cambridge and (what I assume is) Newton that still jumped into my head as I read this.
In other news, I can’t wait until my kid is literate.
I am ALL ABOUT this. When my sister and I travelled to the UK last year, we basically spent our vacation hopping around to various locations from all our favourite classics. Nerd heaven.
I also tend to read a lot of books set in Toronto (where I live) as a way to better understand my city–now when I walk around I feel those stories layered on the often-drab surface of the city.
Oooh, what are your favourite Toronto books?? I love reading stuff set here too!
well described by Walker Percy regarding movies, but applies to books perhaps even more:
“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
This is great! I’m a geographer who focuses on literary cartography, but with the emphasis almost entirely on fictional worlds. Very cool to see a similar approach taken to the real world.
That sounds like such a dream job!
Do you know anout this graphic novel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unwritten Basically the entire plot of the book is literary cartography.
The bit about searching for these places as a type of fandom just serves to remind me of Forks, Washington, haha, oops.
A friend of mine in college was from Washington and had the most epic rant about how the actual town of Forks is like, a few houses and the lumber industry, but people kept going there anyways because of Twilight, and they only had one two-story house in the entire town, so that had to be Bella’s house when they started doing tours because her bedroom is described being on the second floor. (Idk how true this is, but it was a very entertaining rant)
It’s incredibly surreal to read stuff set in the very, very specific places of your day to day life, though. Israel Horovitz set a lot of his plays in the town he grew up in 50 years before I grew up there, and I bought a collection of them off of Amazon a few years ago. They were really interesting, but the overall sensation was SO WEIRD.
watching Spotlight the movie did this too for me. A big moment in the film is centered on a rival high school of mine, where I was running track meets there at the same time as the events of the movie take place.
I am in love with this essay and all the comments. That is all.
Yep, getting some nice recs for books set in my area!
This is LOVELY. Thank you. The last line really resonated with me — wanting to exist in a place, for just a moment, because of what you have read or learned is a really powerful thing. I can never be cool about it myself — I almost got run over by a bicycle when I was visiting Amsterdam because I just stopped walking in the middle of the bike lane when I saw the Vondel Hotel, where W.G. Sebald mentions he stayed in one of his books. I will also buy anything they sell — the raspberry cordial they sell in P.E.I. is pretty weird-tasting, but no one cares.
We organized a trip around England based on locations we could find in children’s literature. Well, children’s literature by our family definition – Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter, Edward Lear, and some Shakespeare who appears as important influences if not exactly a character or location.
It was GLORIOUS.
I am so ambivalent about this–I love evocative writing that nails a sense of place, and I do get a thrill when a place I know is mentioned in a book, but at the same time, as a writer, one of the biggest traps I fall into is obsession with getting locations right when the important thing is what’s happening there. And I get furious with reviews/criticism that complain about the author getting things “wrong” when they make changes. I prefer novels to be set in a general area where locality can be evoked, but in a fictional specific spot so that the author can just go ahead and arrange the space to the needs of the story.
I do find it interesting that there are so many mapping projects, though. The essence of digital humanities.
I love this. So much.
One of my top bucket list items has been to travel to Prince Edward Island since L.M. Montgomery is one of my favorite authors of all time and I’m finally going next spring and I’m just holding my breath and trying not to psyche myself up too much, but wanting it to be a magical experience.
oh man, my best girl and I went a few years ago on The Greatest Of All Road Trips from ME to PEI and stayed in a bnb on a working dairy farm and went and did LMM things and fangirled and drank wine by the ocean and it was an A+ ladies vaca, would recommend; hell, would do it again.
Yassss.
I loved every second of being in PEI. It was magical.
This reply makes me so happy
I remember reading Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson when it first came out and getting really excited when I figured out it was set in Syracuse, where I lived at the time. Later her book Catalyst came out and it felt like it was ABOUT me, and it also being set in Syracuse did not hurt.
Also: The Toronto Public Library breaks down books by neighbourhood here: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/books-video-mu…
And the Guardian has an amazing series called “Reading Cities” http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/reading-c…
These are amazing! Thanks for sharing!
One of my fandoms is Dorothy Dunnett, and because she writes so vividly and evocatively of specific real places, there are regular small tours of Dunnett fans to places described in her novels. The English/Scottish borders, naturally; but also Malta, Istanbul, and (I think) Iceland. I’m pretty sure she never made it to Timbuktu, though.
SOME DAY I will make it to Hexham Abbey!
This reminds me of reading “Late Nights On Air” five-ish years ago while I was living in Ottawa. The book is set in Yellowknife and I had to stop reading it on my lunch breaks because Elizabeth Hay’s descriptions of Old Town were so vivid and accurate that it brought me to tears. Even though I never lived in Yellowknife and the book was set in the 70’s, it conjured up memories of friends and times I was missing desperately.
Another connection to home in books is “Fort Simmer” in Richard Van Camp’s novels and stories. It’s based on our hometown of Fort Smith, NWT and I remember re-reading The Lesser Blessed recently and remembering from his descriptions the high school gym, before the renovations.
eta: I feel like Canadians don’t often get to connect home to real places outside of L.M. Mongomery’s PEI and Margaret Atwood’s descriptions of Toronto. Or maybe it just feels like that.
Travelling with a pack of books set in and around my intended destination has long been my preferred mode of travel. I like to travel by myself, but with books tucked underarm, I’m never alone. These comments are seeding all kinds of new & exciting ideas for future travel. Thank you!! 🙂
I love places too, although I have had few experiences reading about places I know. I am delirious with joy when I stumble across something. My hometown shows up in movies periodically but it is ALWAYS presented as being somewhere else and I don't care about movies as much.
YES. I can't even remember specific cases, but I have read at least one book set in New Mexico with only white people and it's like, who are these people and how did this happen?! Or maybe I'm just thinking of the majority of movies and TV shows set in locations with sizable Latino populations. It makes you realize how invisible POC often are to certain kinds of white people.
Me too! I hope the editors and the author of this and other excellent essays and stories know that the number of comments are not a reliable measure of worth. I worry when my favorite posts from the last few days (this, Carmilla, and Georg and Maria's Great House) have approximately 100 comments combined and others have 400+ each. Not that I don't love the community and idolize our queens (I very much do), but the Toast might eat itself if we only talk amongst ourselves at Nicole and Mallory's tables.
It makes me vicariously happy enough to surpass any and all first-hand happiness I have felt in the last week. PEI is my dream destination like no other and….! That does sound magical.
I do love seeing my city in movies. To date this is really only Magic Mike and The Punisher (the one with Thomas Jane). Cleveland, the Vancouver of the Midwest, gets to be a lot of different places too, so I usually get sniffly while watching Marvel films and A Christmas Story.
De lurking to just to say this was the topic of my dissertation and it was absolutely fascinating to study. Place is such a weird thing to examine in literature because sometimes you can map it onto real places, but then it changes and becomes a fluid non-specific thing that acts more like a physical character and mapping becomes impossible BUT THEN IT GOES BACK.
Literary Geography is my jam.