Podcasts | Waywords Studio

A rarely met short story by Montgomery, and a bit darker than her Anne books.

Resources:

Waypoint –

Reading of “Min,” by Lucy Maud Montgomery

(pdf of this work)

Skeptical Pilgrim Challenges: 

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/literary-tourism/

CHAPTERS

00:00      Intro
00:52      Title: “Min”
01:06      Reading: “Min” (1903)
31:17      Outro

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Tr...

What is the real story behind the creator of Anne of Green Gables?

In the close of this two-part examination of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life, we examine how her idealized fiction was neither passive memory nor simple escapism, but a defiant “evensong,” an act of economic, spiritual, and even artistic sovereignty launched from within a deep winter darkness.

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What if Anne of Green Gables wasn’t just an escapist daydream, but a calculated strategy that saved its author’s life?

Today we find the divide between L.M. Montgomery’s sunlit public fiction and her claustrophobic domestic reality. From hidden kitchen-table writing under an autocratic grandfather to a decade-long legal battle against a predatory Boston publisher, we explore how her idyllic landscapes served as a fortress of psychological survival and an engine for economic sovereignty.

Resources:

Hey, everyone!

Thanks for your patience during this unexpected episode delay! A few tech challenges while I upgraded my studio this summer put me a few weeks behind.

But this little announcement proves that I’m back up and running, so we’ll continue our Literary Tourism journey very soon, and I’ll likely drop a few episodes closer together to make up for our lost late summer. 

Next we dig into author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own life to see how our little Anne of Green Gables may have mirrored it! Spoiler: We’re cal...

How does the map overwrite the physical territory it claims to represent?

Today we look at literary simulations, from the bedroom of Victor Hugo to the Orlando welter of parks and rides. Guided by the semiotics of Umberto Eco, the simulation theory of Jean Baudrillard, and the urban critiques of Sam Jacob, we investigate the social construction of experience environments and what creates our preference for them over the raw experience.

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How do we navigate the space between the curated tourism experience and the raw concrete of the world beneath it?

We investigate the “imaginative geographies” we project onto other lands, examining how Italo Calvino’s semiotic cities, Arthur Conan Doyle’s romanticized London, and Mathieu Kassovitz’s brutalist Paris reveal the ethical tensions of the traveler’s gaze. We look into our habit of cropping out infrastructure and ask whether reading the raw city makes us better travelers or something worse. Bloomsday in Dublin and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital are also considered.

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What happens to a real, working community when a fictional landscape is physically constructed on top of it?

We discover the socio-economic friction behind literary travel, contrasting the magical ideals of Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo with the unpaved streets of Aracataca, Colombia. Behind the “front stage” of tourist attractions are bulldozers, evictions, and even a violent army. We learn about the history of PEI National Park expropriations, the 1928 Banana Massacre, and how to critically read tourist destinations beyond the gift shop facade.

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Why do we drive thousands of miles just to touch the wooden beams of an author’s birthplace?

From Poe’s Baltimore to PEI and Waywords’s own Waterford, MI, we consider what it takes to build a literary destination and how this works to undermine the very real need for we travelers to cross the threshold from the literary into the physical. Is there a way to thwart the hucksters of simulations? Perhaps!

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