Hey all! Last week, I finished my section on literary tourism, which looks at guidebooks (George Beahm’s Stephen King Country and Stephen King’s Maine Haunts, Sharon Kitchens’ Stephen King’s Maine), mediated tours (the excellent SK Tours of Maine) and events (Hallowell, ME’s 2025 Stephen King Day), and individual travelogues, including those by Joseph Maddrey and Tom Howells. These two authors and travelers take really different approaches to experiencing King’s Maine, from Maddrey’s detailed 5-day journey, with lots of great connections to King fiction and film, to Howells’ more general, philosophical consideration of New England and King’s position within place and the larger sphere of regional Gothic writers. Both well worth checking out!

Here’s the intro to my travelogue section:

While guidebooks and mediated tourism experiences offer structure and authoritative expertise, for many literary tourists, journey and the sense of exploration are of central importance. Many of these travelers chronicle and share their adventures, including Joseph Maddrey and Tom Howells, following the time-honored tradition and genre conventions of the travelogue, the roots of which can be traced back to ancient civilizations as humans moved through the world and recorded their experiences (Carreras). Fouiza Hamid provides a foundational definition of the travelogue as “a truthful account of an individual’s experiences travelling, usually told in the past tense and in the first person” (41). Essentially, an individual sets out on a journey and once that journey is complete, they share their experiences and reflections with others. The lines may blur some between the travelogue and the travel guidebook, as readers often follow in the established path of the travelogue author, recreating and experiencing the journey (in whole or in part) themselves, but the travelogue focus is more subjective than that of the guidebook: rather than providing an authoritative, fact-based overview of key locations and sites, the travelogue author turns inward, highlighting their own personal travel experience, including elements like questions, challenges, detours, sensory stimuli, emotional response, and individual significance, whether in what motivated them to undertake the journey or the impact of the travel itself. Drawing upon this travelogue tradition, Madrey and Howells provide readers with two different personal experiences of traveling through King’s Maine.

I’m working now on the food and place chapter and look forward to sharing a taste of that with you all next week!