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Image courtesy of Miti Aiello at sketchbloom.wordpress.com
A flaneur is “a person who walks the city to experience it.” The term became popular through the writings of Baudelaire, who thought of the flaneur as someone who was both a voyeur of the city as well as someone who was completely within it. In the mid 18th century, artists and writers took up the idea of flaneur and began to walk turtles on leashes through the Paris marketplace. In general, the term refers to a person who sees the city fully, an observer who slows down enough to analyze the social, the architectural, the infrastructural and psychic nature of the modern city.
In the Flaneur Walks Pamphlet Series, writers create poetic/conceptual walking tours of the cities in which they live in order to guide readers through a re-exploration, re-habitation and re-experiencing of their urban space. Readers are able to purchase the pamphlets /maps and take the tour as the writer instructs. This series promises to be eye opening, interactive, and fun.
Want to take a walk?
Northampton, Massachusetts is a renowned cultural hub in the western region of Massachusetts, which Andrea Sachs of the Washington Post says "is by tradition a place of activists, artists, intellects and rainbows." If you are going to be in Northampton, these two walks are must haves!
Montreal, Canada is the site of the second stop on our flaneur walk journey. Montreal writers Julie Mannell and Kaie Kellough have created two walks that speak to the narratives that rise out of that city as they lead readers through North America's most cosmopolitan city. Click here
Meet the Writers:
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NORTHAMPTON, MA
Strictly Pedestrian - Check it out!
Connolly Ryan was born in Greenwich Village, New York. He is currently a professor of literature at University of Massachusetts where he was thrice a finalist for the Distinguished Teaching Award. His poetry has been published in various journals including Harvard Review, Scythe, Bateau, Slope, Meat For Tea, Pannax Index, and Old Crow. He is also a multiple Pushcart nominee. He has two finished Manuscripts: Fort Polio and The Uncle Becky Chronicles. Connolly can be seen riding his bike down the streets of Northampton on any sunny day.
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NORTHAMPTON, MA
Mental Detours - Click here!
Betsy Wheeler studied poetry and the art of the book at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse where she was a Maple House Fellow for Sutton Hoo Press. After a brief stint working in the publishing industry in Minnesota's Twin Cities (as an Intern at Graywolf Press, and as Events Coordinator at Consortium), she went on to receive her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University. From 2005-2007 she held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University. She now works as Managing Director for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass, Amherst and is editor and publisher of Pilot Books—a poetry micro-press. Her poems have appeared in Bat City Review, The Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Forklift Ohio, Octopus, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Start Here, is available from Small Anchor Press. A yoga devotee and damn fine cook, she lives in Northampton, MA with her partner, Meghan, and their two cats, Ollie and Brodie. |
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MONTREAL, CANADA This Is You Here Now - Click here!
Julie Mannell is a Montreal-based writer of prose, poetry, and essays, originally from Fonthill, Ontario. Mannell currently writes for The Huffington Post, and her work has appeared in several journals, magazines, and textbooks. She is the recipient of the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing and The Mona Adilman Poetry Prize. Mannell founded the McGill Creative Writing Society where she facilitated workshops and panels for three years. In 2012 Roseanne Barr gave Mannell the Vagenius Award.
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MONTREAL, CANADA
Navette - Click here!
Kaie Kellough is a word-sound systemizer. His systems originate in the inchoate swirl of vowels, consonants, misspellings, shapes, stammerings, and emerge as audio recordings, books, visual entities, volumes of letters, and performances that verse and reverse utterance.
Kaie's work fuses formal experiment and social engagement. Kaie is the author of 2 books of poetry Lettricity (Cumulus Press 2004), and Maple Leaf Rag (Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2010), and 2 Sound recordings: Vox:Versus (WOW 2011), and Creole Continuum (HOWL! 2014). Kaie has performed and published internationally, and is presently working on a novel.
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Photo by Pablo Riquelme
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