A book lover's odyssey: Exploring where cherished authors lived at home and abroad

How would you move your friends to occupy clip come out of their hebdomad to power through one of classic literature's notoriously hard texts?

The promise of good writing, company and discussion would certainly help, but they might not be enough on their own.

Throw in a trip to Ireland to celebrate the accomplishment, however? Now we're talking.

The idea for Antonio Michael Downing's literary pilgrimage was sparked when the current The Next Chapter host and his friend realized neither had ever finished reading Ulysses, James Joyce's epic tome of a novel.

Excited by the challenge, they decided to gather a crew and start reading the book aloud once a week. The carried through with their plan to finish in Dublin on Bloomsday, the unofficial June 16 holiday named for the novel's protagonist, Leopold Bloom. That's the day on which the entire story of the famous book takes place.

"Being in Dublin felt surreal because we felt like we had been in Dublin for seven months, in a way," Downing said. "The Dublin he describes is still there. There are still some shops, there are bridges, landmarks and statues.

"We felt like we had landed in the book, and we were having that experience over and over."

Downing and his Ulysses book group certainly aren't the only people to plan a trip to a favourite author's hometown, or to a setting that figures prominently in their work.

Both classic authors like Joyce and contemporary ones like Canadian romance novelist Carley Fortune have inspired literary pilgrimages to destinations as far ranging as Dublin is to Barry's Bay, Ont. 

Kate Scarth, the chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, says she often sees people making the trip to the province to uncover the world of Lucy Maud Montgomery and her most famous series, Anne of Green Gables.

She notes that Green Gables, the real-life setting of the books, has been receiving visitors as far back as 1909, just one year after the first novel was published.

Scarth herself is one of those visitors — and she cites a family trip to Green Gables in 1990 as an important moment that drove her fascination with Montgomery.

The eight-year-old Scarth, who had read the books and loved the 1985 television miniseries starring Megan Follows as Anne Shirley, recalls her visit to Green Gables as the highlight of the trip to P.E.I. From their home in St. John's.

"My parents still laugh about how I kind of gave this breathless tour of Green Gables," she said.

"I definitely remember feeling very excited and that kinship like I was there with Anne, or at least in that same place where she and Diana [Barry] had walked and told stories."

As a Montgomery scholar and a consultant on the renovation of the Green Gables Visitor Centre, Scarth now gets to witness other people's literary pilgrimages there.

"Often in my experience, they're not disappointed because they're like, 'Oh my goodness. She knew this place. She really got it. She'd already brought it to life for me.'"

Scarth says Montgomery made literary pilgrimages herself, visiting writers' homes in both the United Kingdom and the United States over her lifetime.

After a trip to Concord, Mass., to see the houses of writers Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Montgomery noted in her journal: "It gave a strange reality to the books of theirs, which I have read, to see those places where they once lived and laboured."

But Scarth says for a lot of people, the literary pilgrimage is simply "about being inspired."

"Maybe in their scholarly work, but also as writers or artists themselves, they're wanting to get some of that magic dust almost right from the place. It's almost like the place holds something."

"I think everyone who goes there kind of wants to be as great a poet or writer as she was," Raymundo said. "So it was very nerdy for this English major. I was like, 'These are my people.'"

For Raymundo, there was also an element of sacredness to her visit. She's been a fan of Dickinson and her poems since university and even calls Dickinson her poetry "patron saint."

"It felt very emotional and powerful, especially to also be there with my partner experiencing this queer literary pilgrimage that we were on, to step into the shoes of a poet that I so admired and felt so connected to, even though she's been gone a long time."

Blockbuster romance writer Carley Fortune says she's been struck by the numerous readers she's met who have travelled to Canadian locales to experience her book settings.

Most of Fortune's novels are set in Barry's Bay, Ont., and her third book, This Summer Will Be Different, takes place in P.E.I. It even includes a map of Fortune's favourite spots on the island that her characters frequent throughout the book.

"It means so much to me to bring this beautiful country to the world," she told Mattea Roach in an interview for Bookends. "It's one of my favourite things to get to be an ambassador, especially for rural Canada and some of our most beautiful spots."

Fortune did have something to say about timing literary pilgrimages properly when she heard about one couple who drove nine hours from New York to Ontario cottage country — only to be surprised by black fly season.

"I wish they had known it's a terrible time to visit," she said.

But for Downing and his friends, the Dublin weather in June co-operated, so they're already planning their next literary adventure: a trip to England inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf.

Add some “good” to your morning and evening.

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