Walking Studies, the Eastern Townships, and William S. Messier's Dixie

Abstract

This article is part of a project entitled, ‘Heartlands/Pays du cœur’. This aims to offer new critical approaches to Québec's ‘regional’ novel; focusing on representations of rural, semi-rural, exurban and urban spaces and places outside of the province's largest city, Montreal. The article considers material and imaginary geographies of the Eastern Townships in relation to William S. Messier's Dixie (2013). Drawing on theories on walking, it is structured around a walking interview with the author, in which he and I discuss the importance of place in his writing whilst moving through key sites featured within it.

Hawks, Robots, and Chalkings: Unexpected Object Encounters During Walking Interviews on a College Campus

“…For example, Anderson (2004) used the term "bimble" to describe a process of walking or wandering, while Kuntz and Presnall (2012) used "intraview" to describe the enactment of Deleuzian positive difference, intervening in the isolated human subject through a relational and nonhierarchical encounter between the participant and researcher. The idea of "wandering" or "meandering" has been employed in research focused on the encounter of place (Burke et al, 2017;Cutcher, Rousell, & Cutter-McKenzie, 2015;Kuntz & Presnall, 2012), while other research has looked to the concept of the dérive from Debord (2006), where the path is determined by the pull of place and the environment (Burke et al, 2017;Morgan, 2016;Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). However, the dérive has also been critiqued as perpetuating a hegemonic vision of a singular (usually masculine and able-bodied) subject who wanders without regard to inequities, justice, or implications for his meanderings (Springgay & Truman, 2018).…”