I’m always disappointed when I see a band play the song the way I heard it in my living room. Whether it’s in a pub, a concert hall, or giant-sized festival stage it has to be more than a listening experience. I want something I can raise up and pour over my head. It’s not just for my ears. Like a Hobnob in a hot brew, I want to dunk all my other senses in it too. I want to mangle the lyrics of songs I’ve (partially, sometimes horribly) memorised and hurl them back at the artist. Call me greedy, but I want value for the time and effort taken to nurture that small but necessary bit of love. I want to see the band play, feel the bass in my chest, and taste the joy, or sorrow and everything in between. I still have Charlie Burchill’s guitar pick from a Simple Minds concert. I know exactly where I keep it and where and when I got it, but couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to one of their songs in earnest (though finding the link did make me nostalgic).

I love reading. Screen, page, cereal box, it matters not. I throw myself at it. If a story expects me to get off my arse and engage with it in its own environment, there better be good reason. Locative literature, the name most commonly given to in-situ story telling, takes the reading experience and lets the reader wallow (or paddle, depending on the story) in the physical dimensions of its setting. Locative literature is, as you would expect, a synthesis of characteristics of oral story telling traditions, city walks, and serialised fiction. These stories aim to take their reader to the place and time and drop them in it.

Regardless of their nature, great stories want for the same basic elements: characters, conflict, premise, plot, and so on, but they all happen some where at some time. Setting is an all-encompassing must-have in storytelling. Well-crafted settings carry the reader to their world, inspire emotional tone, and affect the characters – they can also take a dramatic role. At the very least, even when it doesn’t really matter (I’m looking at you Edgar Allan Poe and your Tell-Tale Heart), a story has to happen in a place. If the reader engages with the story in that particular place, there has to be more. And fortunately, in most cases, they usually do.

Locative literature projects can cast long shadows on the pavements tread to get through them, where others will disappear in the space of a frosty breath. I’m going to tell you about some now. It feels sexy to say I’ll be taking you to New York, Edinburgh, Oslo and Melbourne, but in doing so I will only highlight the classic premise and fundamental tension in locative literature – it really is one of those things when you have to be there.

Today, the practice of presenting a story in its most relevant physical environment, and augmenting it with digital tools and techniques, has become inordinately sophisticated. Take [murmur], an audio documentary project that collects and presents stories told by residents in specific locations. Launched in Toronto in 2003, the project spread to Vancouver, Montreal, San Jose, Edinburgh (2007), Dublin (2007), and Geelong (2009). Using mobile phones and a website, it captures locals’ experiences of a locale. Places you’ve been or recognise are given pinpoint depth and texture. The project seems (quite unfairly) antiquated alongside contemporaries such as Craig Mod’s Hi, with its stylish sophistication and reach (you may also like Jonathon Safran Foer’s Cultivating Thought, but they do the same thing, bring a very personal view of the world to your doorstep.

In this context [murmur] is hardly old. Locative literature has, Jason Farman argues, been around since Christian pilgrims began walking the Stations of the Cross. Before disruptive tech even opened the door to physical/virtual interplay, a plethora of variations were popular. From Jane Austen’s Bath to Greenwich Village, Lonely Planet regularly update their literary walking tour guide. Their list does not include the Secret Edinburgh tour (by Rebustours), which juxtaposes Ian Rankin’s hard-drinking detective’s best with works of Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Thanks to sneak peaks from forthcoming novels and irregular but frequent appearances by Rankin, the tour was, for a little while at least, the second most popular tourist attraction in Edinburgh, after the Castle. The combination of settings and the added extras proved deliciously attractive to the crime writer’s expansive fan base.

Edinburgh is also home to imaginative variations of the form. Ghost Walks, or their thematic relatives, can be found in many cities and tourist destinations – the famous cellblock audio tour of Alcatraz is just one example. Whether literary, religious, historical or supernatural, these walks tend to have a guide (even if its an electronic one) and often draw on elements of physical theatre to imbue dynamic sense of drama to their locative and literary nature, such as actors in Roman costumes; paid performers reading the relevant author’s poetry; and dressed up ‘ghosts’ flitting through shadowy graveyards. These works are most commonly driven by enterprise, celebration (spiritual or otherwise), or entertainment – or all three. Sarah Winter’s performance artwork, Library for the End of the World attempted to catalogue and curate a database of participants memories through a growing library of cassettes in Brisbane’s West End. It is a serene example of a work that offered an experience beyond the orthodoxy of enterprise or entertainment.

When Matt Blackwood, an artist, writer and innovator (and personal professional crush), says he uses his work to connect to the reader, he is referring specifically to the level of physical immersion locative literature can offer. Graffitied walls and stale odours take on new significance when a short story is read to you in one of Melbourne city’s famed laneways and alleys. In Blackwood’s 2011 project, MyStory, listeners were led to the setting of a short work by author Tony Birch where they listened to a 5 minute reading. When the story was complete, the small crowd stayed in the alley to talk, touch the bricks, and experience the space with a new perspective. In 2012, for 2Stories, Blackwood linked two three-minute audio stories to bold and beautiful QR codes (see below), decorated with elements of their stories, and hung them next to a studio that used to be a restaurant – he connected a story set in each through two characters.

It’s a strange and wondrous feeling standing in the street listening to a story set in a building you can lean against. In Rita Raley’s discussion of mobile narratives, she notes a story’s engagement with the physical, the material, and the lived space in functional terms and the inherent risks in those same stories denying, or worse, losing sight of the social or political aspects. This is an aspect Blackwood works hard to overcome in these and other works.

While locative literature can be ephemeral and that its impermanence is also part of the attraction of the form. There are long-term works, which take a particular location and build on it, and others which encourage readers to stay longer. Ben Russell’s 1999 Headmap Manifesto highlighted incredible prescience in its encouragement to readers to think about space and location as opportunities for gathering and placing information through interaction with personalised tech (he went as far as suggested use of a proto-Google Glass). Designed to reveal ‘hidden’ stories of the city of Oslo, Anders Sundnes Løvlie’s Textopia was an experiment in facilitating public contributions to an experimental story system. This approach drew in collaborative writing, turned found texts into literary compositions, and sought exploration of place through the act of writing. The resulting work was positioned to read as a form of situated, poetic documentary on an urban textual environment. It required substantial time in its place to engage with the work. No discussion of locative literature can close without mention of Eli Horowitz. The writer followed his collaboration (written under the pseudonym Gus Twintig) on The Clock without a Face with The Silent History. The story of the emergence of a generation of children who would never read or write stands foremost in the canon. Where The Clock without a Face sent readers scurrying across the continent on a real-life treasure hunt for hand-made jewel-encrusted numbers, The Silent History was developed as an iOS app filled with uploaded testimony of its characters and GPS-responsive segments that are switched on where the reader lands in specific locations, such as Chicago’s O’Hare airport or a neighbourhood in lower Manhattan. It has since been cemented in hard copy, which while capturing the whole story for convenience and removing the frustration of never being able to get to New York to try it for yourself, removes the work’s primary purpose.

The Story City project delivers Choose Your Own Adventures through an iOS app, which overlays real environments with fictional tales (full disclosure: I’ve worked on two separate projects). Stories are currently located in Brisbane, Adelaide and the Gold Coast, Australia, where the project partners with local councils. Stories are often purposed as a form of cultural tourism, highlighting specific places such as newly (re)developed parks and laneways, the project encourages the reader to think about familiar spaces in different ways and challenges them to play more active roles such as solver and explorer to follower and leader (Mike Jones highlights even more when he discusses interactive storytelling). Story City stories are serialised or chaptered, have a designated start and finishing point and are often in second person to achieve an immediacy that is much rarer in hard copy fiction. In terms of setting, the narrative moves quickly across interspersed short bursts of text that contain explicit direction to the next point, puzzle or narrative event – a map is often provided too. While a dark, atmospheric short fiction can easily lose its impact in the bright Queensland sun, or turn into a rain soaked unintended nightmare – mobile phones and water don’t mix well – the literal race across an urban park moves the story from the individual reading in a comfy chair to a energetic social exercise.

Locative literature offers those rare elements to reading that the book (I am a little loathe to say) cannot, the possibility of, for example, continuing exploration in a landscape like Textopia, where the specific terrain of the text grows and changes with each contribution. The form occupies the liminal space between reader engagement and play. Some works, those created by Horowitz and curated through Story City, look to facilitate the participants’ travel through the landscape of their works, offering a physical experience, which can change with each read. Others are anchored, but still question the readers’ experience, their engagement with the text and its physical place. The writers noted here use setting as the key element of great storytelling and their augmentation of their work through the possibilities offered by the physical environment and available tech, underline the value in enriching the reading experience. Good locative literature should give you more, it should at the very least, give you the dunk and let you take the pick home for your efforts.

During the summer of 2009 I spent a week reading and writing in residence at the Elizabeth Bishop House, in the tiny and thus somewhat incongruously named village of Great Village, Nova Scotia. Readers may know Great Village as the setting of Bishop’s haunting story In the Village, first published in the New Yorker in 1953. One day I went for a walk to the village store. I was on the hunt for postcards, intrigued by Bishop’s observation: “The grey postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating… one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full-size, and in colour”.

caption Postcards for sale in the village store, Great Village, Nova Scotia. Photo by J. R. Carpenter, 2009.

In the back of the store, which is now an antique shop, I happened upon a well-preserved copy of a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s. Nova Scotia being New Scotland, an old map of Old Scotland seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to find. Why I felt the need to buy an out-of-date-map to a city I’d never been to was not at all clear.

Questions of place have long-pervaded my fiction writing and maps have figured prominently in many of my web-based works. An outline of a map of Nova Scotia served as the interface for one of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996). In The Cape (2005), I used an assortment of maps, charts, and diagrams borrowed from an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979 as stand-ins for family photographs. In In Absentia (2008) I used the Google Maps API to haunt the satellite view of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with stories of former tenants forced out by gentrification. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008) included an impossible map of ancient Rome. I’d never set out to map a place I’d never been before, but then sometimes maps seem to call places into being.

City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s.

In 2011 I was commissioned to create a new work for an exhibition called Remediating the Social, at Inspace gallery in Edinburgh. Handily I already had a map of the city. In May 2012 I travelled to Edinburgh to begin research for what would eventually become a massive hybrid print and digital project called The Broadside of a Yarn (2012). More information on that project can be found in an article called The Print Map as a ‘literary platform’ published on The Literary Platform in May 2013.

During my research I used the 1940s edition of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map purchased in Great Village, Nova Scotia, to undertake a series of experimental walks, or dérives, in and around the modern city of Edinburgh. Dérive is a practice first explored by the Letterist International in Paris in the early 1950s and later taken up by the Situationist International. The concept of dérive was introduced by Ivan Chtcheglov in his Formulary for a New Urbanism (published under the pseudonym Gilles Ivan). Chtcheglov proposes a future city, in which “the main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING” (1953). In The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International  (2011), McKenzie Wark suggests that Chtcheglov “sought not the rational city but the playful city, not the city of work but the city of adventure. Not the city that conquers nature, but the city that opens toward the flux of the universe” (2011: 20). The advertising copy on the back of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map hovers between these states — on one hand promoting such solid stolid institutions as the Bank of Scotland, North British Rubber Footwear, and Scougal’s Oatcakes, “Scotland’s National Food in its Most Palatable and Convenient Form” — and on the other hand issuing imperatives toward the exploration of a playful city, a city of adventure, and, read from a contemporary vantage point, a city safely adrift in simpler past:

Follow the Star of Health.
Encompass the City.
Map it Out For Yourself.
Do Not Allow Your Holiday to be Spoiled by Rain.

However many times I set out toward the flux of the universe in search of the points of interest advertised on the map — The Largest Stock of Hand-Knitted Woollies in Britain, Radiator and Mudwing Repairs and Other Sheet Metal Work, Vertical Filing Systems and Visible Card Index, and Carpenter Joiner Jobbing Specialists, orders in any part of the city or elsewhere in towns or country promptly attended to — dérive led me instead into Edinburgh’s wealth of museums, libraries, and used and antiquarian print, map, and book shops.

In the Old Town Bookshop I found an A5-sized staple-bound booklet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s. This booklet contains twenty-two narrative descriptions of walks, each beginning and ending within easy reach of bus routes, and each illustrated by a small black and white line drawing. The preface states: “this book is designed for the visitor or the resident who wishes to have a change from the more usual places of tourist interest and to combine a little mild exercise with exploration of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs.” The unnamed author adds that her one wish “is that those who follow these trails derive as much pleasure from them as she has done over the years.”

Many of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs the author urges us to explore are no longer know-able. Many of the green spaces on the City of Edinburgh Transport Map have long since filled in. Time has rendered these two immutable print documents nearly nonsensical. I decided to further this process.

I created a computer-generated narrative called Walks from City Bus Routes which uses JavaScript to randomly and endlessly recombine illustrations and portions of text from the Edinburgh City Transport booklet and bus and tram route icons from the City of Edinburgh Transport Map. The term “computer-generated” is something of a misnomer here. The computer does not generate these new texts. It selects phrases from the booklet which I have typed into preset lists (variable strings) and slots them into templates (sentences). Take, for example, the following sentence:

Take the #{take} and continue #{continue}.

I went through the print booklet looking for phrases which follow the words “take” and “continue”. Let’s say the phrases which follow #{take} are as follows (there are in fact many more than these):

Take the [‘path leading down the hillside just before the monument’, ‘path that leads off to the left’, ‘broad and easy descent down the grassy slope’, ‘towpath along the side of the park’, ‘dirt road that runs uphill under the wall’, ‘road behind the Inn’]

And the phrases which follow #{continue} are:

continue [‘upstream’, ‘to follow the river’, ‘in the same direction’, ‘through the fields’, ‘as far as the roundabout’,’along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard’, ‘in a roughly southerly direction’, ‘to follow the wall’]

Here are but a few of the possible sentence results:

Take the path leading down the hillside just before the monument and continue along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard.

Take the towpath along the side of the park and continue in the same direction.

Take the broad and easy descent down the grassy slope and continue through the fields.

Though many of the paths, towpaths, grassy slopes, fields, and roundabouts referenced in the Edinburgh City Transport pamphlet no longer exist, as variables within JavaScript strings these past places are ascribed new locations in computer memory. Called as statements into this new narrative structure, these past places become potential (albeit imaginary) destinations once again (albeit for readers rather than walkers).

The result is a new guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes an infinite number of plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh, and and its book shops, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, reading and writing, fact and fiction.

Detail from The Broadside of a Yarn, J. R. Carpenter, 2012.

In the gallery installation of The Broadside of a Yarn exhibited in Edinburgh during Remediating the Social in November 2012, this new digital variable iteration of the Walks from City Bus Routes pamphlet was accessed by scanning a QR code embedded in a cartographic collage which remediated elements of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map and a drawing borrowed from the Edinburgh Streetscape Manual, published by the Lothian Regional Council in 1995. These visual links to the work were also reproduced in an A3-sized print map handout iteration of The Broadside of a Yarn, which was handed out freely during the exhibition and continues to circulate through gift exchange economies and postal networks.

Earlier this year I created a stand-alone web-based version of Walks from City Bus Routes, which appears in the Spring 2015 issue of The New River – a journal of digital writing & art.

Walks from City Bus Routes, J. R. Carpenter 2015.

Readers keen on bookish-drifting-wander-walking may also be interested in Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts a web-based collection of hyperlinked quotations from a wide range of writing on walking, accompanied by a bibliography. Wanderkammer was included in Walk poems: A series of reviews of walking projects edited by Louis Bury Corey Frost published on Jacket2 in 2011.