Words by the Water research

I’ve been really busy every day working on my articles for Words by the Water, and have had meetings with my friends to discuss our magazine publication, ‘Watermark’. Meeting up with the Graphic Design students to explain what we’re looking for has been helpful as they now know the tone and layout and we can all start to picture it coming together.

I was really happy with the four articles I’d written for the magazine, as I carried out background research and interviewed people, and focused them towards the publication’s target audience.

In between working on Words by the Water, I’ve continued reading Michael Palin’s ‘Full Circle’, and have been researching travel writers and their works. Writing an article about the three Lake Poets for ‘Watermark’, I was intrigued to further research Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and so, sitting down and doing so, I found out many interesting facts about each of them.

I remember that when I visited Hawkshead in Cumbria quite a few years ago with school for a Geography field trip, and once again with my Mum and Grandma some time after, I went to the school which Wordsworth attended. It was great to see this and a plaque saying so, as a reason for my sense of travel comes from being intrigued in literature and its writers. During my research, I found that Wordsworth’s ‘Guide through the District of the Lakes’ which was published in 1820, sparked off the first beginnings of mass tourism to the area.  

Next, I researched Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, the other two Lake Poets. I didn’t realise that ‘The Story of the Three Bears’ originated from Southey’s prose, ‘The Doctor’. Beatrix Potter also made her way into my research, as well as her Tale of Peter Rabbit, one of the classic pieces of literature.