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Walking Home: book proposal 2

SA_Walking Home/1
In 2010 Simon Armitage spent 19 days walking the 256 mile Pennine Way as a 'modern troubadour'. This online resource presents archive material relating to the walk and creation of Walking Home, held by Special Collections.
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Simon Armitage describes writing 'Walking Home'
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SA_Walking Home archive materials
A summary of the Walking Home archive materials
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Armitage Harmonium proposa
Details of book proposal 1
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Armitage Walking Home Proposal doc
Details of book proposal 2
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SA_Walking Home Red Notebook
introduction to the red notebook
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Walking Home SA/8
prose diary entry for day 0
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Walking Home SA/13
prose diary entry for day 1
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SA_Walking Home/126
Prose diary entry for day 15
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SA_Walking Away/162
red notebook poems introduction
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SA_Walking Home/18
first draft of the poem 'Cotton Grass'
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SA_Walking Home/31
second draft of the poem 'Cotton Grass'
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SA_Walking Home first proof/287
second draft of the poem 'Cotton Grass' continued
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SA_Walking Home_74
blank page entry headed 'fell ponies'
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SA_Walking Home/130
Comparison of three types of writing referring to black huts.
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SA_Walking Home/134
Notes on the changing imagery of 'Above Ickornshaw, Black Huts'
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Armitage Notebook Black Huts
Notes on the importance of landscape for the poem
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SA_Walking Home/108
Notes on the importance of poetic influences
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Walking Home SA_162
writing themes listed at the back of the red notebook
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SA_Walking Home/Glossop Audience
introduction to the Walking Home photograps
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SA_Walking Home/slug088
Walking Home photographs as visual narrative
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SA_Walking Home/digital_image/21
Walking Home: poetry as travel guide
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writing themes listed at the back of the red notebook
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Further reading material for Walking Home.
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The second book proposal was sent to the publishers Faber and Faber, and focussed on one journey: the Pennine Way. This focus allowed for a more detailed discussion about the meanings of journey and landscape in a specific region.

Armitage notes that in some parts of the Pennine Way, history and geography are fused in the public imagination: Saddleworth moor, for example, the site of the Moors murders, and Kinder Scout, where a mass trespass took place in 1932. In others, including 'Brontë Country' the borderline between the landscape and its representations in fiction and poetry has become blurred. Landscape inspires art which in turn affects our perception of a region or locale.

By taking into account these different interactions with the landscape, this proposal frames 'Walking Home' as 'a kind of indispensable and definitive companion or alternative guide': one which will locate the walker historically and culturally as well as geographically.

In this second proposal the idea of walking home has become central, with 'home' as an inclusive term combining birthplace, family, landscape, and the source of much of Armitage's poetry. Given this focus on home it is interesting to learn that the proposal was written during a trip to Chicago in 2008. Physical distance, Armitage has suggested, can often offer a useful perspective from which to write about home.