Writing the Waterways: Memoir, Place and the Mapping of Identity

This thesis uses place writing and memoir to explore twenty years of boat life as a single mother, mostly spent moored on the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It also tracks my experience of walking the waterways of Manchester, thereby creating a personal map of the city and a way of belonging within it. Writing about canals is often London-centric or based in the south of England, following a single journey or a relatively short period of time on the water. It also largely misses out the reality of bringing children up on a boat. Through the narrative of how the waterways have shaped my identity over two decades, I bring a new and longitudinal perspective to the canal-writing field, uncovering the ways in which the marginality of this world challenges conventional narratives of home and belonging. Through both the creative and critical elements, I question the role gender plays in canal life and canal literature. The opening critical reflection provides the context for the creative work, providing an analysis of canal literature which details its progress from the viewpoint of a privileged outsider dabbling in the exotic world of the working boatman, as the fulcrum between working boat life and boating for leisure, and through to more recent experiences of continuous cruising in London. It also explores the impact of psychogeographic thinking on the walking research, the structure of the writing itself, and the differing perspectives of writing place in urban and rural settings. Finally, the act of writing memoir as creative non-fiction is considered, looking at how the lyrical intensity of place writing can immerse the reader within moments of significant experience utilising a fluent slippage between past, present and future. The creative element is then presented in three main sections: a chronological memoir of boat life up to the point of my divorce; an immersive exploration of life as a single, home-schooling mother living on a boat; and the overlapping move towards a new phase of life, shown through a collage of urban canal and river walks within the boundaries of the M60. The concluding section brings an end to this era of life, as I leave two decades of boat life behind.