The Writer as MapMaker

The writer is an explorer.
Every step is an advance into new lands.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am thinking quite a lot about maps of late. Mostly, this is because the WomanWords 2009 Retreat is just around the corner (last weekend in April – see the program schedule at http://www.stillpointretreatcenter.com/) and I have many more “organizing” tasks to accomplish, as well as pulling together my workshop program and materials. Our theme is “Directions: Mapping a Woman’s Life.” The problem: the more I read, the more ideas bubble up; the more ideas, the more I wonder how I will boil it down to the couple of short hours and the few related handouts that will be mine to fill (I’ve invited two other writers as additional presenters for the weekend so the onus is not totally on me). It’s a daunting yet creativity-enhancing task in itself.

The seed planted for this theme came from a sister writer’s workshop at the International Women’s Writing Guild (http://www.iwwg.com/) summer conference, an event I attend every year. Colorado poet Marj Hahne (http://www.marjhahne.com/) has offered “Poem as Map” at the conference more than once and, as with all her sessions, it was crowded with participants last June. Over the years, Marj became so enamored with maps (and their potential as writing prompts) that she developed a weeklong set of classes that sparked many Creative Fires, leading to some fabulous poetry (and a few prose pieces as well, I’ll bet!). There is so much fodder for writing here—maps, plans, directions, signposts, geography, paths… the list goes on.

Think about it. The writer sets up a sort of road map for the reader. In a novel, it can be more extensive, taking that reader not only to myriad scenes in different locales, but possibly into other time periods, worlds or universes. What we do, as writers, is set up our piece so that we lead the reader (and ourselves, as we scribble words) into a world we are developing. Setting up a story (or any prose piece) usually demands a plot. A plot is a plan which gives you direction, tells you where you’re headed. Maybe you don’t stick with the original road map, but it’s a guide. As in life, we take side trips or veer off in a totally different direction—but the plan got us started.

The poet also creates a world, inviting readers in for a glimpse. Most poems, however, do not reach Homeric lengths (not novel-length) and so likely do not require elaborate planning. In fact, overplanning a short poem reeks of overkill, as in murdering your Muse. Still, we start off with a thought, a direction in which we expect our writing will proceed. Do we always wind up where we expected? Have you ever begun a poem you thought was about one topic and discovered that the finished work addressed a different one (maybe in conjunction with the starter thought, maybe not)? Ah, visions of “The Road Not Taken” (Robert Frost’s classic)—if you had not veered onto a different path than the original idea, would you ever have written on this theme? If you had forced yourself to stay with the first thought, would it have led to a better poem, a more publishable one, something more universal? Or would the original path have taken you to a dead end?

Aside from the obvious mission of writer-as-explorer, there’s the simple fact that maps—cartography— offer plenty of great writing prompts. Years ago, at a women's spirituality conference, I attended a workshop led by Becky Holder, a popular storyteller in which participants drew maps of the inside of a house/building/flat where they had once lived, preferably in childhood, definitely removed from their present situation. Stories subsequently shared with the group came from that exercise. My friend Judith Prest wrote a wonderful piece from a writing prompt in a memoir session led by Hannelore Hahn, Founder and Director of IWWG, that suggested describing the entrance to a childhood home. That prompt led Judy back to her beloved home in Delaware, where she walked the path to her country home once again (a short essay which eventually aired on public radio).

Marj offered a few “structures” that were helpful too, along with plenty of examples of poems. Although I don’t usually write much during IWWG conference week (I'm there for networking and inspiration), except during classroom sessions, I took time to hone the following poem written in “Poem as Map” because it was the piece I wanted to read during the Evening Readings:


MY HOME TOWN
by Marilyn Zembo Day

If the Oscar-winning actor with the bulldog face
called it the armpit of the world;
if the governor of the state cannot see but has vision,
and the sense not to consort with high-end hookers
(but not sensitivity enough to keep personal affairs in his own pockets;
if you checked the mayor’s closets for a tanning machine
or his desk for Coppertone coupons;
if your car discovered potholes deep enough
to reach cobblestones and trolley tracks;
if film directors searching for early American architecture
drive north to squander cash on sweating thoroughbreds
under the unrelenting August sun;
if winding paths bring bikers past old locks of the Erie Canal
where picnickers toss neon Frisbees
along the muddy Hudson’s shoreline;
if the world can’t remember it exists
because downriver sits the shinier, busier Big Apple;
if every other street, park or landmark sports
a name more common to a tulip-toned country
dependent on dikes and dams for survival;
and if those tulips, early in May, adorn hundreds
of parks and gardens and walkways—
you’re in the only state capital in the country where
a government building masquerades as a giant egg
nesting in its cold, concrete coop.


Another IWWG workshop leader, Maryland poet Carol Peck, has inspired many a writer with an exercise designed to bring back childhood memories. While the specific workshop had nothing to do with maps, per se, it had everything to do with scanning your childhood for sites/sights that evoke memories. Memories of sounds, textures, and more—all of which enrich the writing. As Carol emphasizes, these writing exercises come from other sources and they are to be shared—and so Judy and I sometimes pull out this exercise when we co-lead a journal writing workshop. I often use the following poem as an example:


WHERE I COME FROM
by Marilyn Zembo Day

Where I come from
trees don’t touch the sky
they whither and sometimes die
set in impotent dirt squares
wired against the wind
roots searching for sustenance
slithering and gasping below concrete slab.
no catalytic converters controlled poisons
and the streams were those of Fords and Chevys
wending their way to offices, apartments
and perhaps, occasionally,
toward places where Tree Gods flourished.

Where I come from
huge plate glass windows
threw our reflections back at us
screaming our needs
transistor radios, Frigidaires,
Barbie dolls, G.I. Joes,
Playtex girdles, Timex watches
grab the newest technology
purchase the perfect fad
and your life won’t require
juicy shiny apples, budding green leaves
fresh living air

Where I come from
three dark flights of stairs brought visitors
to blue collar linoleum
cracked walls, cracked wallets
love silent but an undercurrent
flowing beneath poker games and bingo
soap operas and True Confessions
plaster-pitted walls and plastic dime store curtains
better than drafty castles and echoing mansions
bourgeois, lived-in

Where I come from
nature is a picture in National Geographic
or a visit to Aunt Naomi’s
a ride to Uncle Charlie’s camp
Tree Gods still play
where Uncle Charlie fished and rested
and they dawdle and dance yet at my aunt’s
although houses now encroach
not yet concrete graveyards
not like where I come from.


I am intrigued by the routes I might take as I journey toward the 2009 WomanWords Writing and Expressive Arts Retreat. The highway to Still Point is clear enough: I drive Route 9 north from Albany for maybe half-hour/45 minutes and it’s a few more turns and about 10 more minutes until I’m there. But the path to my workshop, to creating road maps for women who want to write that weekend, to making further connections on this short-lived roadtrip of life—these are all part of the mystery, the magic, that is Creativity.

*****
For the folks who might be interested, here’s a list of some books I’ve acquired as I pull my workshop together:

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi
You Are Here: Person Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon
Maps: Finding Our Place in the World edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.
How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon



YOUR TURN

1. Let my poem, “My Hometown,” inspire you. Marj Hahne suggested using the “If…” starter, leading to the “then…” conclusion (you don’t have to actually include the word “then” in the poem; I didn’t). What town/village/city do you consider to be your home base? You might make a list of specific memories, definite objects that you recall before starting out. Perhaps you’ll research poems written by others about place and, liking a particular format, you could style your poem similarly. Take your reader there. Make him see the space, feel the emotions, detect the scents. You might name the place or you might not.
2. Another possibility: start with “Where I come from…” and continue on. This works well for many people. Try to use specific images. Work with metaphor (your room was Nancy Drew, paper doll cutouts and dried up watercolor boxes…) and simile (your room was like the mother cave [warm? safe? welcoming?]) to enrich the writing.
3. Where do you go in your mind when the world becomes too chaotic or too wild? My husband was in the Air National Guard years ago with this muscular, seemingly down-to-earth guy who, when someone got bent out of shape about something or seemed sad, would say, “Now go to your happy place.” Maybe that’s a prompt too: who’s the most unlikely person to come out with such a statement? Is there a story in that? Imagine a top exec at a failing manufacturing company coming up with that statement in a strategy-planning meeting, or a terrorist toting a bomb. Write about your imaginary place, or your character’s.
4. Go to a store and buy a map— of a place some distance from you. Or pick up one of those tourist-type maps of an area while visiting a place other than where you live, the kind with cute little icons of houses and hotels and tourists-trap stores. Open the map and let your eyes wander the surface. Let something catch your eye: a name of a place, a river, a juncture of two roads, a continent. Let your imagination go. Write.
5. One of the essays in Chabon’s book (listed above) starts out with the sentence, “I write from the place I live: in exile.” Start an essay or poem with, “I write from the place I live…”
6. Consider the title of another book listed above: How to Lie with Maps. In his introduction, Monmonier states, “A book about how to lie with maps can be more useful than a book about how to lie with words. After all, everyone is familiar with verbal lies, nefarious as well as white, and is wary about how words can be manipulated… yet education in the use of maps and diagrams is spotty and limited, and many otherwise educated people are graphically and cartographically illiterate. Maps, like numbers, are often arcane images accorded undue respect and credibility.” When did you feel a map lied to you? Did you get lost? Was the mileage incorrectly represented? Or did you read the map incorrectly? Another prompt-- from the quote: tell about a white lie you told that backfired on you.
7. Tell a road trip story. Don’t name the places—just give the details about the places, using all, all most, of the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste).