Writing as Mapping

I have no training in geography or cartography; mine is strictly an amateur's enthusiasm," says Peter Turchi, and boy, oh, boy, is he ever enthusiastic about geography and cartography. His new book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer asCartographer (Trinity University Press), includes dozens of beautifully reproduced maps, from a copper engraving of the moon by Galileo to a modern Upside DownWorld Map reconfigured so that Australia appears where one expects Russia. Stir in Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover map, View of the World From 9th Avenue, and an Aztec map complete with footprints and plants, and you have a small taste of the dizzying procession of perspectives presented here, with the maps serving as metaphors for a variety of narrative techniques and assumptions.

Speaking on the phone this past summer from his office at Warren Wilson College, in Asheville, N.C., Turchi, the director of the M.F.A. writing program there, sounds almost childlike when it comes to maps. Indeed, Turchi became fascinated by them as a boy when he first read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, with its famous map of the fictitious isle. Now, his enthusiasm has brought him to a meditation on where mapmaking and storytelling meet.

How the book wound up at Trinity University Press is a classic example of a felicitous author/editor encounter that turned into a solid working relationship even as the editor changed houses.

"I originally wrote "The Writer as Cartographer," a lecture, for a residency of the M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson College," Turchi says, "and later delivered a revised version of the talk at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Barbara Ras, who was then an editor at the University of Georgia Press, was in the audience and asked me if I'd be interested in turning the lecture into an illustrated monograph. I considered that, but in our next conversation Barbara said Georgia wanted a longer book. I wrote another, related lecture, and even then there seemed to be new aspects of the metaphor to explore. When Barbara left Georgia to begin the [revived] Trinity University Press, I moved with her, since I would never have considered writing the book if it weren't for her passionate encouragement."

The author of a novel, The Girls Next Door (New American Library, 1989) and a collection of short stories, Magician (Dutton, 1991), and co-editor of two handbooks for fiction writers, Turchi was aiming for something a little different with this book, something both creative and instructive.

"There's no shortage of handbooks for beginning and developing writers, many of them quite useful," he says. "There are fewer books that aim to engage writers who are farther along in their lifelong pursuit with regard to matters of craft. My hope is that writers will be provoked to reconsider some of their practices, and be inspired."

Maps of the Imagination ranges widely across a many disciplines and art forms, from mathematics and formal geometry to Marx Brothers movies and the works of such writers as Borges and Calvino. Sometimes with off-the-cuff analogies, sometimes with pages of analysis, Turchi charts a lively course through a labyrinthine field of varying ways of looking at the world and, most important, the blank page. "We start with a blank: a world of possibility," he says, in the first line of the book, and proceeds, in the spirit of erudite play, to deconstruct the perspective of exploration from a writer's point of view, suggesting that writers, as they sense the direction of their work, "turn from the role of Explorer and take on that of the Guide."

Turchi considers a story as a kind of map, an arrangement of signs and directions that leads somewhere. The best stories, like the best maps, he says, don't necessarily have to be the most complete or exhaustive in detail; only the most effective.

"Mapmakers omit information for many reasons, including clarity and function. The Way Finder—the kind of map used to depict subway lines in cities all over the world—includes as little information as necessary, reduces the turns of the tracks to simple angles and takes a very casual attitude toward matters of scale.

"Exploring a metaphor for five years has given me a new perspective on the inter-relatedness of the expressions of how we think," Turchi continues, adding that he has incorporated much of his thinking into his work as a teacher, though not at all in a heavy-handed manner. "My students tend to adopt cartography ideas if they happen to be in harmony with something they're already working on. Otherwise, I try to encourage them to look for another metaphor that might work for them."

Asked about his writing schedule, Turchi says, after what sounded like a does-everybody-have-to-ask-me-that sigh, "Well, I don't have a religious schedule, can't really say I'm one of those guys who gets up way before dawn and writes for hours before the family gets up. I like to write from 10:30 in the morning to about one in the afternoon, then come back to it in late afternoon. I also like to work at night, from about nine to two a.m."

So when does he teach?

"All the time."

Asked about his current writing projects, Turchi, who is spending this academic year in Norway, says: "I'm currently working on a collection of stories and on a book about writing inspired by the visual arts, specifically my collaboration with the Washington, D.C.-based artist Charles Ritchie."