By Emily Lodish
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi. Trinity University Press: San Antonio, Texas, 2004.
"We stare at our own backyards, hack trails through the rainforest, paddle through overgrown rivers, wade into swamps even as something pulls thickly at our boots. When we reach what feels like a destination, we turn and map the way for others. But will we show them the trail, or force them to negotiate a muddy slope? Will we label the poison ivy, indicate where the rive is shallow enough to cross? Or will we add serpents dangling from trees? We cannot be trusted. We tell our readers, Trust me" (Turchi, Maps of the Imagination).
Peter Turchi’s associative style leaps from fanciful fiction to the most sensible of maps in Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Using cartography as a lens through which to view the craft of writing, Turchi charts a fascinating path from the writings of Ptolemy to the work of Nabokov, from the shores of Circe’s Aegean isle to the most recent representations of modern subway routes. Practically speaking, both writing and mapping must navigate issues of "selection and omission; conventions (adherence to and departure from); inclusion and order; shape, or matters of form; and the balance of intuition and intention." The extraordinary connection between the two disciplines, however, lies in the similarly brave and imaginative endeavor each demands. To embark on a creative venture is to confront the unknown (and the terrifying). It is an attempt to chart unfamiliar territory in the hopes of discovering, or creating, a new order–one that will make sense to others, inspiring them to go where they have never been or to return to where they have lived all along and see for the first time what they have always seen.
