Map Room: Workshop Overview

The Map Room considers the energetic, generative relationship between mapping and writing. Taking a tour through ten different stations from which to consider what maps are, how they wield knowledge, how to make them and how to use them in storytelling, it proliferates perspectives. 

The Map Room is a thirty-day workshop in ten installments. Each installment contains a consideration and a packet of prompts for three sessions of writing or map-making. The prompts are designed to be used flexibly in whatever way fits your day and place in a project cycle. There will be generative angles (for sprouting seeds of totally new things) and development angles (which use mapping as a resource for a story already in progress). It can be applied to fictional and nonfictional worlds, or to build intermediate spaces between the real and the imagined. 

You can use this workshop as a way to nurture your cartographic imagination, you can use it to make yourself a seed bank for future stories, or you can apply it toward an open project. As always, it will be over-abundantly supplied, with the expectation that everything is there to take or leave as whim or interest strikes. 

The mapping considerations range freely across different types of spatial representation: symbolic space, geographic space, and narrative space. I like to use a distinction between the story world (including all the event sequences inside it) and the telling of the story. Map thinking can feed both the world and the telling. My question is always: How does a telling move through a space? And reversed: How can thinking of the space of the telling — the terrain through which it moves — help me proliferate my sense of possibility in the way the narrative unfolds? 

I encourage you to draw a lot whether or not you think you’re any good at drawing. When making map details, you can always work freely between cartoony graphics and verbal notations. You can map on anything, but do find the paper and pen supplies that give your hand some pleasure.  You can of course use a digital workspace too, although I personally think that working on paper gives your mind a useful break from distraction. 

These are the ten considerations:

  • 1) Maps as mnemonics, instruments of recuperation
  • 2) Maps and representation: visibilities and symbol keys
  • 3) Borders, thresholds, flood zones: of points, lines and shaded areas
  • 4) Threads, traces, walking lines: destination versus wayfinding, mapping inhabitation
  • 5) Mapping story shapes: traditions, experiments, grow-your-owns
  • 6) Narrative atlases, layers, simultaneity and co-presence
  • 7) Speculative maps: generative mapping to discover story possibilities
  • 8) Scale, folds, joins, passages, portals, distortions, wormholes
  • 9) Hic Svnt Dracones: edges, monsters, regions of uneasiness
  • 10) The Map Room: collections, flat files, archives

how the workshop works

There will be twelve installments total, including this overview up front and an outerview at the end. Each of the ten main installments offer a longish consideration in a somewhat theoretical mood. At the end of each consideration, I offer ideas for translating the substance of the ideas into experiments we can run in writing and map-making, in the form of an experimental question and a scatter of prompts and etudes. 

I’m always trying to make up writing experiments in this manner, sourcing ideas from one field and applying them in another. I’ve found with my own prompts that I sometimes need to replay them a few times before they yield interest, and in the case of map-making, before I find my own hand/line/iconography.

fragments toward a rationale for spending time in map thinking: 

Space as a grounding source for story asks about how and where we inhabit a world, and what in the world we might give our attention to.

Maps as an effort to hold or imagine space, considered here as a kind of alembic for story-making. 

Map thinking as a way to refresh a sense of what is and is not part of a story you want to tell. 

Space as a registry of time (landscapes and inhabitants are always in motion; stillness and permanence are relative); this is not a jettisoning of inquiry into why and how things unfold, but rather a re-situation of organizing point, from the narrative of the agent to the narrative of the world space in which agency operates. It offers a different set of values to activate when thinking about what belongs in this story, who belongs in this story, and what is a center, how many centers are there. 

A map can hold space for the coetaneous emergence of any event or any person; maps can simplify but they can also provide anchors for real complexity. 

A narrative of porosity and adjacency and contiguity and plurality. 

Narrative unfolds in time, but so does space. Landscape is always in motion. 

Also: the map room. Sometimes when I have no ideas, I go to the map room in a library, and browse until something lights up. Here’s to the pleasures of flat files, paper, oversize binding. Here’s to the pleasure of width, breadth, horizon, and wandering.

credits

I write these workshops for an excuse to dig around in an area of thought. While map thinking is something I’ve included idiosyncratically in my own teaching and making for a long time, I don’t offer this from any sense of comprehensive subject knowledge. My sources for this workshop include the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book, Lines: A Brief History, and two books by cartographer Denis Wood: The Power of Maps, and the beautiful Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, as well as many years spent and playing with and building on the implication of Gertrude Stein’s idea of plays as landscape, of composition as a field of relations. 

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?