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  • Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
  • Alicia Conroy
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter TurchiTrinity University Press, 2004, 224 pp., $24.95

Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer is as far from an analytical how-to of the writer's craft as Italo Calvino's moon is from Neil Armstrong's. Rather, as Turchi explains, he uses maps and map-making as a potent metaphor for examining the creative process and literary art. This book will speak to those who find more common ground with Natalie Goldberg than Madison Smartt Bell or John Gardner. Instead of recipes for process and hard prescriptions, Turchi, himself a novelist and teacher, offers pithy insights linked to free-ranging ruminations and examples as well as to theory and criticism.

The writer's process involves two fundamental acts that intermingle, Turchi asserts: exploration, the process of discovering; and presentation, communicating with others. In these ways, the writer is like the mapmaker. Turchi takes his central metaphor for writing from "an amateur's enthusiasm" for cartography and an inclination "toward analogy rather than explication, exceptions rather than rules."

Turchi takes the role of a guide who is a chatty raconteur, given to digressions and yarn-spinning before he hauls the wheel back toward the main channel. His ramble is colorful and far-reaching and even punctuated by intriguing illustrations. It's a fun and entertaining ride, especially for curious readers who like maps or writers who dislike rules.

For example, in the chapter titled "Projections and Conventions," he meanders from Claudius Ptolemy's "projection," or formula for getting the spherical Earth onto a fl at page, to Mercator's version fifteen hundred years later, then to Impressionist painters, T. S. Eliot, Franklin Delano Roosevelt [End Page 198] and the World Trade Center. Throughout, he introduces ideas about the distortions used in art or maps, their privileged "truths" and how presentation choices shape a reader's perception. It's a looping, associative string of examples that occasionally touches down with declarative oomph: "This is why it is important for all of us realists, damned by that word 'conventional,' to remember, always, that we have chosen a particular projection—one that seems to us to minimize distortion and to speak powerfully."

With this metaphor Turchi validates both the writer's uncertain, anxious joy of discovery and the urge for control. It seems particularly suited to his task of exploring rather than declaiming and is effective for discussions of form, literary convention and narrative point of view. He compares mapping the world to nineteenth-century realism, and mental mapping to Woolf 's stream of consciousness. In discussing postmodernist experiments with form, he touches on geometry, the invention of perspective, the Rorschach test and contemporary writers, on his way to discussing the reader's "pleasure from perceiving a shape only partially represented—from playing a role in bringing the work to completion." The purpose of these varied examples is to shine a light on the intangible imagination and conscious choices in the writing process.

In Mapping the Imagination, Turchi doesn't carry out a tidy mathematical formula like the one he shows Italo Calvino using to "map" If on a winter's night a traveler. Rather, he calls attention to such scenic highlights and offers contexts and insights that inspire readers to reflect and writers (in another nod to Calvino) to "build ladders from the world we live in to the worlds we imagine."

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