Maps of the Imagination:
the Writer as Cartographer
Reviews and Comments
About the Author
Dates for the 2005 Book Tour
An Inside Look at
Maps of the Imagination
The MFA Program for Writers at
Warren WIlson College
Trinity University Press
   ..."Maps of the Imagination" has won the Silver Medal in Germany's Stiftung Buchkunst's Most Beautiful Book in the World competition...
                            "Essential for all collections"--ALA Choice
              "The Perfect Gift for...a writer"--Tattered Cover Holiday Gift Guide
    Maps of the Imagination is a magic carpet ride over terrain both familiar and exotic.  Award-winning fiction writer Peter Turchi uses mapmaking as a metaphor to investigate writing as a combination of exploration and presentation. An erudite and charming guide, Turchi compares the way a writer leads a reader through the imaginary world of a story, novel, or poem to the way a mapmaker charts the physical world. "To ask to be told a story," Turchi says, "is to ask to be taken to unknown territory; to ask for a map is to say, 'Tell me a story.'"
     With intelligence and wit, the author looks at what mapmakers and writers convey through the careful use of blank space; the conventions they use or consciously disregard; how both writing and maps convey one individual's unique perspective; the role of geometry in mapmaking and the parallel role of formal choices in writing; and the delicate balance of science and art, intention and intuition.
     The ancient Greeks, German globe makers, and British cartographers join forces with the Marx Brothers, NASA, and Roadrunner cartoons to shed light on the strategies of writers as diverse as Sappho, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, and Heather McHugh.
     A beautifully illustrated combination of personal essay, history, critical cartography, and practical guide to writing, Maps of the Imagination is a book for readers who have found themselves lost, gleefully, in the world of a story--and for the writers who want to lead them there.
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THE SUPER-COLLOSAL
           Reed Turchi
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mapsoftheimagination@yahoo.com
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