Maps, They Don’t Love You Back
You might remember this prompt. It starts with asking students to draw a map of some location. If it’s for a memoir, the location is inevitably some childhood memory place, where the student’s family held derby parties or where the bourbon distillery caught fire. The students spends several minutes drawing this map, filling in the neighborhood, the creeks and rivers, the knob where she/he played king of the hill and where later, Bigfoot was sighted by a drunk. Then the student uses the map as a writing aid and learns to fill in the setting while writing.
(For extra fun, the students may make a list of different events that happened in the same location—where they had derby parties was the same place that they broke a window with a baseball—and write two or three events that describe the same place differently, because the remembered emotion is different.)
I’ve done this prompt several times, and I’ve assigned it over and over again. Now I finally know what to do with all of these maps after the exercise has been completed.
The Hand Drawn Map Association promotes mapping and sharing by building an archive of submissions. They have maps from all over the world, detailing places real and imaginary. It’s pretty cool to look through (and might be writing inspiration), and you can send your old maps there. I submitted one of the fruit trees in my neighborhood (complete with legend—last summer I had a lot of free time), and they sent me a small notebook and a map of Philly (entitled “I have to go to work, here’s things to do”) as thanks.
If you’ve never done the prompt, go on and give it a try. Even if you don’t have substantially awesome writing evolve from it, you can always get your map published online.
This is staggerlingly awesome.
Thanks!
Staggeringly, I mean, though one could make the case that the extra L makes it even more cool.
Dante’s Inferno revisited, eh, Amaris? I love that you copied that great map down. I think that would be appreciated by the Hand Drawn Map peeps.
I agree with Tanya. You should totally submit that map of the Inferno. That website is amazing! Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Oh, and your fruit trees map rocks!
Jaime, I think that once we did this same memory map writing exercise together at a cafe last year. You should submit your memory map!
Yeah, maybe I should. It’s a cool activity and always seems to work better as a way to jog my memory than I think it will.
Estimated retail value of the sun: 59 cents.
[...] under searchable terms? If you think about a lot of those prompts that serve to jog your memory, like drawing a map of the house you grew up in, you might realize that it’s only a matter of time before Google Earth has floor plans of [...]