Back to maps and storytelling

Regarding storytelling and mapmaking, here's what has been on my mind:  instead of thinking about what we choose to show, and what we choose to tell, I've been considering what and why we omit.

One of my favorite aspects of creating of a map artpiece was actually the design and placement of the legend--that box that shows symbols and mileage measurements--the parameters of the map. The legend was fun to stitch because it had an established visual vocabulary--widths of roads, solid vs. dashes, a title, compass.  It gave my fiction credibility, too, as a "map."
As artistic cartographer, I had to decide where the legend would be placed.  In my Map of Great Pies piece, which showed Michigan and Illinois pies, would the legend be placed, say over Missouri, deeming it undistinguished in the matter of great pies?  Or would I place the legend over what would have been Kentucky, rendering it a place of second rate pies, unworthy of even appearing on a map?

In all the years I've looked at real maps, I've always wondered, what actually IS underneath the legend? They were usually placed in some obscure place in the ocean.  Was there nothing there?  At all?  Do fish swim there?  Is there not one speck of an island?  Was all of that place so unnoteworthy it had absolutely nothing to offer the map?

Were it not for its strategic location on one of the country's busiest transcontinental highways, Van Horn would probably be one of those communities obscured by the map's legend.  At least most people would be tempted to place the legend there, for whenever the region's virtues are mentioned, Van Horn is rarely among them.  It HAS assets and attributes--fine ones, actually--but depending on who is leading the discussion, it probably won't rise to the top.

In our statewide program, we know the political fallout from being omitted from the map.  Forty years ago, to publicize the state for the upcoming World's Fair, Governor Connolly set up 10 driving routes--one for every part of Texas--for HemisFair goers to discover the true Texas.  And thirty years later, those routes became the framework for our program and the ten heritage trails regions.  Some..many communities were left off that first set of driving tours forty years ago, and it still doesn't sit well.  We happily serve them, but they're not on the map, and that apparently still stings.

Clearly, no one likes to be ignored.  And some assets, some places, don't just jump up and grab you.

Part of my job is to find what isn't mapped, what isn't known, what isn't immediately apparent about a place.  Find, investigate, cheerlead, promote.  Our funder calls it "untold stories."

The longer I'm here, the more untold stories I find...the 1918 tent hospital in the desert near Marathon, set up for the influenza outbreak; the progression of design in family motor courts and small roadside motels; the history of my own building, first a fraternal hall, then a series of stores connected to other buildings in town by an underground tunnel.  There is also the story of the desert surrounding us, the silent, imperceptible elements of the land--like the character of the wind--that do not fit well on a map.