Narrative Atlas of the Missing Year
On the far end of the street at the top of the hill where I live, there is a stretch of sidewalk that, despite my having resided nearby for more than a decade, I had scarcely traversed until a little less than a year ago when, following spinal fusion surgery, I started walking a lengthy portion of it, tracing and retracing its path multiple times a day, every day, so slowly, and so self-consciously, that its contours and cracks, edges and indentations, became as familiar to me as the lines and scars—the memories they contain—on my own hands. Early on I considered paying for the premium version of the pedometer app I installed on my phone to track my steps and gamify my recovery, imagining the overlay map of my familiar route it would have shown me, like a deep groove worn into the ground by my footsteps, over and over, punctuated by tiny landmarks known only to me. The ledge where I stopped to stretch my tight, traumatized legs; the utility pole upon which a red-tailed hawk perched in the dim light of predawn; the smudge on the concrete where I encountered a girl inexplicably burning a notebook one lonely afternoon (her smile as I walked past); the gap in the fence overlooking the high school football field that I stared at for hours trying to process my mom’s death, composing her eulogy, repeating the same lines again and again, wearing a different kind of groove into my mind. These are the maps we carry around with us, amateur cartographers of the vast interior.
“[M]aps helped me imagine a fictional psychogeography for the characters I had created on the page,” writes Natalie Bakopoulos in “Blurring the Borders in Fiction: On Mapping and Naming, Unmapping and Unnaming,” about consulting maps of Athens while writing her first two novels. “But to think about mapping an invented world into a real place, or onto a map, is only one way to think about inhabiting fictional worlds. Maps tell only one kind of story, after all.” In this issue we chart meaningful destinations that exist both in the physical world—a cabin in Wallowa Lake, Oregon; a writing studio in Banner, Wyoming; and other settings in “The Places That Make It Possible: Retreats That Change Writers’ Lives”—and in more ethereal spaces. “These terrains are both physical and psychic,” writes Sally Wen Mao, “places where the act of writing, of remembering and dreaming, is braced against the onrush of new sensations.” Whether you are writing from within the well-worn grooves of the everyday or heading off to points unknown, may these pages nourish your spirit of discovery.
