Digital Mapmaking and the Art of Writing

Cathlin Goulding

My 12th grade poetry students at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, Calif., began this school year reading a selection from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, by Peter Turchi (2007). Immediately my students balked, "Why are we reading about maps? I thought we were supposed to be in poetry class. We should be writing poems!"

"All right; I hear you," I reassured them. "I promise we'll get to the creative writing soon. Trust me."

Writers as Mapmakers

Both writers and cartographers sketch out a veritable world of places, characters, and journeys for the reader. Considering writing like an act of mapmaking means approaching writing not as a laborious task (as many of my students perceived it in their years of writing five-paragraph essays), but as an act of creation, as the starting place of an adventure. Or, as Turchi writes,

We organize information on maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, they also inspire us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities . . . To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story." (p. 1)

After our examination of Turchi's book, I asked my students to draw personal maps of important places in their lives and communities, and I told them that these maps, ultimately, would lead to their first writing assignment of the year: a "Where I Am From" poem. I asked them to consider places that held particular significance for them, such as the theater where they saw a first movie with their boyfriend or girlfriend or a water fountain they frequently used at their elementary school. We then took their hand-drawn maps and posted them online on Google Maps, which has a tool that allows users to tag and label various points on a map.

One of my poetry students added 924 Gilman, an all-ages punk-rock venue in Berkeley, Calif., as a place that stood out in his life and memory. Other students added the local taqueria or the teen center where they taught swim lessons to kids during the sweltering summer months.

These young poets translated their maps into poems that identified and encapsulated the places that made them who they were. Repeating the line, "I come from a place ... ," their poems praised the ebullient sounds of their favorite music venues, the splash of water in summer, and the sizzles and smells of local eateries. Mapping the everyday and ostensibly banal places in their lives initiated a host of memories and fresh images for my poetry students—it allowed us, as Turchi writes, "to see our knowledge in a new way." 

Writing a Political Landscape

Following this experiment in using digital mapmaking to inspire student writing, I began to consider how to further incorporate this notion of writers as mapmakers into my language arts classes. What I did not predict was how mapmaking would take shape in the digital landscape this school year. Publishing student work within Internet forums became a means for my students to widen their intellectual audience—to place themselves literally and figuratively onto a "map" of writers and thinkers.

Later last fall, I was able to utilize maps again when a few colleagues and I had our classes participate in the National Writing Project's Letters to the Next President, an online writing task that asked students from across the nation to compose and post letters to the president. The Web site displays, via Google Maps, a map of the United States with red markers signaling letters written by middle and high school students. A click on a city leads the reader to a piece of persuasive writing, which is tagged with the contemporary issues that the student is addressing in his or her letter.

Seeing their letters were going to be published on a "real" Web site for an authentic audience ignited my students' writing in a manner I had not witnessed before. They composed convincing, empowered letters decrying harsh immigration policies, unpacking the morality of abortion, and pleading for an end to the economic crisis. By the 2008 Election Day, more than 6,000 letters had been posted online—and the voices of our nation's youth were veritably charted and recorded on an electronic map. The site and mapmaking tool provided an opportunity for my students to participate in a larger conversation about the issues they believed were the most critical for the next president to address.

Creating New Territories for Student Work

The excitement generated in publishing work on the Letters to the Next President Web site encouraged me to invent more forums for young people to publish work online. This past winter, I created an online literary magazine for our school Web site called Echoes Magazine. The magazine, now accepting submissions, will show the photography, graphic design, poetry, and short stories of students. The site broadens the literary horizons of our small Bay Area community by exhibiting the work of young people in a widely accessible online format. And while not literally a work of cartography, electronic publishing founds a permanent yet dynamic "map" of student creative work. The idea of presenting writing in a virtual map led me to new publishing possibilities for my classroom and my school.

Turchi explains that writing, like mapmaking, is an act of generating a world for the reader. He notes, "From the first word we write, and by choosing to write rather than to paint or sing—we are defining, delineating, the world that is coming into being" (p. 14). I believe that there are vast opportunities for new virtual worlds to develop in our classrooms. Digital maps, whether they reflect the political landscape of American teenagers or lead us, hyperlink by hyperlink, to the lively and exuberant creative work of our students, offer the potential to, as Turchi suggests, "delineate . . . the world coming into being."

Reference

Turchi, P. (2007). Maps of the imagination: The writer as cartographer. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press.

Cathlin Goulding is an English teacher at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, Calif.