I was on the phone one day with my friend Brandon. Brandon’s a writer, been a serious one for a lot longer than I have, so whenever I get him in a conversation, I drop a little, “So what’re you working on?” question somewhere in the middle of things, a little bait, to see if maybe he’ll bite and spill the beans.

“Oh, I’m just reading, mostly.” The kind of answer that drives me nuts.

So I said, “Well, what are you reading?”

He told me he was picking out certain authors, and then reading everything that author had ever written. (I think at the time, he was tackling Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Ian McEwan.) I freaked out a little bit, and said, “Jesus, man, how disciplined of you! I can’t even finish a novel!”

So I hung up later, and got to thinking about his project. A few days earler, I’d read a line of advice from G.S.: “Find two or three writers that you’re really excited about. Follow their lineage back. Know everything about them. Immerse yourself in those writers.” This really clicked with me.

Since I started working in a library, I’ve been on book overload. I can get any book, anytime. No limits. Always a bad idea. So much to read. So little time. Really overwhelming. But this, this was a really great idea: Take it slow and steady. Saturate yourself with a writer’s work. Figure out who means the most to you right now, and then read who meant the most to them. No problem.

But how to begin? A list seemed too linear. What I needed was a map.

I’ve always been a nut about genealogy. When I was in undergrad, Brandon gave me a book of Carver stories. I fell in love with them. Then I found out our teacher had been taught by John Gardner, the same John Gardner who taught Ray Carver. I started building this goof-ball lineage in my mind…that I was somehow inheriting what had come before me.

A family tree!

So once in a while, when I’m feeling lost, feeling a little schizophrenic in my reading habits, I’ll draw a dorky map like the one above, who I’ve read, who I should read.

Where I am, where I should be going.

Around 10, I stopped in at Mac’s Backs, and bought the new BELIEVER BOOK OF WRITERS TALKING TO WRITERS, as well as the second issue of BCR to show the writing group tomorrow night. Suzanne had just opened and nobody was around, so we started chatting and I showed her Kenneth Koch’s work in BCR, and then she told me about this guy named Kenneth Patchen, a poet/painter who drew “picture poems.” Apparently, a guy named Larry Smith speaking at the D.A. Levy symposium at Cleveland State has written a biography about him. So, that might be something to go to this weekend. Said goodbye and drove over to Joseph-Beth and picked up the new issue of BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW to show the group.

Around 11, in the parking lot of Zagara’s, grocer of the Cleveland Heights literari, I saw Harvey Pekar half-shuffling, half-limping across the parking lot. He looked pre-occupied, so I thought better of shouting, “Yo Harv!” across the lot. I showed less restraint when Meg pointed out Dan Chaon in next lane a couple weeks ago:

ME: Mr. Chaon!
CHAON: (looks up, startled) Hi!
ME: Looking forward to your reading next month!
CHAON: Oh. (What reading?) Oh yeah, with Kelly Link.
ME: Yeah.
CHAON: (Who the hell is this kid?) Well, I’ll see you there, then!
ME: You bet!

A few minutes later I heard him say to the cashier, “Oh, just trying to write. It’s pathetic.” Which made me feel less pathetic.

The celebrities kept coming: the crazy lady who feeds the pigeons behind our building was in the produce section. She smelled like Marlboros, not pigeons.

Got back home around 12, and I had an e-mail from Peter Turchi, who was nice enough to reply to an e-mail I’d sent about maps and world-building. He read a section from my thesis and gave me reading suggestions to check out: 1) Denis Wood’s THE POWER OF MAPS, where Wood argues that maps are temporal, whether they mean to or not, they map spatial relationships in time; and 2) FLATLAND by Edwin Abbott, for its take on the “space/time relationship.”

Turchi also wrote that when he spoke at the University of Greensboro some students told him that a cartography professor there was using graphic novels to talk about depicting time and space; and at the University of Iowa he met a fiction writer who builds three-dimensional models of the settings for his novels. I’m going to try to hunt down these characters.

(from HARPER’S, June 2005)

I’ve been taken lately with maps and storytelling. It started at Cambridge, where I did these rough “psychological” maps of London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, continued during my senior project, and it got started again when I read a book called Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. In Maps, Peter Turchi, (who edited a book with Charles Baxter and teaches fiction at Warren Wilson College), writes about fiction using the metaphor of making maps. The sociology article containing the above graphic can be found here, and a collection of crazy network maps, here.