And Just What Did Ward Cleaver Do in Mayfield, Anyway?

A contact at Trinity University Press passed along the delightful news that the demand for Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination has been so persistent that they're going back to the printers for more copies. Turchi's meditation on "the writer as cartographer" has quickly become a favorite of bookblogs such as The Mumpsimus and Tingle Alley. Poring over the gorgeous illustrations, and Turchi's elaborate concept of writing as an act of exploration and presentation much like mapmaking--where what you leave out can be as important, in some ways, as what you put in--made a believer out of me as well.

"In a surprising number of novels [Turchi writes], the characters are effectively jobless; they have been granted pyschic vacations from work by the author. Their occupations might be named, but they have no employers, no colleagues, no pressing work-related obligations; which is to say, they live in a world very different from that of most readers. (Long ago, bent over one of the blue-spined books I read the moment they entered the house, I noted that the Hardy boys, unfettered by schoolwork, lived in an endless teenage vacation.)"

Not very many critics can deliver equally convincing analyses of the Road Runner cartoons and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler; fewer still would be able to do it in such a way that readers who are themselves aspiring writers could find semi-practical inspiration for their next encounter with the blank page or screen. This turns out to be not so surprising: Turchi is the head of the creative writing program at Warren Wilson College, and this book has partial roots in a lecture which first appeared in an anthology of essays by WWC faculty, Bringing the Devil to His Knees.

Readers in the Pacific Northwest can hear Turchi speak in early April 2005. And, with any luck, I'm told, there will soon be online excerpts available at the book's Trinity web page.