Peter Turchi: The Writer as Cartographer (January 1997)

In this “exploration of mapmaking as a metaphor for writing, led by a man known to get lost in shopping malls,” Peter Turchi looks at what fiction writing has in common with maps. Through close readings of stories by Dennis Wood, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Kate Chopin, and Robert Hoover, Turchi shows how the metaphor of the map can help us better understand, as writers, how a work of fiction can effectively chart territory, both orienting and disorienting its reader.