I'm trying to get a maps project off the ground and I need a little help. I'm hoping that you'll take five minutes and draw me a map. The hope of this project is to create a sort of personal geography. I hope the juxtaposition of these maps will tell a story about how we live in the world and create a collective biography about how we experience the world.
If you do this your name will never appear with the map, and the goal is definitely not to make fun of anyone's lack of geographical knowledge.
Here's what I'm hoping you can do:
1.
DRAW and
LABEL a map of the world
without any aides, visual or otherwise. The last part is important. Please, no prior research or studying, and no looking at a map, list of countries, or anything that could help make your map more complete. Just use what you already know. This is the key to this project. Maximum of two drafts. Let it be messy if it's messy; get creative if you want to get creative. If your process shows through, all the better.
2. On a
SEPARATE piece of paper
write your initials, a
list of cities you have lived in (even if it was just for a few months), and a
list of countries you've visited.
3. You can mail your map to me at
this address, c/o Dustin Nelson. (Sorry for the run around, thought maybe it's weird to just throw my address on the blog for the spam-bot-o-tronics.) I will gladly reimburse postage, as I want to have the original copy of your map and not a copy or an e-mailed image.
If you have any questions you can e-mail me at dlukenelson [at] gmail [dot] com.
I hope you'll participate, and if you have friends who'd like to participate please pass this along. I'm hoping to get people from all over the world involved, and to see a wide spectrum of demographics (though I won't know who are, as I'm throwing away any identifying information).
and 
...which we can get because Melville House is bringing his work to America.) I did the interview for John & Molly Knefel's 