A deep map of place.

This phrase rang like truth for me from the moment I first heard it, spoke to my own love of wild places like Wyoming’s Red Desert and Wind River Mountains. The term, which I first heard credited to Wallace Stegner, comes from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairie Erth (a deep map).

But I didn’t know that back in college and graduate school. My initial understanding of the concept was linked to my study of literary, place-based fiction and non-fiction, and thus I always thought of authors like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams when I thought of deep maps, of authors who came to know wild places in complex layers — personal and familial experience, history, informal and formal ecology, close-looking and listening, meditation, reflection — and who wrote lyrically and beautifully about them, depicting them from different angles and perspectives, returning to them over and over again like a river-smoothed stone. I strove to create my own deep map of place, one focused on “my” Wyoming, on the Red Desert and Wind Rivers, on the horses that have carried me across the plains and into mountains, on the traditions that have tied my family to these landscapes and to each other for generations.

Since then, my understanding has expanded, has allowed me to see that deep maps are not limited to wild places and literary writing. For example, the HBO show Sex & the City was imminently popular with college women when I was in school, and looking back, I see that the show was, in a way, a deep map of New York City. I have encountered some interesting projects online that extend the what and how and why of deep mapping, like This is Not an Atlas (https://notanatlas.org/#atlas-maps). I have also read academic work in disciplines like Wildlife Biology and Anthropology that are excellent examples of the nuanced layering required of deep maps.

And I have realized that, though I bandy about the term frequently, I am far from being an expert on what it means. Therefore, I am beginning a, well, deeper exploration of the concept while also embarking on expanding my own deep map of place, and I invite you to join me.