As a writer and a teacher who teaches writing, I wanted to imagine a way to take advantage of Google's My Maps by using it to tell an interactive story. I decided to imagine it as a facet of a common project of mine, the memoir. The map I created would work as a modeling example for my students.
Imagine I were writing a memoir about five of my favorite places, associated with five of my favorite memories. While the memoir would rely, typically, on a standard essay format, "illustrating" the story with this map can add depth to that memoir. It becomes a map-story, a secondary storytelling device. My assignment for my students would then be to write their essay and then use the map to illustrate the key points of that essay, however they would decide.
My hypothetical memoir essay is about how most of my favorite memories are outdoors at a park, even though these days I'm a homebody. In my map below (you may have to zoom out so that you can see the whole of the U.S.), you can start at the green push pin to see why Disneyland is important to me, then click on the park table in Del Mar, the comedy and tragedy masks in El Paso, the pine tree in Huntsville, and finally the fork and knife in Chattanooga. However, for my story, I would not include a line to give a "path," allowing my reader to have some freedom. Ideally, the map and the essay will compliment each other. Each should be able to tell a story, even if that is a collection of descriptions instead of a linear plot.
In fact, I specifically like how each student as cultural cartographer could choose to indicate a path or direction for their map-story or not. This could lead to interesting conversations about plot, storytelling, and memory.
View My favorite places in a larger map
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