Like most people, I love a map in a book, love a book with a map in the front. My loving a map in a book is as ordinary as my loving cute kittens or loving good triumphing over evil, but I especially love Monica Friedman’s map in my new novel The Waters.
Every novel that focuses on a place should have a map in it. If not for clarity, it should have a map just to add to the fun of the book. But when you’re trying to get a book published, there is a lot going on, and so the project of having a map created may fall to the bottom of the list of priorities.
The facts: Authors who want a map in their books generally must provide or pay for their own maps. Maps are usually commissioned (from cartographers) by publishers for $500. Any map must meet with the approval of the editors, book designers, etc.
For readers who like books with maps in them, Goodreads has a list.
Lucky for me, I know and love Monica Friedman’s work, and even more fortunately she loves The Waters, and so she created a brilliant map of the region where this story takes place. It includes stylized drawings of many of the book’s important elements, including buildings, plants, and animals.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe I don’t have to say anything more. It’s up to you whether to keep reading my words or just skip down to Monica’s map, where you can admire her exquisite details. As well as being a map, it is a work of art, social commentary, and literary criticism.
Monica Friedman has been an important person in my life ever since I met her, when she was a graduate student at Western Michigan University. I was the MFA thesis advisor for her fantasy novel, though I wasn’t employed as a faculty member at the time, and so for me it was a labor of love. She is from Chicago but moved to Tucson and told me without apology, “My people are a desert people.”
Monica continues to write and to work as an artist, barely staving off starvation, supplemented by 75 minutes of paid teaching at an elementary school. She is a creator of all kinds of fun and beautiful work, and (amazingly) she has chosen to create graphical literary criticism about my work. Yes, Monica has created comic books for each of my three collections, and she even has a graphical essay in Michigan Salvage, the collection of critical work about my stories.
Here on her blog is where you can see a lot of the work Monica has done. The critiques of Women & Other Animals, American Salvage, and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters are also to be found each collected in 16-page volumes. In a sense, Monica invented a new genre of contemporary comic-based literary criticism.
My novel Once Upon a River was also published with a map, a more traditional map (photo below) that shows the distances traveled on the river by my heroine Margo. And W.W. Norton, bless them, kindly gave me that map as gift.
But the map for The Waters had to be peculiar because the whole story takes place on a few acres, and most important is where the buildings and natural elements relative to each other as well the directions in which everything else lies. There is also much to be gained by showing the character of these buildings and elements, more important than respecting the relative size of a cornfield in comparison to an army-issue Quonset hut.
My initial request was that Monica create a map like the famous “View From 9th Avenue” New Yorker cover to show how people in rural spaces are as myopic about their spaces as New Yorkers are about theirs, and so this is a take on that.
By the way, Monica also can be seen in medieval garb here and there on FB and attending various real world Renaissance. When I questioned her about wearing tight corsets she assured me, “I actually thrive with corset cinching 😊 It really does wonders for back pain.”
Clearly, books are better with maps, and clearly the world is livelier place with Monica Friedman in it. Her novel, The Hermit, is available here.
Another inside look at what helps birth a book! I love maps... paper maps when I’m planning a road trip still 😉and love maps in books! Thanks for explaining, for introducing us to Monica!