The Great Lakes region is home to country and coastline, cities and hitching posts, sea glass and Petoskey stones, sex trafficking and opioids. Regionally, it is a rainforest of diversity capable of transcending its natural geography through the written word.
If you want to sample that diversity through our Narrative Map Project, here’s how. First, read from the selection of short narrative map essays. Each essay is written about a place in the Great Lakes region.
Then, when you find an essay you like, take a walk with it. Locate on the Google map (see below) the place discussed in the essay. Learn more about that location. Learn about the people and history there. Perhaps you’ll find a new place to vacation or a new inspiration for a poem or piece of fiction. Or just learn a little more about the Great Lakes and take it with you.
Some people still call Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula “The Copper Country,” since it was home to over 150 copper mines and mills from the mid-1800s to…
While growing up I was mildly obsessed with Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, particularly his depiction of the traveling carnival that disrupts the…
It was mid-June, and the annual army of spindly Canadian Soldiers had come to clog up the screen windows of every lake-front home. I, too,…