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. On the Narrative Map, each essay is pinned to the place it calls home. Choose a title from the list and the map will carry you there, or wander the shoreline and see what you stumble upon. Learn about the people and history of that place. 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.
The first paragraph placed me on a shoreline. The second put me on a city street. A few minutes later I was standing in a…
The following is a journal of observations and reflections from a canoe trip through the northern section of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. Together with…
What is the fascination with the Platte River? Thousands of families and rowdy vacationers float, paddle, and motor their way down its serpentine course…