Unmapping the West
A series of annotated historical maps tracing how the American West was named, claimed, and erased — often in the same gesture.
View project →Cartography & Place
Mapping
Maps are never neutral. Every projection distorts, every boundary is a decision, every blank space is an argument. This is where I collect work that engages directly with cartography — as subject, method, and metaphor.
Projects
What Gets Left Off the Map
On negative space in cartography: the communities, routes, and ecologies that official maps have always refused to show.
Read →Walking the Contour Lines
A personal geography of the Wasatch Range, built by foot and cross-referenced against topo sheets from three different decades.
Read →On Maps & Writing
Why Cartography
I came to maps the way most people come to poetry — sideways, through something else. I was reading about water rights in the Colorado River Basin when I realized the dispute was really about whose map you believed.
Since then, cartography has been a thread running through almost everything I write. Not because maps are beautiful (though they often are), but because they are arguments — and arguments can be questioned, revised, redrawn.