Imaginary Maps

Along with invented languages and manuscripts, maps are often the key to imagined worlds. Certainly, Tolkien's maps of Middle-Earth gave his realm a definite sense of reality, but there are maps, too, of other imagined realms: Utopia, Earthsea, Oz (including its lesser-known neighbors Ev, Ix, and Mo), and the Hundred Acre Wood. This map, which I drew when I was 14, was, like A.A. Milne's a projection of the imagination onto an actual landscape: just sixty acres of trees, brush, and fields -- including part of an abandoned tree-farm -- that lay behind my childhood home on Brainard Road in Ohio.