Every map is an argument made to look like a fact. A line is drawn, a road is named, a settlement is given a centre. What does not fit is moved to the margin or allowed to disappear.
I began The Cartographer of Rain with a simpler question: what if the land rejected the map? The river in the novel does not speak, but it revises. Its flooded path returns a house, a garden wall and a set of decisions that had been made invisible.
Fiction is sometimes described as invention. I think of it more often as a form of patient attention—to what an official story cannot contain, and to the human cost of leaving it out.
“Reading is one of the ways attention becomes a public virtue.”
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