You've heard of historical fiction, right? You know, James Michener's famous books—Hawaii, Alaska—that sort of thing. If you know what historical fiction is, I can explain to you what mythography is. So just to be sure we have this down pat, let's look at Dictionary.com and Wikipedia for some definitions:
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Historical Fiction, noun:
1. the genre of literature, film, etc., comprising narratives that take place in the past and are characterized chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction of historical events and personages.
2. works of this genre, as novels and plays. .
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Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the main characters tend to be fictional. Writers of stories in this genre, while penning fiction, attempt to capture the manners and social conditions of the persons or time(s) presented in the story, with due attention paid to period detail and fidelity. .
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Great, now imagine a new genre with me that I would like to call "geographic fiction." Apparently though, I’m not the only one thinking of this new turn of phrase since a quick Google search reveals that someone else has posted the following online just two months ago as part of an academic thesis at CUNY: .
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Geographic Fiction
My thesis, tentatively named Geographic Fiction, is a compilation of several of my poems, as well as one short story, detailed notes about each piece, an introduction, and a collection of photographs and maps in the appendix. Much of the project is about the design of the book itself. The cover will likely be a topographic map of New Hampshire that I picked up on a visit to Portsmouth. (1) .
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Many thanks to Joseph Pentangelo for this work! By adding imaginative impressions to a presentation of a landscape, at least with several poems and a short story, Pentangelo is making a geographic landscape come alive in the feeling world inside of his and his reader’s minds more than it might otherwise have made an impression. This is what the author of historical fiction also does with history. I remember much of the sequence of the history of Hawaii because of how Michener personalized it for me with plausible, salient, personal narratives of fiction in his novel. Geographic fiction on the other hand will naturally deal more with space than with time, but in the same manner..
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Space can be explored on many levels. We can explore the spaces in our bodies, in our homes, and in our world to mention a few of these different levels. Generally, the closer we get to our personal spaces and to our own bodies, the more privately we hold our graphic understanding of our topographic details in space. On the level of global geography, however, we are now sharing increasingly vast amounts of information with the entire global community. And with Google images we are now sharing street level camera views of nearly every major street in the United States of America! This is a new and thrilling opportunity in shared imaginative space, and it is ripe for exploring with geographic fiction.
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Perhaps you now understand my vision of graphing out space in imaginative stories and why the name of this website ends in -ography, like geography. But what is this “Myst-” part in the beginning of “Mystography?” .
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Well, you’ve heard of mystery novels, right? That’s a good place to start. But in fact, I intend to go much deeper than the ordinary mystery of hidden events and the everyday curiosity of who did what. I want to dig past the mystery of what has simply been in the material world and delve into the mystery of what it might all mean. And then, even further in than that, I want to dig into the mystery of how we find meaning in the first place. And this ultimately leads me to a place of Mysticism. What is mysticism? One way I would put it is that is the openness to awe and wonder at sheer being—awe at sheer existence on every level, material, perceptual and conscious. It is awe and wonder with both the incarnate and the transcendent. It is pure skepticism in all human knowledge and pure belief in all phenomena of being. It is the religion of calling God first and foremost, The I AM. It is the ultimate source of mystery, magically connectivity and religion. It is the salt of the earth which gives it it’s flavor and it’s life for us. Therefor, the genre of mystography that I conceive of is the mystic mythologizing of geography. .
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And why geography? So that we can remember and know so much more, and know it with the power that we describe metaphorically as “knowing something as well as we know the backs of our own hands.” This is the power to remember and to expand one’s inner capacity through what the Roman’s knew as the Method of Loci, also known as memory palaces. .
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And will we only learn geography this way? Oh, no. This is a gate to remembering anything and everything, starting with the memorization of the entire core lexicons of foreign languages. So let the adventure begin!.
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If you do not know me and wish to participate in this project, email me. Mostly this initial blog is written for my friends, adult students and fellow mystographic developers and artists. But, I’m putting this out on the web live, so perhaps we’ll collaborate across greater degrees of separation through this medium than we might have otherwise. .
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I am going to create a template for this work that I claim as my own and for which I claim copyright ownership. If you wish to use my template as a foundation on which to build your own instructive geographic fiction or mystography, I might be happy to grant you license to do so on three conditions, as follows. I ask that you get my personal permission first; I as that you reference me in your work; and I as that you grant me the freedom to quote and use pieces of your work in my future projects as well. Thank you for your interest...
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Sky Thoth. .
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