There is No Map for This: Guest Post from Tom Birdseye
There is No Map for This. This title is a writer’s dream. Take the words “there is no map for this” and you can use them as preface for anything doubtful, anything scary, a day gone wrong, a question unanswered.
You can use them to refer to life itself.
Image courtesy of Tom Birdseye
Given the title of this YA novel that raises complex questions of what it means to be a man, I decided I didn’t need to give the author, my VCFA colleague and friend Tom Birdseye, a map for this guest post. When I told him he could take it in any direction he liked, he replied with a picture of the McKenzie River, where he was headed on a camping trip. He said he might contemplate what he had to say while sitting on the bank of the river, listening to water. He’d see, he said, where the current took him.
Here’s what he wrote at the end of that trip.
Photo © David Paul Bayles
Fertile Ground for a Dialectic
by Tom Birdseye
When I first started writing There Is No Map for This, my intention was to explore the different ways in which we process grief. How would my main character, Ren, handle the death of his brother, Levi? How would Levi's girlfriend, Ellie, deal with the aftermath? What contrasts would surface between Ren and Ellie's reactions? What overlaps? Could shared pain eventually lead to something positive—love out of loss? Or just a deeper hole?
However, somewhere along the way, other thematic threads began to creep into the narrative, including the ways in which we define manhood. Ren, like most teens, is bombarded with cultural messages of what it means to be masculine—men strutting with a scowl and clenched fists, flexing bulging biceps, racing jacked-up pickups plastered with hate stickers, raising bloody knuckles in triumph—all telling him how he should behave: Be tough. Show no weakness. Man up. Dominate.
But Ren's heart is big. He is kind, compassionate, empathetic. He is also philosophical, prone to examination rather than quick answers, complex continuums rather than simple binaries. And so he struggles, pushed and pulled, looking for agency, a rudder and a map to steer by. Who is he—as a young man, but more importantly as a human being? What is his purpose? How does he manifest it? What is the metric by which he measures himself?
For me, this is how the writing process often works—I think I know what the story is about, until I find out it's about much more. I didn't choose the threads that appeared in There Is No Map for This. They pushed, they pulled, and demanded a place on the page. The result is Ren's journey, and also a window into my own. Or a mirror. Or both. Not literally, of course. This is fiction, after all—not facts, but my attempt at capturing emotional truths.
My hope is that these truths resonate in some way for readers, shine a light on questions they are pondering, encourage examination. We are at a moment in history in which we—regardless of gender labels, or otherwise—are compelled to delve into who and what we are, what we stand for, and how we might move forward. Stories can help us do that—we see ourselves on the page, or who we might like to be, or maybe even who we don't want to be. We live the narrative vicariously. And so we evolve, even if in only small increments. As do the stories we tell.
There is No Map for This.
Tom’s right. There isn’t, but the journey counts for a whole lot.
