Sneak Peek: Novelist and NEA Literature Fellow Peng Shepherd

Peng Shepherd: For me a map, on the face of it, it is something that gets you from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, and that's what we mostly use them for, myself included, but one of my favorite things about maps is that even though they're a reference chart essentially they're also in a way kind of a story, in a very similar way to books, because even though their primary purpose is navigation they still were drawn by a person who had something that they were trying to tell you, and that something may be about that moment in history, or it could be where that cartographer was from, it could be telling you something about the political situation or about a boundary of the territory. There's always something that map maker is trying to tell you or not tell you, and so I just love looking at a map and trying to figure out what the story is about that piece of art.