This is a map of my personal Republic of Desire, representing thirty years of projected fantasia on the theme of travel and imagination. The capital is Minn, a kind of composite of the Minneapolis of my dreams and wishes. My hometown is Hope, a few hours to the west of Minn, a sort of crossroads between several western South Dakota locations, where many dreams began, some were reformulated—and a few were stilled. This Republic is in fact the locus of a set of points upon six other maps. . .

The process: This is actually a derived map. Rather than simply drawing something, I wanted to map the contours of my fevered dreams. Initially I set out to make a different kind of map, a sort of rudimentary data visualization demonstrating the places where my imaginative efforts were focused at different times in my life. I laid out a map of the world, and then drew lines from the locations I lived at several ages in my life to the places which were most captivating to my imagination at the time. The intervals were approximately five to seven years. So basically I created seven maps—six time snapshots of my tendencies during my life; and one outline, reformulating them as a larger, whole territory which comprises a map of many of my hopes and dreams over thirty years, intrusions of myself and my Romantic intuitions about places derived from books and thoughts and impressed onto the reality of the world. A world atop this world, a nostalgia—prestalgia over things yet or never to be.