Matt Leibel is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. His fiction has appeared recently in places like Hobart, Kill Author, Redivider, and Carolina Quarterly. He hopes to travel to some medium-sized islands soon, and meanwhile can be found online at web.mac.com/mattleibel.
Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a…