Armed with hundreds of blank maps she had painstakingly printed by hand, Becky Cooper walked Manhattan from end to end, asking strangers to map their own Manhattan and mail in the results. Soon her P.O. box was filled with an atlas of intimate narratives: past loves, childhood memories, and surprising confessions. The result is Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers (Abrams, April 2013), with a foreword by New Yorker staff writer and award-winning author Adam Gopnik..

“Home is where the heart is;” “You can’t go home again;” “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” The best clichés are the truest ones, and the people who joined Becky’s project, from the men and women on the street to a number of prominent New Yorkers in the arts and humanities, along with a few celebrities and a several experts on Manhattan's terroir—for the most part, people who are neither artists nor cartographers—poured their hearts out in personal visual narratives about Manhattan’s terra incognita of the soul.

The book that resulted from this interrogation has generated so much buzz that I contacted Becky last week for a DART Q&A. This is what she wrote:

Q: What are some of your favorite things about living and working in New York?

A: New York is a great place for an artist because of many things, but not least, the subway. The collision of worlds, the time to read, the chance encounters with strangers, the sense of never-ending time. The subway reminds its riders of the fact that New York is anything but a one-industry city. Relatedly, I love that this city forces you to dream big but also to dream specifically.

This is the blank map you can download, map your Manhattan, and contribute your story to the project.

Q: How and when did you first become interested in art and design?

A: I’m more of a writer than I am a visual artist, though I guess I’ve always been obsessed with fonts and book design. I used to try to recreate musical posters on my family’s old typewriter, and I used to practice copying fonts for fun.

Q: Tells us about your art/design background. Where did you study? What was your experience there like?

A: I’ve never formally studied art. Until eighth grade, I went to a school affiliated with the United Nations and the art department there was unbelievable. We learned about different materials—cray-pas, vellum, pastels, mosaic tiling—at an absurdly early age.  More than anything, though, it was a school that taught me the value of details. In third grade, for a rainforest diorama, I decided to build a live terrarium. In seventh-grade, I printed a math project as a hemp-bound book on hand-pressed recycled paper. (Looking back, it’s a wonder I had friends.) All that effort was positively reinforced in the school, and I guess that appreciation of detail just stuck. In some ways, this book just feels like a giant UN school project.

Q: What was your first assignment?

A: The summer after my freshman year of college, I was accidentally hired to be the cartographer of a map of all the public art in Manhattan. I was supposed to write the travel guide that accompanied the map, but when I got to my internship the first day, my boss informed me that the map was not yet complete. I spent the whole summer making that map—learning about graphic design, public art, and creative cartography. It was that summer internship that inspired me to start the art project that later becameMapping Manhattan. Instead of being the sole cartographer of a single, giant map of Manhattan, I wanted to have thousands of people make thousands of tiny maps.

Q: What is your favorite part of the creative process? 

A: Talking to people, hearing their stories, seeing someone’s eyes light up when he is asked for the first time in decades about his long-lost Turkish marbling skills. (That’s my favorite by far.) The lonely slog of then synthesizing the material and coaxing it into a shape is, well, less so. Then, that midnight hour after I’ve ingested all the material, when words are flowing and I just feel like a conduit for the information—that’s a close second. My friend and I call it “God mode,” like in video games when you’re allowed to override normal rules and just power through. It’s a magical, mysterious feeling.  

Q: What was the last art exhibition you saw; what did you take away from it?

A: Oh goodness, I want to say it was something at DIA Beacon. I don’t go to as many art exhibits as I’d like, because my predominant experience at an art museum is often one of Experience Envy. I look at other people looking at the art, and I can tell that some visitors are appreciating the art in a physical way that I am only appreciating intellectually.

There are of course some works of art that just, as I say, Ping. Van Gogh pings like crazy (or, as David Foster Wallace would say, “Clicks like a f***ing Geiger counter”), a lot of art with collaged text, unfinished black line sketches. But many times, I’m consumed with wonder about what people are accessing that I’m only observing.

I’m trying to get better about paying attention to my own experience, but in the meantime, this appreciation distance in visual art exhibits, particularly in comparison to my experience reading text or walking through a bookstore, is how I know that words and book design are much more my media—a sentence will halt me or a book design will just be SO right, so perfect, that I feel like I’m accessing what the visual art appreciators are accessing, only just in a language that I understand.

Q: Who and what are some of your biggest influences?

A: Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion and E.B. White for the way they craft their words, the way they turn the patterns in nature into art. As for design, it seems that the stories they inspire me to find demand their own design.

Q: What are some of your favorite blogs/websites for inspiration?

A: Anything with little bits of curiosities that get my brain going: AL daily. Brain Pickings. The New York Times profiles series by Corey Kilgannon: “Character Study”.

Q: Have you ever had a creative block with a deadline looming? What do you do to get crackin’?

A: I go for a run, make a ton of fruit crumble, plug in my computer, and set up for the long haul. I’m only half joking. I work best under extreme pressure and in long stretches and will often manufacture stress in order to get a project done. Recognizing that about myself, and trying to be a little healthier about it, I’ve realized how helpful it is to work with someone else. Working [on my book proposal] with Bonnie Briant, my illustrator friend, was really helpful because our weekly meetings gave me a series of mini deadlines that kept me on track, instead of just skidding toward one big insurmountable one.

Q: What advice would you give to a young designer or writer who is just getting noticed?

A: For a writer who’s drawn to design, I’d recommend working on a project that you love and presenting it in a way that listens to the way the story demands to be told. I think people should consider the format of a story much like they consider its structure. Some stories work as just plain text. Some ask to be apps, some ask to be novels, others, movies.  

I remember for Mapping Manhattan’s book proposal, the proposal wasn’t getting off the ground at first because I was writing it like a regular proposal—as a Word Doc. The maps images were, of course, embedded in the proposal, but simply scanning, cropping and square text wrapping didn’t capture the spirit of the project. I knew that in order to give my story a fair chance of being evaluated, I’d have to make a book proposal that conveyed the experience of the project as the book would eventually. So I took four months and worked with my illustrator friend, Bonnie, to design the book proposal with a specificity of vision that would eventually come to fruition in the book. Not being afraid to insist on a particular presentation for my story was one of the most valuable things I learned over the course of this project.

A book with no true end, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers includes a blank map that invites readers to share their Manhattan and participate in this unconventional public art project. Or you can download the map online and email it to Becky Cooper.

Becky Cooper will be in New York City next Monday, April 29, at the Tribeca Y, and on Thursday, May 16, at powerHouse Arena. Information.