Laura Coffey went on a quest to find the real-life islands that inspired the wanderings of Homer’s epic hero, Odysseus I always have to turn maps around to figure out where I am, much to the disdain of my sister-in-law, who studied geography at Oxford. The correlation between what a map shows and what I see in the physical world is something my brain puzzles with. I’m often lost, taking wrong turns in every sense. I can never seem to remember the official names of things, I’m never quite sure where north is and fail spatial awareness tests. The bend in the green river I love most doesn’t seem to me anything like the way it’s drawn on the map. The way I navigate is by landscape and memory, the remembrance of the twist of a certain road, the shape a fallen tree has made, the things I saw and did, … Continue reading Mapping the myth: In search of Homer’s enchanted islands