Between 2022–2024, I held guided walks for about 300 local grades 3 and 4 students from Beachy Cove Elementary. These walks included multidisciplinary artists doing sited performances in relation to the terrain and the Blast Hole Pond River.

On the walks, each class experienced a different art form. These included readings of site-specific nature poetry by myself and performances by these multidisciplinary artists: Katie Baggs, singer-songwriter on guitar and ukulele; Christine Carter, clarinet and moose horn; Jack Eastwood, shadow puppets of local wildlife; Florian Hoefner, accordion and percussion; Don McKay, nature poetry and moose horn; Louise Moyes, contemporary dance; Matthew Roome, saxophone; and Laura Temple, natural history.

Immediately after the events, the children sat at tables to each draw a memory map of their walk. These memory maps are apparently a simple notion, but they contain the diversity of the children’s ways of thinking, resulting in astonishingly different representations of the same place. They capture each child’s perceptions, fusing both outer and inner experiences, revealing what aspects they found most memorable.

What were the factors that affected what they internalized and remembered? Was it just because something was there and they saw it? Was it because of the performances by the other artists who animated the site? Was it something they learned on the walk, like some natural history? Was it a story that directed their attention to something I told them had happened there? Or a site-specific poem that was read to them? Was it because of the activities in which they participated in the forest and with the river? Was it the weather and the blackflies? All of these experiences contributed to the details they drew on their memory maps, reflecting the interplay between their multi-sensorial perceptions and linguistic modes of consciousness. Their memory map drawings are many intersecting concepts: part cartography, part art, and part personal reportage.

One of the students described the process of drawing a memory map perfectly. She said, “My pencil is me. I’m walking the path. I hike my way through my imagination.”

Marlene Creates, 2025

Walking and Memory Mapping, with essays by Maleea Acker, Diane Collier, Marlene Creates, Sophie Anne Edwards, Tom Greeves, Don McKay, Blake Morris and Clare Qualmann, published by Memorial University Press in 2026.