The first map appears.
In 2020, I did a two-week artist residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. I’d submitted a nonfiction project that I’d been working on for a few years, which I kept hitting a wall with. That first night at Banff, I mapped out what those two next weeks would look like: day by day, chapter by chapter. The next morning, I awoke more confused and depleted than ever. In my first 1:1 meeting that day with Gary Barwin, he smiled and softly said: Your only obligation is to be here. He encouraged me to stop mapping everything out. You’re saturated in psychic juice, he said. With this encouragement to let the ink bleed where it wants to, I scrapped that scroll I’d written those two weeks on, and that night, after watching “At Eternity’s Gate,” I stared at a blank sheet of kitakana paper and thirty minutes later, my first bone map appeared.
It began as dreamwork.
In 2020, I drew 200+ of them. It became a tool I did during a state of deep psychoanalysis: drawing from the blank space and analyzing the shapes, sounds, and memories that came up. Sort of like dreamwork. I found the practice so grounding, that I continued drawing them for the next few years, experimenting with different sizes, shapes, and styles. In 2024, I began digitizing them, and in 2025, I started to consider what a project or collection of these bone maps would look like. At the moment, I have drawn 350+, and am at work on a prose-poetry project, which you can see below. This year and next, I’m looking to create large format bone maps, with the hopes of exhibiting them somewhere.
[ bone map ]
The [ bone map ] manuscript is split into five parts, following the five main phases of an archaeology dig: 1) Selecting the site, 2) Conducting research, 3) Excavating the site, 4) Cleaning and cataloguing the artifacts, and 5) reporting the results. At times, it is the first ray of light to touch the collapse of bone and body, memory and mind. Other times, it is the breath of recovering: a blueprint of and for our shadows, the re-collection of debris that settles on the lens of self. The journey of putting it together, after all, is yours.
The beginning: Narrative maps
Long before the bone maps, I was drawing what I called “narrative maps,” as I have always drawn inspiration from the wilderness, from the woods, from Big Nature. Since 2011, I’ve done around 35 endurance trail runs (from 25K to 100K organized races, as well as self-supported 30- to 50-milers). In 2016, after completing the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, a 42-mile self-supported run in the Grand Canyon, someone asked, “What does trail running feel like?” Later that night, during the night-shift at a law firm in NYC, where I worked for 2 years to fund my less-paid pursuits, I put pen to paper. You’ll see that 8.5 x 11” drawing to the right. A week later, on a sheet of Kitakana paper, I recreated the drawing, the route, and the rendering. These maps are not drawn to scale, but the sensation of memory. They are an illustration of what it feels like to move for an extended period of time across land.
Top Trails Seattle
In 2018, the shoe company Hoka went to major cities around the country to film endurance athletes in their natural habitats, both on and off the trails. When they came to Seattle, they featured Bretty alongside Brian Morrison, the owner of Fleet Feet Seattle, previous Race Director for the Teanaway Country 100-Mile Race, and beloved trail runner in the Seattle community. When Bretty moved (back) to Seattle in 2018, he worked at Fleet Feet for six months, which is when this episode was filmed. Below on the left is the video that features just Bretty and his narrative maps, while the video on the right is the full episode — Episode 2 of Season 4 of Top Trails — with Brian, which also features Bretty’s fascination with unwords, and how running fuels writing (and vice versa).
When it comes to running, artmaking, or writing, I always ask myself: what are the conditions I need to create in order to run, in order to create, in order to find a home for an experience in language? Running, writing, and drawing are three types of blank spaces from which I draw life experience into and from.