I hope these two images from show how before there were roads, making a human map of the landscape…

Near Hellisnes by Fjaðrárgljúfur

…there were lavas and rivers …

… making a map at once spiritual and far beyond the human. Traversing them, each journey is its own map, or, to put it another way, every journey is a story, passed on as story. An ideal writing conference in Iceland would go to the heart of this kind of storytelling. All else follows, or leads away.