Storyworld evoked by hand-drawn maps

This article-as-narrative tells a story about the creation and interpretation of story space through hand-drawn maps and narration. The focus of the narrative is on video-recorded storytelling during a coffee-table encounter and on how it is reshaped and transformed in the process of analysing it. Attention in the analysis is paid to the maps that one of the interlocutors, an aphasic man, has drawn, and the role of multimodal and multisemiotic aspects of narration and the design of mutual understanding. We use the approach of narration-in-interaction to explore storyworlds that are anchored on the one hand in the face-to-face storytelling and on the other hand in the life histories and landscapes of the interlocutors. The article moves between different scenes (home, university and town) and shows how different places evoke different storyworlds, thereby unveiling the multiplicity of space. We show how the graphic lines (the maps) in the notebook turned out to be a success story about how mutual understanding is gained with a few words, drawn pictures, and lots of imaginative artfulness of people who face the challenges of language impairment in their everyday lives. The narrative in this article ends up pondering the connections between spatial frames, spaces of narration, and storyworlds through concepts of literal and metaphorical space.