IF IT MAKES FOR A GOOD STORY, I'M PROBABLY IN. 

That’s been my personal mantra for some time now. I am a collector of experiences and the stories that come from them. Even the most commonplace of situations can become anecdotal superstars with just a mere turn of event, the most fantastic of experiences are always worth it because the story factor is inevitable, and unexpected people and problems and peril are generally positives, in my book—as long as I can live to tell about them, of course.

And, coincidentally, all of my best stories have the same things in common: singular travel, unique situations, and a slight(ly possible) brush with death.

However, while I have (thus far) made it out alive each time, I haven’t done well at keeping the stories themselves alive. I tend to have adventure piled on adventure, with no time allotted to document the previous before another takes its place at the forefront. I fortunately keep a pretty strong record in photography, but become daunted by the overwhelming task of perfectionist writing.

Enter: … CLIFF NOTES

Cliff Notes attempts to solve the problem by only requiring the information in abbreviated form… like, say, Cliffs Notes ™ do. More importantly, though, its mode of storytelling is a joint effort on behalf all my favorite art media: graphic design, illustration, photography, screen printing, letterpress, and bookbinding. And as it turned out… the stories themselves ended up being nowhere written in the piece itself.

Cliff Notes is a brief cartographic anthology of semi-dangerously near-misses. Four stories make up this anthology, connected to each other only in that they happened to the same person (me), resulted in what could be perceived as a possible, if miniscule, brush with death, and require the accompaniment of a map to truly visualize what happened. Oh, and one of them involves an actual cliff.

This project, ultimately, was an exercise in the field of Book Arts, and each story is illustrated, at least in part, by a map—because maps are great couriers of information, are in the endpapers of many of the great books, are actually elements within the stories themselves, and because I love maps. They are actualized through letterpress and screen printing, and then collected within the structure of a non-codex book. The size of the structure is the height and length of a travel book, and each map is presented on dual boards like the case of a hardbound book. The map ‘books’ slide into their box to resemble either the endpages of a book, or when the full structure lies on its side, like the map drawers of a flat file. Minimal information is given about the stories the maps illustrate, so that the full structure and its contents could stand alone for interpretation. There are, however, icons to unify and identify, and within the map books/the compartments of the whole book structure are bookmarks with QR codes to link the viewer directly to the stories.

While this structure is a finished work of art,, the Cliff Notes project remains alive, as I gather, recall, and newly experience more stories worthy of documentation. Semi-dangerously, near-misses, dangerously-near, or 100% safe—the stories deserve to be shared.

Jennie Doezie, 2021