Writing regional fiction: a cultural geographer’s first-hand account

ABSTRACT

In this first-hand account, a geographer describes his experience in writing and publishing his first work of fiction. He outlines the process involved in identifying and re-examining narratives from real people, and discusses how he configured these into an award-winning novel that amounts to an alternate viewpoint of what transpired in Chile's Atacama Desert in the politically tumultuous early 1970s. In addition to credibly portraying historical events and actively engaging varied voices, he notes that capturing the character of place – its landscape, economy, and inhabitants – is essential in writing regional fiction. This transformational experience led him to the conclusion that fiction can reveal deeper truths than non-fiction.

KEYWORDS:

• Atacama desert
• Chile
• cold war
• copper mining
• fiction writing
• landscape description
• political revolutions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Richard V. Francaviglia, Imagining the Atacama Desert: A Five-Hundred-Year Journey of Discovery (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018).

2 Luz María Méndez Beltrán, La Exportación Minera en Chile 1800–1840: Un estudio de la historia económica y social en la transición de la Colonia a la República (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2004).

3 United States Senate, Covert Action in Chile – 1963–1973: Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1975).

4 Negley Farson, Transgressor in the Tropics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938) p. 295.

5 Hernán Rivera Letelier, El Vendedor de Pájaros (Santiago, Chile: Alfaguara – Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2014).

6 Lake Sagaris, Bone and Dream: Into the World’s Driest Desert (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

7 Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America (San Francisco: Analytical Club of San Francisco, 1995), p. 85.

8 Richard Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama (Newport and Bend, OR: Dancing Moon Press, 2019; available from Amazon.com books); p. 7.

9 Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama, p. 29.

10 Isaiah Bowman, Desert Trails of Atacama; Special Publication No. 5 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1924).

11 Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama, p. 114.

12 William E. Rudolph, Vanishing Trails of Atacama (New York: American Geographical Society, Research Series No. 24, 1963).

13 Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama, p. 156.

14 Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama, p. 56.

15 Collected Verses of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1915), pp. 18–22.

16 Francaviglia, The Enchantress of Atacama, p. 58–59.

17 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (New York: New Directions Books, 2017), pp. 120 and 121.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Francaviglia

Richard Francaviglia (PhD University of Oregon, 1970) is a cultural and historical geographer who has an enduring interest in how places are depicted in literature and film. In addition to a long academic career, he served as a manager of environmental and community development planning programs in southeastern Arizona (1979-1984). He is Professor Emeritus (University of Texas at Arlington) and now lives in Salem, Oregon, where he is an Associated Scholar at Willamette University. His current book project focuses on the ways in which Latin American exploration-discovery narratives are depicted in film.