The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

This session discusses the issues that arise when authors represent foreign spaces in fiction—such as other countries, cities, states, and landscapes—they themselves have not traveled to or are not originally from. We will look to what extent a writer can “know” a place they did not grow up in; we will discuss/write how to deal with the social and factual issues innate to representing unfamiliar territories, sharing observations from our own work and experience. This session will illuminate the sometimes ethically sensitive process of writing about places/people we do not intimately know.