Peter Turchi: A Rigorous Geometry; or, Erathosthenes, Kundera, and You (July 2002)

The world of the story, Peter Turchi explains, exists just off the page; the story is the map of that world, and maps rely on geometry. While most stories don’t conform precisely to figures like Freitag’s triangle, writers can learn from geometry, Turchi suggests; in this lecture, he considers what the language of geometry and the distorting formulas of map-makers can offer to fiction-writing, drawing on work by Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edgar Allen Poe, among others, for examples.