Literary Logbook

I was born in Chile, in the port of Talcahuano, in whose seas Melville was inspired to create "Moby-Dick." My land was, for many centuries, the last frontier of the Spanish crown and Chile because beyond it, the brave Mapuche people managed to keep at bay the advance of all invaders. Between my adolescence and my university years, I worked in different professions: car caretaker, clown, nightclub bouncer, and trinket seller, professions that I reported for my desire to know other lives and their stories. I played in a punk-rock band, and I was a terrible actor, an athlete who never ran in a competition, the director of my career magazine, and a freelance protest photographer. I wrote verses in different notebooks of finance, accounting, or taxes, which died buried in a mass grave by those who never wanted to recognize them. I graduated as a chartered accountant with the hope of telling stories, and I invented one on my way to the capital, one where I lived in Santiago for almost twenty years, achieving a prosperous professional career in the leading consulting firms in the country, tax fraud investigator, university professor and speaker at conferences. While doing all that, at night, I wrote with the illusion of a chronically ill person who resorts to an unprescribed medicine to heal. I worked as a freelance at the Ministry of Culture and the Arts, I worked in literary workshops with prominent writers and screenwriters such as Marta Blanco, Nona Fernández, and Marcelo Leonart, and I was part of different independent cultural collectives in Santiago, all to be close to art and not go crazy; if anything, I was no longer crazy. After three years, in 2012, I published my first book of short stories "Ciudad Capital" which received an excellent Literary review and was awarded by the Ministry of Education of Chile. I have been invited to Literary Fairs in Santiago, Viña del Mar, San Francisco (CA) and New York.

 

                                                                                        That guy is me.

 

Now I write in New York, confusing all my stories with the streets of this indescribable city and discovering new ways to talk about this world that every day inspires me to tell what I see and, by the way, not to forget who I am and where I came from.