Back in 2009, novelist Katie Kitamura heard Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, on the radio, speaking at his trial at The Hague’s International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. “It was one of those really destabilizing moments,” she told 13 students in Frost Library on a snowy Saturday in February. “I could hear the ego and monstrosity of this person, and I could also hear his incredible rhetorical skill. Something in that moral gray zone grabbed me.”
Kitamura was on campus for the seventh annual LitFest, which also featured Pulitzer Prize winners Natalie Diaz and Viet Than Nguyen; Elizabeth McCracken, who, like Kitamura, was longlisted for a 2021 National Book Award; journalists Vann Newkirk and David Graham; and others.
These writers spoke in Johnson Chapel and sat in on classes. Four of them, including Kitamura, also offered “craft talks” on how they create their narratives—while coaching students on how to make their own stories come alive.
That craft talk is where Kitamura recalled the radio segment, saying it resulted in her novel Intimacies, the unnerving story of an ICC translator. She asked the students in Frost to take five minutes to find a news item that intrigued them, and then consider ways to alchemize it into fiction. They spent the rest of the session workshopping those ideas.