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Dissonance [1]

Creative Nonfiction [2]
7.15.21

“There’s a real cognitive dissonance as a person in the world,” says Katie Kitamura in an article by Brandon Yu for the New York Times [3] on the inspiration for writing her new novel, Intimacies (Riverhead Books, 2021). “Your consciousness can only accommodate so much, and certainly it’s been incredible to me how I can simultaneously be very worried about the state of democracy and also thinking, has the turkey gone off?” The novel introduces readers to the mind of a language interpreter at The Hague confronting a moral ambivalence about a former president on trial for war crimes, while simultaneously grieving the loss of her father. Inspired by Kitamura’s character, write an essay in which you recount a time you faced moral ambivalence about a situation. What two seemingly disparate realities were you balancing at once?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/dissonance_2

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/dissonance_2 [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/creativenonfiction [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/books/katie-kitamura-intimacies.html