Back in Nancy, France
IALJS Celebrates its 20th Anniversary
By Arson McLaren and Almila Turgut
Université de Lorraine
You are a book, cover worn by decades of being passed from hand to hand. Your pages stained with ink, blood and time. You told their story, those who were displaced, those who suffered, those who were ignored. Your work is unending and necessary; you record every tragedy and each moment of hope in between. You are everyone, everything, everywhere, yet you do not belong.
As a newly printed unread tome, you left Nancy on a worldwide odyssey. You started small: Paris, Stockholm, Uppsala. Not long after, you were soaring into the sunrise towards an awaiting Sydney, watching the plane swerve around Palestine and Iraq on the in-flight map.
You remember the first words ever written in your margins, back in 2006, a gathering of fourteen voices who didn’t yet know they were building the foundations of a home. Their debates over names, meanings, and missions filled your first pages.
Each city, no matter the clime, imparted the same experience. New leaves sprouted on the boughs of the extensive tree you were becoming; new stories carved themselves into your pages; new grime was embedded onto your cover by the various hands that gripped you. You explored the streets and scoured every bookshop for a shelf on which to finally settle.
Balanced on your edge, looking up at the looming high-rise of the literature bookcase, you called out to your fellow tomes.
“Is there a place for me here?”
“No, you are too real,” muttered The Call of Cthulhu. “Begone.”
The corners of your pages folded in shame. You went off towards the journalism section.
“Is there a place for me here?”
“No, you are too fictionalized,” whispered the tomes like a forest in a storm. “Begone.”
In New York, you were left on the pavement, rain soaking through your spine. In Porto Alegre, you were bartered for a coin and forgotten. In Gdańsk, you were mistranslated. In every city, you were promised a home, but were never welcome for long.
In every city, country, continent you travelled through, you received the same responses. Each “you do not belong” cut a little deeper, until you had run out of resolve. Dragging your corners and filled with twenty years of story-shaped testimonies, you boarded a plane back to your origin.
Nancy welcomed you with open arms, listened to your words, and offered you a special shelf for you and your many brothers, sisters and cousins.
You were home, finally.
Home, not a place, but a language. The quiet murmur of pages turning in unison. The shared breath of writers, historians and researchers who had finally found each other – through you.
For a long time, literary journalism was an academic refugee, calling home to any place that would welcome it. It lived, and lives still, on several different shelves of the library and the bookstore, just as it still lives in various university departments throughout the world. Longing for a home of its own, literary journalism – those who write it, those who study it – found a kindred spirit over the years in the IALJS, and, in coming home to Nancy in May 2026 for IALJS-20, it bears witness to the decades of research and researchers (from those living to those we have lost) dedicated to its many forms, its many faces, its many names.
Join us in Nancy for the homecoming celebration!
