Practice Archives - IALJS: The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies

“Girl Reporter”: Tracking intergenerational trauma through the story of Eva Sommer, the inaugural winner of Australia’s first national journalism prize

In 1956, Eva Sommer, 22, won the first-ever Walkley Award, Australia’s equivalent of the Pulitzers, for her article about a stowaway with amnesia and no identification papers. Sommer discovered he was 26-year-old Jacob Bresler, a Jewish immigrant and Australian citizen, accomplishing in days what the authorities had failed to do in months. But when she…

Jennifer Martin

The priceless happiness that comes with $250

It was the night of a cold winter day—February 6, 2023. I was at home in Eskişehir, Turkey. The night had turned to frost. Suddenly, at 4:21 a.m., the phone rang pathetically. It was very late; I was scared. I felt as if I was about to hear some bad news. The person on the…

Ömer Özer

From the Archives: Dispatches from Centerville, USA

A journalist seeks out the heart(s) of America. We were supposed to be better than this. That thought kept running through my head after the 2016 election. I simply couldn’t believe that the country I was born and raised in, the country that took in my Venezuelan immigrant mother, was really as angry, as caustic,…

Oriana Schwindt

Finding a New Normal

Technology and grit are the keys to pandemic-era narrative nonfiction I am a literary journalist, a narrative nonfiction writer. But I am also, for want of a better term, a “cultural anthropologist without portfolio.” (The “portfolio” I am without is a university degree in that subject.) What I do, what I have done for my…

Lauren Kessler

The Domestication of Disaster

A writer reflects on the challenges of covering environmental catastrophe in longform *Editor’s note: This article is from our archives. It originally appeared in Literary Journalism vol. 15, no. 1 (2021). When my book Hazelwood came out in June last year, it was born into a world much-changed from the one it had been conceived…

Tom Doig

Remote Immersion: The Power of Not Going There

*Editor’s note: This article is from our archives. It originally appeared in Literary Journalism vol. 14, no. 2 (2021). Go there. At least once a semester, I write these words on the white board in my journalism classes. The phrase is meant to get my students away from their screens and out into the world….

Lisa A. Phillips

“Be That It Made Some Contribution”

A veteran literary journalist reflects on the craft and key stories in his new book, The Detective: And Other True Stories Why did I write these stories? That was my first thought when I read the galley for The Detective: And Other True Stories, in which Mike Sager and Alex Belth, both of Esquire lineage,…

Walt Harrington

Bringing Narrative Journalists into the Classroom with “Gangrey: The Podcast”

In the fall of 2012, I was working on a virtual roundtable discussion for the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction focused on how some journalism — narrative specifically — should be considered a form of creative writing. The panel consisted of Ben Montgomery, an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and founder of the website…

Matt Tullis