Decorative

Stories That Stay With Us

This month we hear from the President of the IALJS, Associate Professor Willa McDonald, as she writes about three works of literary journalism that have had a lasting impact.

A few years ago, a challenge was circulating on social media. Friends were nominating each other to post for seven days about books they loved. Mine was a ragbag collection but it was fun to reflect on writing that left an impact on me. I posted about childhood fiction (Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books turned me into a keen reader), and books that represented important moments in my life (Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as a young adult, Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion during a period I lived in Japan). But three of the most influential books for me were works of literary journalism.

The first was Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) by the American poet and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. The book interweaves three strands — the stories of her mother’s relentless illness with cancer (which one wit described as the slowest death in literature), the increasing environmental damage to the Great Salt Lake that threatened the local birdlife, and the discovery the author made that the fallout from atomic bomb testing in the 1950s had left a deadly impact on the women in her family. It sounds grim but it’s not. It’s a lyrical protest, a hopeful book. Although infused with grief, it is primarily about love for family, friends and the land where Tempest grew up.

No Road (1997) by Stephen Muecke was another important work of literary journalism for me (though he would call it ficto-criticism.) I read this book when I first started full-time in academia. It was eye-opening that something so lovely could be written that combined reflections based in cultural theory on the meanings of belonging and home, with vivid storytelling about the author’s experiences working in remote Australian communities. I read it in one hit, sitting up till 2am, excited and inspired by the possibilities.

The third was Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey, which won’t surprise other IALJS members. It was the subject of a panel at our last conference, IALJS-19. A riveting magazine-series-turned-book, it was devastating in its telling of the aftermath of the nuclear attack on that city at the end of WWII. The armaments race and the threat of nuclear war hung over my growing up in a similar way to the way climate change is hanging over the futures of young people now. Between fears for the environment and the increasing threat of nuclear war, I was pretty much convinced that I wouldn’t live to be an adult – nuclear war or accident seemed inevitable. Somehow, despite all the odds, impossible things changed. By the early 1990s, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

We’re living in dark times at the moment, but it makes me hopeful that maybe something profound will shift this time too. The impact of books like the three I’ve mentioned can’t be measured definitively, but they unarguably provide important models of truth-telling that move people to want to protect the things they love. That seems as good a reason as any to work in this field – to explore literary journalism in formal ways and share its possibilities with the students in our care.

Bio: Associate Professor Willa McDonald researches and teaches creative non-fiction writing and narrative journalism. A former journalist, she is recognised internationally for her research in the field of literary journalism, in particular, Australian literary journalism. For nearly twenty years, she has worked consistently towards the establishment of literary journalism as a discipline of study, in particular identifying its links to democracy and social justice.

Willa’s four books are all in the area, the most recent being the monograph Literary Journalism in Colonial Australia (Palgrave, 2023) and the edited collection Literary Journalism and Social Justice (Palgrave, 2022). In 2015, she co-authored the audio-documentary The Vagabond – Digging the Dirt on Melbourne. Her database of colonial Australian literary journalism is now housed at AustLit, the national online resource for the humanities.

She is a founding editor of the international book series, Palgrave Studies in Literary Journalism, and she is current IALJS President.

 

Willa McDonald


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