about laura jane+ immersion
Laura Jane is an accomplished, award-winning journalist with experience in broadcast and print newsrooms. She is an immersive, participatory writer working on a manuscript about the faith-based Sanctuary Movement in the United States.
About Laura Jane
Laura Jane Willoughby is a journalist and nonfiction writer with a portfolio that spans a 20-year-career. Her award-winning journalism has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Howard Magazine, The Post & Courier (Charleston), Capital Gazette Newspapers, Houseboating Magazine, true mag, and several other regional and trade industry publications.
She began her career in broadcast journalism in Charleston, SC and freelanced for the daily paper while still in college. As a print journalist, she has covered business, politics, technology and development. When the news media industry began consolidating, she turned her penchant for telling stories into a successful ten-year career leading non-profit organizations in technology and national security where she sought to diversify both membership and Board of Directors to include more women and people of color, and she helped form the Women in National Security group, which worked on supporting women-owned enterprises in destabilized Middle Eastern countries.
She graduated from the College of Charleston with a B.A. in Media Communications and a minor in Latin American Affairs and holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She speaks Spanish and was on the founding committee for Comunidad Presbiteriana La Trinidad, a Latinx Presbyterian worshipping community that was founded in Maryland. She was born in the Midwest and lives in Maryland.
Immersion Journalism
Immersion journalism definitions are wide-ranging: it is a form of nonfiction writing that is quickly becoming its own genre. It ranges from writers who immerse themselves in a situation, a subculture, or a topic and then document that personal experience to those who maintain an anthropological viewpoint and write from the third person.
The longform nonfiction and book publishing world has exploded with popular titles that combine traditional journalistic writing with the author’s personal experience: Claudine Rankin’s Just Us, Imani Perry’s South to America, Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow, Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist; Suki Kim’s Without You, There is No Us.
Yet even these more recent titles lean in heavily on a shortened form: immersive but briefly, the writer turned traveler in a strange land. There is a discreet beginning, middle, and end, and a time when the largely solitary experience is over.
My particular form of immersion is participatory. Since 2018, I’ve been immersed in the faith-based Sanctuary Movement in the United States, immersing myself in the faith communities accompanying immigrants during several administrative changes at the Presidential level. I spent 2018 and 2019 immersed on the Northern border, several months over 2019 and 2023 immersed at the Southern Border, and more recently immersed in the interior United States. I document my experiences at the side of the faith communities and the immigrants they have helped, ultimately charting a time of great societal and cultural change in the United States.
You can read more about the craft of immersion journalism in my interview with Ted Conover, "Transparency in Journalism Through the 'I'."