Immemorial - Paperback

by Lauren Markham (Author)

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

"Markham delivers a probing meditation on grief, memory, and memorialization... Plaintive and powerful, this is hard to forget."--Publishers WeeklyA speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms."I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost--a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come? In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative--the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park--in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create "a psychic space for feeling" while spurring action and agitating for change?

Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Author Biography

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.