A Conversation with Lauren Markham
BY CARLI CUTCHIN
Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the new book Immemorial, out with Transit Books in February, as well as the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and the critically-acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.
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I met Lauren Markham in a Zoom class on the very short essay. She was our teacher, kind, generous, and brilliant. I was her student, a newbie in the creative nonfiction world after working for a couple of decades in academia and university communications. This was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lauren’s class was a bright spot in those boring, frightening days of spring 2020. Each week she’d appear on my screen looking fresh and fashionable, brimming with contagious enthusiasm. In that course, and in a similar class I took in the fall, Lauren introduced me to essayists whose work would shape my burgeoning craft: Luis Alberto Urrea, Mary Ruefle, Sabrina Orah Mark, Pola Oloixarac. I published the two essays I wrote in her classes, including one in the The Cincinnati Review.
Lauren and I kept in touch, and when she asked me to interview her for her new book Immemorial, about the grief of climate catastrophe, I was honored—and intrigued. I’m currently working on a memoir about a more traditional grief experience, parental loss, and I was curious to see how Lauren weaves memoir with meditations on this less talked-about form of mourning, the grief that comes with the vanishing of the planet as we know it.
In this slim, lyrical volume, Lauren rues not just the disappearance of birds and bugs, glaciers and forests, but the paucity of words and customs that would help her contain and understand her grief. “Where do we go to mourn?” Lauren asks in Immemorial’s opening pages. Immemorial is structured like a quest or hunt for a memorial that would serve as a monument to decimated woods and dead whales as well as a space to draw inspiration for the climate fight we must wage. She discovers architect Maya Lin’s monument to dead cedars in Madison Square Park and something called the Future Energy Lab, commissioned by the United Arab Emirates, which allows visitors to sniff plastic tubes containing projected pollution levels up to the year 2034.
Along the way, she interrogates the meaning of memorial itself. Are memorials about the past alone? Can they also be about the future, about imagining a different world? How do we mourn the “abstracted casualties” that come with climate change? What would such a memorial look like, feel like? Immemorial lingers in the succulent realm of inquiry, taking its time to think, and feel, its way to the heart of each question. I recently met with Lauren in my home in Berkeley, California, where she also lives, to talk about hope, action, and the fine line between grief and despair.
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Carli Cutchin: Immemorial will be released in February, born into a new Trump presidency and a chilling policy landscape. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s plans include “revoking limits on planet-warming pollution from cars and power plants, ending a ‘pause’ on new exports of liquefied natural gas, and abdicating America’s leadership role in global climate negotiations.” He’s appointed an “energy czar” to orchestrate these sweeping plans and his pick for secretary of the Department of Energy is the CEO of a fracking company. What are your hopes for Immemorial in such a landscape? Do you see it helping readers grieve, keep hope alive, take action?
Lauren Markham: I think that my personal project with this book, which maybe could be an offering to someone else, is to come into a place of attunement with this grief and awareness of its contours. To figure out a way to metabolize it into something, and that doesn’t necessarily mean metabolize it into an absence of grief, but metabolize it into something that can be worked with, whether toward action or toward greater sensibility to climate change. It’s interesting, my most recent book A Map of Future Ruins is in many ways tangling with a similar question of action. What is right action? How are feeling and action in conversation with each other, and also sometimes in tension with one another?
I am somebody who is temperamentally predisposed to being like, Yeah, feelings, feelings, feelings. What are we going to do about it? What’s the plan? On election night, as results were coming in, I was with a colleague—I work with the Oakland Unified School District on immigration issues—and we were already cooking up a plan: We’re going to get volunteers, we need Spanish-speaking volunteers to do X, Y, and Z, and it’s starting on Wednesday. That feels good to me.
I also think that my skipping straight to action actually skips feeling, you know, it skips the metabolizing of feeling. One of the things I’ve been interested in after the election is how different the pervasive reaction to a Trump presidency is in 2024 than it was in 2016. It’s like, we know this isn’t surprising. It’s upsetting for many of us, but it’s not surprising. I’ve also seen another move, which is, We need to tend to our communities, I’m going make soup for my people, I am going to go inward and into the space of feeling. A lot of public thinkers are like, Feel your feelings, have your grief, be with your people, be with your community. And that makes a ton of sense to me because when not propelled by feeling or contemplation, action isn’t always the right action. It’s just quick action, right? Sometimes we need quick action, but sometimes we need more informed action.
At the same time, I also wonder how much of “We just need to make soup for our people” is cloistering. You can decide not to vote, you can decide not to care, you can decide not to read the news. But you are implicated in climate change and in immigration and in racism because you live in this world, and if you go live in the woods off the grid, maybe you can say you’re not part of the system, but even then, your ability to do that is systemic.
So yeah, I’m really interested in that tension between action and feeling, and I think one of the things this book is trying to parse in focusing on grief is, “How does grief move us toward action? How does grief inflect and reverberate in action, or create action?”
CC: In Immemorial you highlight a tension between grief for what’s been lost—forests, glaciers—and fear for an uncertain—or in a certain sense, all-too-certain—future. It’s as if we’re living in an age where the boundaries between what was and what will be are blurred: Is the melting of all the ice on earth a certainty, so that we must mourn the melting as if it’s already happened? Can we mourn a halfway death, and still have the energy to take necessary action?
LM: Yes. Even if we start reversing the impacts of human-induced climate change tomorrow, there are still these irreversible losses. Many of us on this planet have, willingly or unwillingly, aware or unaware of it, mutated into this space in which the planet is a backdrop. There are the concrete losses: my home will be underwater, my house burned down in a fire. Oh, this landscape that I love, the Joshua trees, the first place I ever went camping, might not be there for that much longer. So, there are these concrete things. But part of the ghostliness of climate grief is like, I haven’t spent much or any time around glaciers, but the fact that they’re vanishing is upsetting and disturbing to me. I know there are species of birds I will have never heard of that are vanishing, or all these insects.
CC: I remember growing up in the Sacramento Valley and going for afternoon drives with my family and afterward the windshield would be caked with bugs. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. But, and I’m being totally honest here, in many ways climate change feels very much an abstraction to me. I’m lucky enough to be insulated from most of its effects, aside from the occasional Bay Area fire.
LM: And here in the Bay Area, it’s like, the smoke is here, but the fire is actually elsewhere, right?
CC: Exactly. So I’m wondering, did you experience a deep early connection to nature? Is there something that happened when you were younger that made the natural world very tangible to you?
LM: I would say, yes. I spent my childhood living mostly in San Francisco, and then my parents would basically drop us off at our grandparents’ in Maine. I mean, they’d be there too, but sometimes not, depending on the year. And we would spend our summers on an island with no electricity and no cars and no TV. And I do think that was a foundation. It was sort of an ideal childhood because I got six to ten weeks every summer of being not fully off-grid but pretty much, and then I got to live in a city, a progressive city, and that was a very lucky childhood. So this attunement happened early. I will also say that I too feel climate change as an abstraction. I do not walk around feeling climate change most of the time. And so I structured this book to understand the encounters that sort of jolted me out of abstraction into awareness of loss and the grief that comes with that.
But the fact that the grief isn’t constantly or consistently felt is actually a shadow of the grief, a dimension of the grief. Part of the grief is like, Oh my God, I need to be feeling this more often, I need to be more alive to this feeling all the time. And also, I don’t want to feel like this at all.
CC: That’s the guilt question: What do we do with climate guilt?
LM: I think guilt can sometimes be a dimension of grief. Though politically, it can be pernicious. There is so much we individuals can and must be doing. There are so many structural dimensions to climate change. We can recycle and reuse our jars as much as we want, and that is all very good. [Lauren lifts the repurposed peanut butter jar filled with water I’ve given her.] And also, you know, if Rex Tillerson is going to be Secretary of Energy our jars aren’t going to do much. What is the line between guilt as propulsive and alive-making, something to investigate and understand, and guilt as a shutting-down mechanism? Or, as a deflection mechanism from the actual problems?
CC: If we feel guilty, then we’re absolved! We met our guilt quota for the day.
LM: Yeah, or, I’m so guilty, I don’t want to ever think about climate change again. Or, I’m so guilty I’m going to self-flagellate. Actually, what needs to happen is like, we move off fossil fuels, you know?
CC: I’m thinking of this beautiful idea you cite of a “second body.” According to Daisy Hillyard, we possess a first self that eats, sleeps, and goes about daily life, and then there’s a second self that “has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” As you put it, we “inhabit both bodies at once—the implicated and the innocent.” It’s a frightening concept in the sense that the second body doesn’t always behave well. But I also found the idea beautiful, poetic: We live beyond ourselves, enmeshed in an ecological web of otherness.
LM: Daisy Hillyard says, and this is not a quote, all of us have a body we’re walking around in, and then there’s the body that is out causing monsoons wherever, and killing whales, and, you know, creating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The fact of the second body is that some of us have bigger second bodies than others. And those of us who live in the Global North and more industrial societies, in wealthier societies, tend to have much bigger second bodies. What I love about her framework is that by making climate change embodied, by locating it in the body, she de-abstracts it. It’s not just about impact. It’s about imagining another self that’s going around causing trouble elsewhere, little innocent old me who is, like, sorting my recycling and composting and planting tomatoes in Berkeley.
One of the reasons I was so interested in memorial is because memorials are embodied, physicalized structures meant to hold grief and mourning. That was helpful as a framework for trying to understand, “What do I do with this? Where do I put this?” And not to say that a memorial then fixes climate change, but memorials give us some instruction on how we might metabolize grief so that we can continue to operate and hopefully be attuned to the impact of our bodies. And how to shift like, global capitalism. [Laughs]
CC: Reading Immemorial, I realized there are actually quite a number of such memorials already.
LM: It was really exciting for me to go on a hunt to find them. The hunt started out like, “Could there be memorials to climate grief?” and then became, “Oh, actually there are a lot of these, and some are more explicitly memorials to climate grief or the impacts of climate change, and others could be framed that way or felt that way by particular viewers or interrogators.” [Vietnam War Memorial architect] Maya Lin had one really remarkable one that I got to see in New York City called Ghost Forest. She brought all these dead cedars into Madison Square Park in Manhattan. And so it was this very bizarre thing of the dead cedars being among living trees. There was this uncanny feeling of, “I’m in a forest but I’m not.”
CC: Speaking of second bodies, your pregnancy and baby make cameo appearances in Immemorial. You’re pregnant when you travel to Mexico and see scores of dead pufferfish washed on the beach; when you tell the author Rebecca Solnit you’re pregnant, she says, “You’re choosing the future.” Can you talk a little about working on this project at the same time you were bringing a human into the world? One thing I noticed is that you never get sentimental talking about your pregnancy or your baby; they’re just facts you allude to, facts that matter but don’t overwhelm the project.
LM: I felt really strongly that I had no new arguments or insights to offer on the question, What does it mean to have a child in a climate crisis? I resist the notion that when we have children, now things really matter. You know what I mean? Now I’m going to have a child who might not have fresh air to breathe. There are already children who are not going to have fresh air to breathe. Truly, I do not feel different about climate change having a child. It’s the same issues, just slightly more swollen.
I’m glad I didn’t come across as sentimental because that’s the trap of writing anything related to being a mother, or anything about children. It’s either twee or overly sentimental, or you feel as though you’re obscuring it entirely to play the boys’ game. That’s an unfair trap, but I don’t even know if I felt ensnared by that trap. It was just like, I don’t have anything different to offer here.
CC: We were talking about contemplation versus action. When you’re pregnant, you do have to slow down.
LM: You really have to. Before I got pregnant I quit my job of eleven years to just write, which I hadn’t ever done. I’d been trying to get pregnant for almost two years, and then it was only a month after I quit my job I was pregnant, which was wild. I wasn’t working, so that over-focus I had on action, I didn’t have anywhere to put that but in my writing. I think I was detoxing from all of that over-focus on action. Meanwhile, I was incredibly nauseous during the entire pregnancy. I had to lay down a lot and take a lot of naps. There was a way that contemplation both got foggier and more urgent because that was what I could do from bed, contemplate or, you know, sleep. The other thing that pregnancy did was make me be a person in a body, which I tend to avoid as much as possible. I like being a mind and using my body to enact my mind. [Laughs]
CC: I was reading Immemorial at a Berkeley café and an older man sitting next to me leaned over and asked, “Are you reading in French?” I immediately understood he thought this not because he saw the words, which are obviously in English, but because of the slimness of the volume: The French love short books. Can you tell me how this short format came about, and about Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series?
LM: Transit is a very small but growing publisher that started out primarily translating literature or publishing literature from outside the United States. The press started because of a real awareness of how many incredible books are being written elsewhere that aren’t necessarily making it to the U.S., in part because of the hegemony of the Big Five publishing agencies. They’re commissioning some original novels now, but the Undelivered Lectures series is their first nonfiction project. I think maybe because they do so much work in translation, they see more of these books in smaller forms, that space that’s longer than a magazine article but shorter than a three hundred page novel. I too find this length really exciting. Because it can go really deep. It feels momentous, but also it’s this slim volume that is delightful to hold. You can read it in one sitting, but it’s not a blip of a reading experience.
CC: Yeah, there’s this lightness to the book itself, an almost ecological lightness.
LM: Exactly. It was interesting because this is a book I proposed to them. I knew my range of space, and I’d never written into that range of space before. This is about, I think, twenty-five or thirty thousand words. I’ve written either ten thousand word magazine stories or one hundred thousand word books. So this was a new space for me that was really delightful to be inside.
