“When a system collapses, language is released from its moorings.” I happened upon this quote, originally written by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, in Lauren Markham’s new book-length lecture, Immemorial (Transit Books, 2025). Markham’s book is a slim, wandering treatise on memorials: their architectures, their uses, their impossibilities, and the role they might play in the face of current and yet-to-come ecological catastrophe. It is a book set in many places—Ljubljana, Athens, Oakland, DC—and many tenses—the simple past, the present perfect, the subjunctive, both the simple and conditional future. It is also a book full of the voices of strangers—a cadre of writers and thinkers who pass through like ghosts, who counsel and orient Lauren across her 136 pages.
I met Lauren Markham five years ago, on the campus of a public high school in Oakland where we both worked at the time. She was running programs for the school by day, writing a book on the crisis of xenophobia and state-sponsored anti-immigrant violence in Greece by night. It was August of 2020. The school operated almost entirely on Zoom. Markham and I met each week in a ghostly school courtyard to pack and deliver boxes of food to students’ homes. I admired her chimeric life, her impeccable time management skills, and her unrelenting ability to cleave room for abstraction in the midst of life’s bustle and minutiae. Some years later, these are the very features I admire in her book: a book that flits between reporting and memoir and vernacular theory, a book that houses many overlapping wagers, a book that thoroughly and intrepidly seeks—against all odds—to manage the unwieldy and folded time frames of eco-disaster.
Markham and I spoke on Sunday, January 16, just days after the multiple fires broke out in the larger Los Angeles area. I’d planned, that afternoon, to drive from my partner’s home in Berkeley to my own home in East Los Angeles, but the fires upended my travel. We drank two large pots of tea, sitting across from one another at a wooden picnic table, the sky perfectly blue. The crisis was both near and far, a condition Markham knows well and is ever prepared for. She is a writer who carries a telescope in one hand and a microscope in the other. We spoke about the making of Immemorial, the promises and trappings of language, her career, and the many crossroads we face in our planetary crisis. The following is a condensed and glossed version of our conversation.
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The Rumpus: This book is about climate change and its attendant linguistic dilemmas. It is also about memorialization. We’re speaking in the midst of the Los Angeles fires. One adjective I’ve noticed being passed around a lot in the wake of the fires is “biblical.” I wonder what you make of that term’s proliferation as of late.
Lauren Markham: The use of the word biblical acknowledges—whether intentionally or not—the fact of linguistic wear in the face of climate change. It suggests, effectively, that the images we see of Los Angeles can’t be from the world in which we live now, though, of course, they are. That they’re mystical, that they’re from another time, a godly time, that they’re associated somehow with an imaginary. Even if you believe in the Bible, the word still connotes a distance from our real lives, from our landscapes. The word implies a different place and time and proportion than we can manage in our minds.
Climate change is an abstraction. The effects of climate change are always an abstraction, in part, unless they’re happening right in front of you. But what’s interesting in this particular case is how steeped LA is in the cultural imaginary. Even if you don’t know anyone from LA, your Instagram feed is full of celebrities talking about escaping from their homes. And there’s a way that we always feel like we know celebrities, even though we don’t know them.
Rumpus: Your book is full of quotations and references.Can you speak about your relationship to citation and literary cross-contamination? What can these modes offer us in a time of climate crisis?
Markham: This book has far less narrative inside of it than my other two books. It is a book of ideas and a book of questions. As a young writer, I always felt the pressure to offer answers of my own in my writing. Now, being a little farther on, I’m much more interested in what I don’t know or what I’m at a loss to know. I’m interested in moving toward other thinkers, especially disparate thinkers, and putting disparate thinkers in contact, like a theorist of memory, a cell biologist, an artist who digs holes in the dirt for our grief, a person who writes about the perils of language, a scholar of the classical era. I really love citing people who would never be in the same room together. I think that’s really fun. Writing a book like this one is like making a room and inviting all these people to a dinner party together. People who would never find themselves in the same room normally. That’s fun to me. Even if it can be an awkward dinner party at times!
In the case of Immemorial, eventually I ended up creating a collage of voices, a collage which became something completely whole unto itself. This book is full of wormholes, wormholes you can fall into and then return from, and hopefully return with some ideas or elements that tend to the large looming question I had at the book’s outset: How do we grieve the future? There’s a problem in that question, a syntactical problem and a psychological one too.
I just feel we can’t keep looking at climate change the same way. And in this book, I think I’m trying to look under the issue, or look at it through a side door.
Rumpus: Can you tell me more about that side door?
Markham: I can say that this isn’t a book about climate policy. This is a book about climate grief. It’s not even a book about our failure in the face of climate change. It’s a book about the feeling of the failure. Maintaining that focus was really hard for me. Hard, in part, because I’m an action junkie! Not in the way of, like, I need to go skydiving, but because I’m always thinking, in the face of any problem: “What the fuck are going to do about it?” This book has helped me to pause. To ask: “What do these feelings feel like? What do they mean? What do they amount to? What do we do with them? And how might figuring out what we do with them be an important conduit for the right action?”
I feel increasingly in my life that action and feeling must be in a dance. I’m interested, most of all, in spiritually animated action.
Rumpus: You’re the mother of a two-year-old girl, and you just returned from a reporting trip in Greece with your daughter and mother. I’d been planning to ask you a question about motherhood and writing and climate change, something about how being a mother tilts or tints your sense of these predicaments. But then I wasn’t sure whether to ask it because I wondered if questions about being a writer and a mother can become redundant and annoying.
Markham: I’m sure there are annoying questions about writing and motherhood, but I don’t get them. I think really famous people get them. Like the “How do you do it?” kind of questions. “How are you going to keep reporting now that you’re a mother?”
Rumpus: Right. Questions no one would ever ask a father.
Markham: Exactly! But no, I think it’s totally fair to ask me a question about motherhood, for one, because we’re friends, and also because it’s in the book.
Rumpus: Ok, well I really loved those parts in the book where you let us see your daughter Cleo’s first engagements with language. You tell us the order that she learns words in: first objects, then desires, then emotions. So maybe one initial question is, where is she at these days in her naming of the world?
Markham: It’s so interesting, she’s not just learning the names for things anymore, she’s learning how things happen. One night, in Greece, I took her for a walk by the Acropolis. It was all lit up, and she points and says, “That’s the Parthenon.” I said, “Yes!” I think my mom must have taught her that during the day while I was out reporting. But then she said something else. She said, “It’s . . . old.” Another time, I was home, and I told Cleo that we should make some banana bread. But I didn’t know [if] we had any bananas. Then I found some. Then she said to me, “You bought those bananas, right?” She’s just so interested at the moment in how things work, not just what things are but how things are. And it’s so fascinating for me as someone interested in language but also interested in knowledge. Interested in how we amass knowledge. At later ages in life, we end up learning so many things through osmosis. We forget, or we don’t know in the first place, how we know what we know. So it’s great to see her in the process of coming to know things. It’s a great reminder, really.
Rumpus: In the book, your mentor Rebecca Solnit, upon learning you are having a baby, says, “You’re choosing the future.” Has your outlook on climate change shifted now that you’re a mother?
Markham: Honestly, I don’t have a different relationship to climate change or climate grief now that Cleo is here. I just don’t. I’m confused about why I don’t, but I don’t. I think I have the same outlook that I’ve always had. Maybe it’s because I was already so preoccupied with the future. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked for so long at a high school and have always had young people in my life who I care about. But I don’t know. My base outlook hasn’t changed. I’ve always carried some amount of Pollyanna in me, massive cynicism with a dash of Pollyanna—that’s who I’ve always been.
Rumpus: In your book, you write that “For as much as everyone on planet Earth is vulnerable to climate change, we are unequally protected and exposed, and unequally responsible.” One of my biggest grievances with the recent proliferation of climate literature is that it addresses the crisis from the standpoint of an undifferentiated and uninterrogated “I” or “We.” This feels very dangerous to me, given it seems we’re heading into a period of climate apartheid.
Markham: What you’re saying makes me think of this totally brutal, really affecting, completely spot on—if a bit overstated—line from a review by Brandon Taylor: “In my less charitable moments, it felt as though we’ve reached a point in our culture where the pinnacle of moral rigor in the novel form is an overwhelmed white woman in a major urban center sighing and having a thought about the warming planet or the existence of refugees.”
It’s a common book these days. It’s a very domestic book, in a way, a book whose crisis is interior. Where the horrors of the world are vague, always relegated to the book’s backdrop. It begs the question: How can we make climate change, in literature, not merely an excuse for catharsis? By that I mean not merely a vehicle or vessel for feeling but something that has material consequence—not simply abstract. One book I love that does this superbly is American War by Omar El Akkad. It’s set in a speculative future, a future in which the southeastern United States is totally underwater. The book imagines into how that circumstance plays out socially: the borders that are drawn and the particular violence that ensues.
Anyway, I think what you said about climate apartheid is absolutely correct. We’re going to have to buy our safety, our livelihood. I mean, isn’t that already the logic of capitalism? Everything eventually becomes something you have to buy.
Rumpus: One of the most moving moments for me in all of your writing is from an essay you wrote years ago about writerly recognition and accolade. You write about being a young writer without any books, going into bookstores and placing your finger where your future book could be found on the shelf, “Jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías.” I wonder how your relationship to literary achievement has changed in the years between then and now. I also wonder what that young writer finding her space on the bookshelf might think if she were able to see who you are today.
Markham: There’s something so delightful about this book, something really different from my other ones. Maybe it’s that [Immemorial] is coming out with an indie publisher—there’s no advance and so little money at stake. There’s something freeing about all that, and every reader it finds feels kind of exciting and miraculous to me. It’s a delight for this book, my third book, to really not be a commodity book. Yes, it’s something people can buy, but that’s not its primary job in the world. The lack of pressure to sell feels like a massive gift to myself at this point in my writing life. My other two books were with Big Five publishers, and there’s just a different set of commercial expectations there. A major problem arises when the value of a book, or the worthwhileness of a book, becomes measured against how many people bought it. It’s a false preoccupation, one I’ve fallen prey to in my own writing life. So it’s nice to feel totally free of that in the case of Immemorial.
I have a new nonfiction project in the works, an education related book, which is honestly completely fucking different than everything I’ve ever written. Then there’s my novel—I’ve always wanted to write a novel. I’ve been told before that, for any writer, readers need to be able to track what you’re doing and why across books. Your new work has to fall on a visible continuum with the work you’ve already put out. There’s always this pressure to market oneself, to create one narrative about yourself as a writer. There’s always this pressure to think about where your books fit on the bookshelf. I was at Pegasus Books the other day, and all their nonfiction is divided up, like this is a Social Issues book, this is an African American Studies book. I think overcategorization is one of the perils of nonfiction writing. And the shittiness of “nonfiction” as a term, the shittiness of the way we’ve named our umbrella. Although, I don’t have any better ideas [laughs]. But there’s a way that all these books, the ones I’ve written and the ones I hope to write, would end up in completely different sections.
The Rumpus: Which is cool!
Markham: Yes, it is cool! But some people would think of it as a liability in the marketplace.
Anyway, in terms of my younger self, I don’t know, I just feel really lucky to have the life I have. Yes, I have other jobs outside writing, jobs I actually enjoy doing, which feels lucky too. But if you had told me long, long ago that one day I would be writing books about migration, about climate change, books that are also aesthetically challenging, honestly, I would be psyched.
The Rumpus: It seems like you’re saying that it’s good, even necessary, for artists to veer and drift, to not simply churn out the same stuff over and over. It makes me think of a question a Professor posed to me once: Imagine if Juan Rulfo had tried to write a sequel to Pedro Páramo?
Markham: You know I’d never read that book, Pedro Páramo. And then one day recently I picked it up at Green Light. You know when you walk into a bookstore, and there’s a book there that’s glowing? That always happens to me at Green Light, in Brooklyn, maybe because I’m always there outside the norm of my life. I decided to cancel all my meetings that day and just read the book on the subway. The novel came to me cosmically. I felt I needed to quit my life until I was done with the book. All I could do was read it. And then, I lost it! I lost it with twenty pages to go. I don’t know where it is. It’s tragic! I feel like part of me has been inhabiting Rulfo’s mournful ghost town since that day, walking around there shouting, “Where’s my mother?” “Where’s my book?”
Rumpus: Well, I think you should never get another copy. You should never finish it!
Markham: I know! That’s what I’ve wondered. I have something similar with that book of Lucia Berlin stories. I didn’t read the last two stories in the book, and I still haven’t read them. I loved the book so much, I just knew I needed to save them. It’s been six years, and I still haven’t read the stories.
Rumpus: Years ago, when we worked together, you gave me an old copy of Housekeeping by Marylinne Robinson. You wrote something inside it, something to the effect of: “I’m very jealous that you get to read this book for the first time, an experience which I’ll never have myself again.” There’s a loss that comes with completion. It reminds me of Tomaž Šalamun’s death mask, which you write about in your book, a mask of his face his wife made when he was dying, which memorializes his life by casting the outline of his absence. It is a memorial made of negative space. Circling back to the Los Angeles fires, a strange part of me hopes that they don’t rebuild everything that was burned. That they don’t just promptly reerect all of the mansions. That they leave some remnant of the char. That they leave a memorial.
Markham: Yes. How can memorials say, “Come here and face the ashes”? There’s one memorial to the Rwandan genocide, Ntarama, made by a group of the genocide’s survivors, which essentially is just a scattering of bones the community decided should be left where they were found. Not to collect them and put them somewhere. You walk around the memorial and there are just skeletons. You are forced to face catastrophe, as opposed to an arrangement or rearrangement of catastrophe. Catastrophe itself.
Rumpus: It sounds like you are gesturing toward incompletion as both an aesthetic and political ethic. And, well I hope this doesn’t insult you because it’s not meant to be an insult at all, but I think this book is a much more incomplete book than your other two books. I mean that in a good way, in a virtuous way.
Markham: Thank you. I’m not insulted. Yes, I agree. Perhaps the ultimate memorial is just letting the lost object be. The lost landscape. Letting the open wound remain.
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Author photograph courtesy of Lauren Markham
