Lauren Markham on the Use and Limitations of Language to Describe Disaster

I’ve known Lauren Markham’s writing since her first book, The Faraway Brothers, came out in 2017. Then, a couple years ago, I got to know her a bit more as a person when a friend emailed the two of us and another writer to ask our thoughts on writing (and teaching) journalism versus memoir or personal essay. The ensuing conversation, emailed back and forth between the four of us over a few months, was generous and lively and, for me at least, clarifying. It also left me wanting to read more from Lauren.

I was in luck. Last year, Lauren published her second book, A Map of Future Ruins, which manages to be both rigorously reported and meditative, and this month she has a third book out, Immemorial. Slim in size, it was nonetheless a sustaining read, one made all the more so by the chorus of voices that accompany Markham’s: Maya Lin on making places, CA Conrad on grief and ritual, Rebecca Solnit on choosing the future. I picked it up in early January, amid news of the fires in Los Angeles, and later texts from friends fleeing their homes. After I finished, I reach out to Lauren with questions. We wrote back and forth, her from her home just north of the fires in Berkley, and me, a little to the east, in Phoenix.

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Sarah Viren: I wondered if we could start by talking about the series your book is part of: the Undelivered Lecture series from Transit Press. A number of remarkable books have come out of that series, including yours, and I’m captivated by the framing, the way it implies that many writers, or maybe all of us, have a potential undelivered lecture stored up somewhere inside. How did you find your way to this series and how did that framing inform or inspire Immemorial?

Lauren Markham: I first learned about Transit Books when Brad Johnson, the owner of East Bay Booksellers, hand-sold me a copy of Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic, a totally remarkable book of essays that is part journalism, part criticism, and part personal narrative that probes questions of agency and guilt. (East Bay Booksellers burned down in a fire last year; they’ve just reopened, and I really encourage everyone near and far to buy books from them!) Brad assured me I would love the book (he was right) and that it was published by a new Bay Area press that was “doing really amazing things.”

I loved the book and began following the press and what it was up to. I then learned about the Undelivered Lecture series—these short nonfiction books the press was beginning to publish—when I met Namwali Serpell at a cocktail party and she told me about the series, and the project she was working on for it (Stranger Faces, another banger, which came out in 2020).

I was captivated by the idea of the Undelivered Lecture: these small, compact volumes that are substantially longer than a magazine article but also substantially shorter than most nonfiction books. I do think most of us have a lecture in us: some burning obsession or question we want to mull, or the fruits we’ve gathered while venturing deep into a rabbit hole. But I think what most drew me to the series was the possibilities of this middle length. I’ve written dozens of 6,000-word magazine pieces, and two 100,000-ish word books. What would it look like to make something in the middle? It was a new formal engagement for me, a new container.

SV: Axiomatic is one of my favorite nonfiction books, so I love that connection. But also that the formal constraints of an “undelivered lecture” helped shape this book. Immemorial reads very much like a book-length essay, and yet structurally there was also something story-like in its construction. There were two ticking clocks of a sort: one your pregnancy and expected birth, a subject you return to throughout the narrative, but the other the currently unfolding climate disaster. Can you talk a little bit about how you structured Immemorial but also how you thought about time, both in real life and as it exists within the essay itself?

LM: I think so much about structure, in large part because structure tends to confound me. There’s no predetermined structure; you have to figure out what best serves the work you are making. My first book, The Far Away Brothers, was a narrative journey. I figured out the structure pretty early on: we start at a moment of great tension in these people’s lives, travel back in time, and then catch up with that first section about halfway through. Each chapter was punctuated by a short dispatch from some fulcrum of violence or difficulty for Central Americans moving northward toward and then into the US. The narrative nature of the book determined its structure.

But both Immemorial and my last book, A Map of Future Ruins, are books animated by questions and ideas more than they are by narrative. Questions can be dynamic and propulsive, but only if the structure of a book allows them to be. So one needs to come up with a structural conceit. Because I was pregnant at the time of writing the first draft of Immemorial (I actually handed it in three days before my due date), I was noticing the ticking clock of pregnancy, and the narrative inherent in the waiting. So that found its way into a book. The pregnancy was a timeline that the book’s far-reaching preoccupations could graft to. The same went with the unfolding timeline of the climate itself—all these repetitions of disaster, taking new yet resonant forms.

Then, finally, there’s a structural conceit related to language. One of the book’s preoccupations is the failures of language in the climate emergency. Language either gets stale from overuse, or simply hasn’t caught up to the mutations of the world around us. So a thread in Immemorial about my attempt to find a word to describe my desire to memorialize what hasn’t yet been destroyed, but may be, or is likely to be, in the future. The quest was a genuine one, and any quest makes for a narrative, which offers structure (the question of what happens next? propels us forward).

The book travels a lot of places and asks a lot of searching, earnest questions. What container can hold it all at once? My job, it seemed to me, was to identify these narratives, however slight, that provided a sense of structure to such a book.

SV: A component of that quest involves you thinking through examples of other physical memorials—for past wars, for children killed by gun violence, for disappearing glaciers—but also a meditation on the word “memorial” itself. You joke at one point that your immersion in the study of memorials meant you were seeing them everywhere, including potentially in a half-used tube of toothpaste. What does that word evoke for you now? How did this project change your understanding of memorials as places but also acts?

LM: I have had a lifelong fascination with memorials, ever since my dad forced my brother and I to visit Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial when I was in middle school. It was like the coldest day of the year and I was so grumpy. But then I just stood in front of this block of black, reflective stone on which were carved thousands of names, and found myself totally overcome. I was in no mood to be moved; I knew very little about that war; I had been given no framework to understand the space we’d entered into other than as some sort of history lesson my dad felt us California kids needed at the time. All the same, the memorial shook me alive and awake and into a place of vivid feeling. That stuck with me, the power of spatial design upon the human psyche and spirit.

I’ve visited a lot of memorials since (in Rwanda, Cambodia, Oklahoma, DC, Norway, Mexico, Alabama, Italy). I think I’ve been on a long quest to figure out how, on a technical level, the memorial manages to move people. Because I am a person whose medium is words, it is striking to me that the most moving memorials I visited employed very little verbal or written language. Instead, it is another language entirely: one of space, of place, of presence, of evocation. This seemed like sorcery to me. Over time, I’ve naturally come to understand how fraught memorials can be. They are narratives, after all, and thus can be incomplete or exploitative or nationalistic or intent on offering a single hegemonic version of things. Still, though, I find them remarkable as a form.

I really loved that writing this book gave me the opportunity to better understand their inner-workings, as well as their more nefarious capacities. I started out this book wondering if we could create climate-related memorials to remember not just what already had been lost, but what I’d begun thinking about as the “future gone.”

In fact, I found that there were so many such creations already out there, some more explicitly identified as memorials, and others more art projects or actions or even futurist designs that, ultimately, seemed to me to serve the same function that the most moving and explicitly-named memorials do. A memorial, in its best form, offers a deep experience of presence that looks backward toward some atrocity or loss, and forward toward the possibilities of a repaired future. Can’t books do that? Performance? Protests? Installations? Just looking for a long, long time at a river or the sea? Okay, maybe a tube of toothpaste isn’t a memorial. But the thing about spending so much time thinking about a social phenomenon, and its purpose, is that you begin to see its resonances everywhere.

SV: It’s impossible to talk about this book without mentioning one of its more playful, yet also serious, elements: the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. At first, its role seems to be helping you find a word to describe the desire you mentioned above. It eventually becomes apparent, however, that the organizers of the Bureau are actually helping you think through a larger question, one you pose at one point this way: “What good were words when the world was burning?” How did your interactions and conversations with those from the Bureau of Linguistical Reality help think through both that desire and that question?

LM: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality helped me break apart language in order to see it anew again. I was all business when I approached them: let’s make a word! But their process was much more collaborative, playful and patient. It involved looking at word roots, searching dictionaries of other languages, considering the multiple meanings of a single word or syllable, feeling into the sonic resonances of language. It was really a delightful process to be asked to engage with language in this way.

I still wonder about the power of words in the face of catastrophe. But I feel less bereft about the prospect of language than I did when first writing this book. It is now clear to me that “what is the power of words?” is not an answerable question, or if it is, its answer isn’t static. What is certainly true is that words lose their power if you just assume that words are powerful. They can go stale, flat, rote as a result of such bluster and carelessness. Then the meaning can begin to slip through our fingers, which feels like a precarious state of affairs.

I’ve also decided that it is foolish to obsess over the legible impact of our writing. The thing about art is that we can’t fully see what it does in the world once we’ve made it. This is, in part, because our writing outlasts us and we can’t see the future. But it is also because, however singular a work of art, what we make ends up in a larger ecosystem of ideas and creation. Think of the exhibitions of long dead artists, for instance; critics and historians look backward and assign—or see—new meaning that may not have been so clear at the time that artist was making their work.

I’ve come to a place as both a writer and a reader where what matters to me most is that language is as clear, alive and devoted to meaning as it can be. Writing can be an act of devotion to whatever you are writing about, but also to language, itself. I want to live, think and write in this spirit of devotion.