Lauren Markham in Conversation with Rebecca Solnit: Immemorial

Join Mesa alums Lauren Markham and Rebecca Solnit as they discuss Lauren’s forthcoming book, Immemorial.

Immemorial is a 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.

Lauren Markham is a writer and the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), which was awarded the Ridenhour Prize and the California Book Award Silver Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Orion, and Harper’s. In addition to writing, she has spent more than a decade working in the intersection of immigration and education. Lauren was a Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2016, and was a resident again in 2018.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist and the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for River of Shadows; two other books of hers also were nominated for the prize in other years).  Rebecca writes regularly for The Guardian, serves on the board of Oil Change International and launched the climate project Not Too Late in 2022. Rebecca was a resident at Mesa Refuge in 2002, 2013 and was a Jennifer Egan Creative Approaches to Mental Health Fellow in 2024.

Presented in partnership with Point Reyes Books. Held at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station.

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