The Forum with Lauren Markham: Immemorial

About this event

“A vital, moving portrait of how to live in a world we may never get back.”—Vulture “Nearly every page in this stunning book has been dog-eared and underlined . . . I am enamored.” — Hannah deBree, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Berkeley, CA) Fiction writer, essayist, and journalist Lauren Markham, in her most recent book Immemorial (longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award and shortlisted for the Northern California book award), has written a speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how can we memorialize what has been lost, and what soon will be? “I am in need of a word,” Markham writes in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She is searching for a way to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost—a landscape, a species, birdsong. 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. She reckons with the grief of climate catastrophe and asks whether memorials can do more than remember the past: Can they help us imagine—and perhaps shape—the future? Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Markham about how we might create “a psychic space for feeling” in the face of loss, while also finding the language and imagination to spur action and agitate for change. Buy Immemorial. Books will also be available for purchase at The Forum. Registration is recommended but not required. The Forum will be posted on our Youtube and Apple Podcast channels. Give To Grace You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Click here to give. About the Guest A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, Lauren’s work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of…

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