What's Creative Nonfiction, anyway?

Award-winning writers Lauren Markham and Ingrid Rojas Contreras explore all the shapes Creative Nonfiction can take.

From memoir to journalism to linked essays to think pieces, Creative Nonfiction can wear a lot of hats. In this conversation between two award-winning writers, a memoirist and journalist/essayist, we'll explore all the shapes Creative Nonfiction can take, including some unconventional ones, as well as how and where to get your Creative Nonfiction published.

After the craft talk, books will be for sale and prosecco will be served.

About Immemorial

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.