Lauren Markham returns to Greenlight to launch her speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: Immemorial. In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative and offers, what Kirkus star reviews as, "urgent, heartfelt, and lyrical reflections... an intimate meditation on the climate crisis.” Markham reads from the book before a brief discussion with fellow author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Names of New York), followed by an audience Q&A and signing.
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.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Island People, Names of New York, and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (with Rebecca Solnit). His work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, among many other publications. He teaches at NYU and is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works, where he also serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast.