Interview: Lauren Markham

Remorialization: An Interview with Lauren Markham

Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer based in California. Her work has appeared in VQR (where she is a contributing editor), Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Guernica, Freeman’s, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lit Hub, California Sunday, Zyzzyva, The Georgia Review, The Best American Travel Writing 2019, The New Yorker, and on This American Life. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), which was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and was the winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024), which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Immemorial (2025), which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

In addition to writing, Markham has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of education and immigration. She regularly teaches writing in various community writing centers as well as at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, the University of San Francisco and St. Mary’s MFA in Writing Programs, where she co-founded the Storyboard Residency alongside Chris Feliciano Arnold. She co-edits The Approach and is currently at work on a novel about early California.

Interview conducted by Cheyenne LaRoque

The following conversation took place on March 18, 2026, via phone call.

Cheyenne LaRoque: As much as Immemorial is an exploration of grief and the climate crisis, it also explores language and its failings. In your KQED interview, you stated you hadn’t quite found the word to describe the feeling that you’re grappling with in Immemorial. So, since it’s been about a year, I was curious, have you come any closer to finding a word to describe it? Or have the words that have been applied to this feeling shaped or changed the feeling in any way? I’m thinking of blissonance or premation or guiltchantment, all mentioned in the book. Or there was a word, I believe a man named Arnold called in for that KQED interview and offered remorialization. 

Lauren Markham: Remorialization. Yeah, I liked that one. I have to say that I think this is common with books and writing projects. There’s a certain question that’s animating the initial pursuit of a book or an essay or what have you. And then that’s the pursuit that brings you into the doorway of what you are making and what you are exploring. But the question becomes complicated or falls by the wayside in some way, or the question kind of mutates and changes. And so, while this search for a word was really animating me when I set off to research and write this book, it turned out in the end that finding the word was far less important to me than thinking about the utility, failings, and possibilities of language and thinking through the nature of yearning for language itself. Unfortunately, that’s a fancy way of saying the journey was the destination, you know what I mean? 

CL: Absolutely. And that hearkens to something you said in your interview with The Rumpus. You talked about previously having felt pressure to offer answers in your writing to questions you were asking, and in time, you said you’d become more interested in what you didn’t know or what you couldn’t answer. And I found in reading this, this book deals so much with the unanswerable, like: how can we cope with the climate crisis, or can or even should we mourn the world as it was while still inhabiting the world as it is? How can we and why do we feel the need to? So, I’d love to know what advice you would offer to writers grappling with the pressure of feeling the need to offer answers or even attempt to answer the questions they raise on topics that are so unanswerable, such as this. 

LM: I think that trying to answer a question is valiant, important, and necessary. But I think that, because the answers to some of the world’s most entrenched crises are either woefully simple and I would say, almost sometimes cliche. Like capitalism, you know, kill the rich or end fossil fuel. It’s remarkably simple. We could just transition off of fossil fuel. We even know how to do it. So, if that is the answer and it’s a simple answer, then actually the questions are more complicated. Not how do we solve climate change, but why aren’t we solving climate change? The books that I most love and find most important do not ever come to a simple answer, because if we come to a simple answer, it suggests that the question is too simple, or it’s not the right question. And that’s not to say there aren’t there aren’t way station answers along the way, but generally once you reach an answer, your question has become more complicated again. 

CL: Yes, so allowing the questions to complicate even as you develop your interest and continue to just keep diving. I think that’s fantastic advice and oftentimes advice I need. Speaking of complicated, this essay, to me, is not only braided, but ends up forming an expansive tapestry of threads—grief, climate crisis, language, architecture, memorials, ritual, motherhood, community, memory—and that’s just naming a few off the top of my head. As a writer, I wanted to ask what your experience was in juggling all these threads and how you managed to both keep track of and honestly fulfill so many of them? 

LM: I’m so glad to hear that you found them fulfilled. You know, at the beginning, one feels as though they’re just making a giant mess. But I think that I often talk to students about sort of heeding this inner Spidey sense, this inner knowing that I think these pieces are connected. And we have to heed that without gripping too tightly because I think generally we have a sense that connections are there as writers, as thinkers, as human beings, before we’re able to explicitly spell out how and why. So, I think part of the creative process and the intellectual process is writing into the suspicion of connection, which again, involves making a big mess or having all of these disparate pieces. But what I have found is that over time, when these various threads are being laid, you start to see the resonances and the places that they’ll braid together. So for my book, A Map of Future Ruins, it took me a really long time to understand that it was a book fundamentally about storytelling, and that’s why I was writing about being a journalist, about borders as a kind of narrative, and about the perniciousness of anti-immigration ideologies suffusing contemporary populism. That’s why I was writing about mythologies and the myth of whiteness in ancient sculptures and the myth of whiteness in the ancient world. All of these threads were about storytelling, but I had to write them down in order to see that. And then I had other threads that were part of that Spidey sense that turned out to not actually belong. So, this is what I mean by heeding that inner knowing or that inner suspicion while also being suspicious of that inner knowing and inner suspicion. It’s a matter of porousness, of being receptive to the possibility of these connections forming and also ready to let them go if and when it does not turn out that they are connected in any way that is in service to the book. 

CL: No, absolutely. Speaking of resonance, the amount of research and referents in this text is incredible. 

LM: Oh, thanks!

CL: You had spoken on the Bureau of Linguistical Reality’s desire to create neologisms that don’t just directly translate to what they’re attempting to describe, but to resonate with it. And that to me is what you do in your work. You are finding resonance in oftentimes really surprising and amazing ways. For example, I wasn’t personally expecting to see mention of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police in this work, and was really delighted by it, because I was both surprised and found it incredibly resonant to what you were discussing. I was wondering: how does the research process work for you in this book or in general?

LM: Yeah, I always experience research as incredibly generative and that there’s a reverberation between me and what I’m learning about. It’s the ideas and questions that I come in with that lead me to this particular book or to this particular art piece or to this particular search. For instance, in Immemorial, I was searching for memorials to climate change and I kept finding these sort of art installations that really struck me but weren’t exactly what I was looking for. That’s incredibly generative because it complicates and deepens my thoughts and affirms some thoughts and undercuts others. But it’s also true that when I’m deep in a project, and I think this is true for many of us, my kind of tentacles are up such that, whether consciously or not, I’m experiencing the world and living my life looking through the lens of my project. I don’t necessarily even realize I’m doing it. But it means that I’ll go to an art exhibition and relate to something that I see there as related to my project. Or I’ll hear a podcast, like I talk about the poet, CAConrad and their work, Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, which is amazing, wild, experiential art in which they bathe themselves in the sounds of extinct animals and effectively go put themselves into a trance and go walk around Walmart. It’s remarkable. And I was listening to that one day on a podcast that I like, David Naimon’s Between the Covers, and it was like, oh, I want to know more about this poet and this work, and this work already feels like it’s in conversation with some of the questions I’m trying to ask, and I want to invite it into my work. So, it’s both going and seeking but also being receptive and kind of metabolizing what’s around me.

CL: Absolutely. And I also wondered, were there any moments that to you felt in the moment this is what I’m looking for, and then you didn’t end up getting to use or needing to use? I remember there was this meditation retreat, I believe, that you had spoken about. Were there any other moments like that or even memorials you wanted to include? 

LM: Oh yeah, there was the meditation retreat when I was pregnant. I think there was a lot more that I wrote about. One draft had a lot more of that experience and a lot more of the way people were so sorrowful in that retreat and the teachers kept kind of being like, yeah, you can decide to focus on what’s sorrowful and you can decide to focus on the beauty and what’s around you. So definitely there’s stuff that you kind of leave behind. I often think of that, and we probably talked about this, as scaffolding writing or even scaffolding experience. That I had to kind of experience it or write it down and it had to live for a while as part of the book and then it didn’t belong in the final book, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t help the final book become itself. So that’s one way I sometimes let those things go where it’s like, oh, this was really in service to me for a while and now goodbye.

CL: No, absolutely. I bet that happened a lot because with how much material there is in here, I can only imagine that there are desks and desks full. 

LM: Yes, I’m sure there were. It’s funny because it’s like the answer is yes, definitely. But it’s an interesting thing that it shows how inessential it was if I can’t remember it.

CL: Absolutely. Shows that you made the right choices.

LM: I hope, right? 

CL: And going off of that, Immemorial has been out for a little over a year now, so you’ve had time to let it sit and digest and become what it is away from your hands. So, I wanted to ask what it’s like to return to it here, even though I’m sure you’ve never quite left it, just as it will never leave me. What is it like to experience this text from retrospect? 

LM: What a great question. Thanks for those really kind words. You’re such a beautiful reader in general and of this book. I think I certainly feel that when a book is out in the world, it’s already been some months since you last touched it and maybe even, you know, over a year since you did much to it, right? So, there’s some way that a book is a kind of time capsule for an author. My daughter Clio is very obsessed with the book, but she calls it her book because it’s dedicated to her, and recently she started having me read parts of it when she’s in it, which is very funny. She’s three and a half now. 

CL: That’s beautiful. Speaking of your daughter, you stated that when you told your mentor, Rebecca Solnit, that you were going to have a child, she had said, “You’re choosing the future,” which is such an incredible and lovely sentiment. I wanted to ask, since it has been some time, how have you, if you have, continued to choose the future, and how, if I might ask, has Clio been a part of that choosing? 

LM: Yeah, that’s so sweet. I loved her saying that. It was really helpful and emblematic to me. This is a slight tangent, but I have a little bit of a suspicion of this trope in literature and I would just say in social thinking in general that someone becomes a parent and all of a sudden they give a shit about the future, and I both think that that is true for people and I don’t love that because I’m sort of like, oh, wait, the only reason you care about the future is because you’re now more implicated in it for yourself. Like, what about the other children? What about everyone else, you know? And so, while I understand that it is more visceral when you have a child, that the future is a more visceral question when you are in charge of someone who will ostensibly live far past you or at least the hope is that they will live far past you, that the future and the precarity of the future is more visceral and more felt. I guess I don’t actually care about the future less or more now than I did before. I have the same preoccupations. I feel the same impulses toward doing what I can to usher in a better future, for everybody, not just for Clio, right? 

CL: Oh, absolutely. 

LM: However, that said, I did just publish a piece about trying to secure her a passport elsewhere. So maybe I’m undercutting myself here. There’s this instinct for people to find passports, to secure passports often through ancestry. Anyway, I feel like every day we live is choosing the future. And every day we act, we’re choosing the future, and as you know, from my writing, I’m very preoccupied with what is action, what is the right action, what is enough action. I think we can get really tangled up in the fact that nothing we do will ever be enough, as you kind of put it earlier. Yet we cannot then be so hamstrung by the question of what do I do and how can I possibly do enough that we do nothing, right? Again, this is an unanswerable question that I’ve just decided to hold at the red-hot center of my life, which is like, in what ways can I better act? In what ways can I be in relationship with the future and with the present? In what ways can I attend to the present in such a way that will secure a less horrific future?

CL: It’s that balancing act of contemplation and action: how do I do what I am trying to do, and when is thinking not enough, but also realizing that not thinking is almost anti-intellectual. Back to what you said about the idea of parents immediately jumping into caring about the future. I think, as educators, or maybe as people just existing, it’s impossible to not care about the future as well. So, I completely agree. As long as we are engaging with society, we are thinking about the future. 

LM: Exactly.

CL: And where was the passport piece published? I’d love to plug that.

LM: The New Yorker. It’s very short.

CL: What else can we look forward to reading from you? 

LM: Oh, that’s so sweet. I’m working on a novel, well I am working on two novels, but I’m working earnestly on one actively. So, there’s that, and then I’m also working on another Undelivered Lecture for Transit Books that I’ll be working on over the next couple of years, which I’m excited about, that is sort of looking at some of the questions we just discussed about parenting and this notion of this instinct to secure a better option for one’s own child. I’m looking at this through citizenship and politics and travel and all sorts of other factors. I’m still in the early phases, but there’s this Spidey sense that these pieces belong together, and I am sure I will figure out how. 

CL: I will certainly be looking forward to that. I was delighted by Transit and the Undelivered Lectures series.

LM: Aren’t they great? 

CL: Yes, and I would love to know bit more about what it was like working with them.

LM: It’s so lovely. I’ve worked with two Big Five imprints and it was so wonderful to work with beautiful editors and with career editors, people who were brilliant. My editor, Megan Hauser, for The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life  is a total genius. And my editor at Riverhead for A Map of Future Ruins is a legend. She’s just unparalleled. I will say that there was something incredibly liberating about writing a book that was not a commercial enterprise. Transit is a nonprofit. Of course, they want to make money from their books and, no one would have been mad had this been an instant New York Times bestseller, but that wasn’t the expectation and it wasn’t then a failure that it wasn’t. So that was incredibly liberating. Adam and Ashley, they’re a couple and they started and run Transit. Now they have this lovely team. They have become really dear friends to me, and I feel like they’re a huge asset to the literary community in the Bay. I’m really excited to work on another book with them. 

CL: And I’m certainly looking forward to reading it. 

LM: Don’t hold your breath, but hopefully one day, yes. 

CL: Well, that can be a choice I’ll make, and we can all make, in the future. 

Cheyenne LaRoque is a second year Ph.D. candidate in creative writing, teaching fellow, and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at the University of North Texas. She is the Co-Managing Editor of American Literary Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco and a B.A. in creative writing and linguistics from the University of Southern California.