Immemorial – Lauren Markham

[Transit Books; 2025]

Last summer, I drove north on the I-5 from Berkeley to Southern Oregon. The route is a straight shot, mostly strip malls and megachurches foregrounded on yellow swathes of farmland, until you hit Mount Shasta. This is my favorite part of the drive, winding my way slowly through the wild switchbacks as sunlight sweeps across the sawtooth range. But in the past few years, I’ve noticed this landscape change dramatically. The waterline for Lake Shasta—the reservoir responsible for irrigating much of the agriculture in the Central Valley—seems to dip lower each year, exposing the ruddy, naked shore in its dramatic descent. Wildfires have ripped through thousands of acres of forest. The impacts of climate change are so pronounced here that it’s impossible to ignore them. Even so, I kept my eyes trained on the road. The prospect of gazing out the window at the blackened hillsides filled my throat with dread. It is one thing to know that such ecological destruction has occurred; it is another to witness it firsthand. Looking is the least you can do, I thought, but my grief felt too porous to place, and so I kept driving.

A similar scene occurs in the opening pages of Immemorial, journalist Lauren Markham’s new book-length essay, published by Transit Books as part of their Undelivered Lectures, a narrative nonfiction series of book-length essays. In the opening scene, Markham describes the experience of flying over the icy glaciers of Greenland: “For the better part of an hour, I would press my face against the window to become transfixed by the great, frozen world below.” This transcendence is interrupted by her knowledge that these glaciers were rapidly melting. “Part of the trouble of metabolizing climate grief is that to do so requires grieving many abstractions at once,” she observes. These abstractions pose a temporal dilemma: they include not only the current loss of species, ecosystems, and human life, but also the destruction that will continue occurring in the future, even if we can’t predict its exact scope. In 2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the neologism solastalgia to describe the peculiar psychic pain of witnessing environmental degradation of a familiar ecosystem. Alchemized from the Latin solas (solace or comfort) and the Greek root -algia (ache or grief), solastalgia is a deliberate departure from nostalgia, or the type of pain that people often feel when they’re separated from their homelands. In contrast, solastalgia is “the homesickness you have when you are still at home,” as Albrehct wrote in his book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. When he first created the word, Albrecht was writing about the ecological destruction wrought by drought and open-cut mining in New South Wales, but these days, the term applies ubiquitously. It’s nearly impossible to exist in the world and not experience some flavor of solastalgia.

But solastalgia doesn’t quite match what Markham’s looking for. She yearns to understand how to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost. Like many writers, Markham initially reaches for language, searching for a word that might capture the emotional weight of the question. Through a stroke of luck on Instagram, she connects with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a two-person arts organization based out of San Francisco that creates neologisms to reflect the emotional complexity of being alive during the Anthropocene. Inspired by Albrecht’s neologism, they’ve created words like chuco헐sol (“The experience of seeing a brilliant red sunset blown up by manmade pollution and knowing you’re not suppose to enjoy it but you do anyway”) and soltactiphoria (“The euphoria a farmer experiences when s/he gathers soil from the ground with their naked hands”). Although these words have not entered the mainstream, they make a point: our lexicon does not adequately reflect the world as we know it, and a new linguistic imagination is required to capture the nuances of the emotional experiences of climate change. In her message to the Bureau, Markham writes of needing a word that expresses “the feeling of losing something as it is going.”

While Immemorial is a quest for a word, it’s clear that language has its limitations. “On my most doleful days, I questioned what words could accomplish, and, if anything, whether it would be nearly fast enough. What good were words when the world was burning?” These questions are familiar to anyone who’s worked an environmental beat, as Markham has. Her previous books—The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins—examine migration, climate change, and the fluidity of borders and identity. But despite her excellent reportage skills, Markham understands that no amount of prize-worthy longform journalism can mitigate the material destruction of climate change or excuse the lack of meaningful political action. When Markham describes her fear of semantic satiation (“that unnerving occurrence when a word, having been looking at or considered for too long, ceases to hold any meaning”) and “linguistic wear” (the problem of “[obscuring] the issues or people or places I’m writing about with stagnant words”), her actual fear seems to be the failure of language to adequately capture its subjects and render them honestly. “Writing was supposed to help me remember what it was about the world that broke and moved me, but instead it felt powerless in the face of all I was trying to describe and even seemed to be making me forget,” she confesses.

What makes Immemorial unforgettable is not Markham’s desire for a new word but the book’s formally experimental structure. Split into eighteen sections, Immemorial weaves reporting, memoir, history, and art criticism. Although the sections progress numerically, the book does not follow a linear logic. Unlike the inverted pyramid structure of traditional journalism, where the most important information is placed at the beginning of the story and everything that follows is of diminishing importance, Immemorial moves in “meditative” time, moving loosely from one story to the next, inviting the reader to make connections and linkages between subjects. This formal structure mimics what psychologists call “associative memory,” where the brain establishes connections between two seemingly unrelated items. The associations—between physical memorials, collective memory, grief rituals and climate change—create a scaffolding for Markham to wind her way through, never staying in one place for too long. Markham’s amorphous climate grief assumes an amorphous form in her writing.

Markham’s mode-shifting gives her authorial voice flexibility: she can transition from historical analysis, as when she describes the history of the Metelkova district in wartime Slovenia, to recounting personal experiences, like when she snuck into a monument in Madison Square park before getting chased off by security guards. As it moves between reporting and memoir, Markham’s prose occasionally slips into lyricism: “I imagined these trees drinking in my grief like they once did carbon and light, and metabolizing it into something else.” Because Markham uses lyricism so sparingly within the book, lines like this one create a sense of careful intimacy with the reader.

In a recent piece for LitHub, Markham and writer Chris Feliciano Arnold describe how their work often lands in the “no-man’s land” between journalism and creative writing: “​​In the field of so-called ‘Creative Writing,’ our work as reporters is sometimes sidelined as wonky non-art. To journalists, our creative, lyrical sides are sometimes perceived as distractions, unmoored from the rigorous work of reporting.” Immemorial’s form makes room for reporting and lyricism to enhance the other. Markham uses the structure’s porousness to reference the work of other artists and writers around the world who are grappling with memory, climate change, grief and monuments, including poet CAConrad, architect Maya Lin, and artist Jason DeCaires Taylor.

Climate writers and climate readers debate whether storytelling should adopt a local or global scope. By opting for a transnational scope, Markham offers readers insight into how artists are using memorials to respond to the specific consequences of climate change in the countries, like the funeral for the Ok glacier (now considered “dead ice”) in Iceland. However, the majority of the artists Markham references are from the Global North. The omission of stories from the Global South is a missed opportunity for Markham to explore how the people most affected by climate change are managing the psychic, economic, and spiritual disorientation caused by ecological destruction. How do farmers in Iraq grapple with the fact that drought is making traditional irrigation methods nearly impossible? Which artists from the Caribbean island nations are creating work that directly engages with the ongoing effects of climate colonialism? Stories like these reveal the gravity of the climate crisis and the creativity required to make sense of being alive in the Anthropocene.

Although Immemorial is only 136 pages, its nonlinear form and fragmented sections create delays in time, forcing the reader to proceed at a more contemplative pace than its page count suggests. In prioritizing contemplation on a formal level, Markham addresses her own sense of urgency as a writer, mother, and human in the climate crisis. “Time, for many of us on earth, seems to be speeding up,” she observes, but this scarcity mindset also creates what environmental writer Sarah Jaquette Ray calls “the myopic focus on action at the expense of…cultivating collective and personal resilience” in her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Surviving the climate crisis means bearing witness over time and imagining new possibilities for our world. In a recent essay for Pioneer Works, Markham describes her childhood penchant for photography as “a tremendous feeling, watching the image as it appeared on the page, a resuscitated ghost.” The experience of reading Immemorial mirrors this phenomenon: the threads of each section start to stitch tighter and tighter together, until they’ve accrued into a larger story.

The exigencies of climate change are terrifying, but they also offer opportunities for designing and envisioning a new world. The same could be said for formal approaches and strategies when writing about climate. “Recognizing the reality of climate breakdown means recognizing the interconnectedness of all things,” Rebecca Solnit writes. Publications like The Guardian are updating their climate journalism style guides and experimenting with how to shape climate narratives to engage with their audience. Books like Ayana Johnson’s What if We Get it Right? Visions of Climate Futures and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy don’t shy away from the hard truths of the climate crisis, but they offer readers the chance to envision and believe in a better future. In other words, doomsday is out, radical hope is in. 

Near the end of Immemorial, Markham travels to downtown San Francisco to workshop neologisms with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. “I sat down opposite them,” she writes, “feeling as though I was taking part in something between a Tarot reading and a Catholic confessional.” The process of creating a new word begins with honing in on a definition. Spurred by questions from the Bureau, Markham narrows what she’s looking for: a word to describe the desire to memorialize an ongoing loss that, because it is linked to other global disasters of the climate crisis, can’t be measured. With this loose definition in mind, Markham and the Bureau experiment with suffixes and prefixes, weighing the connotations of etymological roots. When Markham and the Bureau of Linguistical Reality finally land on a word a few days later, it’s immemorialgia, defined as “the sorrowful ache for memorial, to be a part of ancient time and to mourn it, to be distinct from memory and deeply nested within it.” The experience of creating this neologism “pried open a portal,” reviving Markham’s belief in the power of language as a medium to render truth. “I was breaking apart language like a giffy scientist and putting it back together again,” she writes. In a similar fashion, Immemorial breaks the traditional essay form and puts it back together again with fragments of art, history, memoir, and reporting, a formal decision that embodies the interconnectedness of the climate crisis.  

In the final pages of Immemorial, Markham references a poem from CAConrad’s Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. In this poem, the speaker longed to “to / desire / the world / as it is / not as / it was.” Living in the era of climate crisis means noticing the vanishings of species, glaciers, and seasons, but this same conscious attention can also be attuned to the world’s beauty. When I think back now on that drive through Northern California, my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel and my eyes trained straight ahead on the road, so determined not to see what desperately needed to be seen, I wish I had summoned the courage to look out the window at the ashy world and—perhaps—desire it nonetheless. 

Bethany Kaylor is a writer and illustrator living in Iowa City. Her essays can be found at Alta Journal, Sunday Long Read, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she’s working on her first book.