Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, September 20, 2026 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. Give to Grace You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give Become a GraceArts Member Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join. 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 California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging(Riverhead, 2024) and Immemorial(Transit, 2025.) The Far Away Brothers was awarded the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics' Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography. A Map of Future Ruins was named a finalist for the California Book Award, The Northern California Book Award, and the runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her most recent book, Immemorial, was longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award. She has reported a range of stories all over the world, including the border regions of Greece and Mexico and Thailand and Texas; arctic Norway; gang-controlled regions of El Salvador; schools in North Slope of Alaska; depopulating towns in rural Sardinia and rural Guatemala, too; home school havens in southern California; imperiled forests in Oregon and Washington; the offices of overwhelmed immigration attorneys in L.A. and Tijuana; the parched olive groves of the Mediterranean; the upscale haunts of women scammed on the Upper East Side; and a war (and reconciliation) with the crows in Oakland, California. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is a contributing editor), Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, 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, and on This American Life. She has been awarded fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Silvers Prize, the de Groot Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. 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 the University of San Francisco and St. Mary's MFA in Writing Programs, where she co-founded the Storyboard Residency with Chris Feliciano Arnold. She co-edits The Approach and is currently at work on Pageant, a novel about early California. About the Moderator The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner. About The Forum The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum's host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world. Learn more about The Forum here: gracecathedral.org/the-forum
