Episode 260 with Lauren Markham, Author of A Map of Future Ruins, and Sympathetic and Empathetic Chronicler of The Forgotten, The Neglected, and Those With Complex Stories Often Reduced to Tropes
Notes and Links to Lauren Markham’s Work Lauren Markham is a writer based in northern California. She is the author of the recent A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, 2024) which The New Yorker listed as one of “The Best Books We’ve Read in 2024 So Far” and which Kirkus reviews called “a remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.” A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California. Markham’s first book, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, 2017) was the winner of 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. Markham has reported from the border regions of Greece and Mexico and Thailand and Texas; from arctic Norway; from gang-controlled regions of El Salvador; from depopulating towns in rural Sardinia and rural Guatemala, too; from home school havens in southern California; from imperiled forests in Oregon and Washington; from the offices of overwhelmed immigration attorneys in L.A. and Tijuana; from the upscale haunts of women scammed on the Upper East Side. 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 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 fifteen years 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 Program. Her third book, Immemorial, will be published by Transit Books in 2025. Buy A Map of Future Ruins Lauren's Website Los Angeles Review of Books’ Review of A Map of Future Ruins At about 4:00, Lauren makes the case that not all young reading has to be high-brow as she discusses formative works as a kid and adolescent, which included Nancy Drew and Milan Kundera At about 6:50, Lauren responds to Pete’s question about how she thinks and writes in diverse genres, and how her reading of varied writers informs her own work At about 10:40, Lauren shouts out Vauhini Vara, Hernan Diaz, Nathan Heller, Jia Tolentino, and other treasured contemporary writers At about 12:45, Lauren talks about how writing informs her teaching, and vice versa At about 15:25, Pete asks Lauren about seeds for A Map of Future Ruins and how her work with many undocumented and refugee students has affected her writing At about 19:00, Lauren and Pete discuss ideas of belonging and exclusion and pride and heritage in connection to Lauren’s Greek heritage and reporting trips there At about 23:10, Ideas of “insiders” and “outsiders” and the challenges of immigration paperwork are discussed At about 26:05, Pete and Lauren reflect on a powerful quote from Warsan Shire regarding people being impelled to emigrate At about 26:55, Lauren gives background on the conditions that made Moria on the Greek slang of Lesbos a “purgatory” At about 31:20, Demetrios, a representative Greek from the book, and his views on
