Building a Nest

Lauren Markham and Jenny Odell discuss people, books, and places as inspiration; grief and the creative process; and the conscious attention required by climate crisis.

By Lauren Markham, Jenny OdellApril 25, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Environment

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to live in a shape-shifting world? It seems that the writer has a mandate to try to render it: the shape, and its shifting. But how do we focus our attention while attending to the focal points of our climate emergency and their root causes? Grief can get in the way. How does a writer face the looming future while also writing toward the future we want, toward subsistence and ecology, toward life itself? What must happen in the present—on the page and off—to take part in the act of writing, which is always, at least in part, a futurist project? These questions are second nature to any writer working today, especially those explicitly grappling with ecological breakdown and climate catastrophe. Recently, on the occasion of the publication of Lauren Markham’s new book Immemorial, she met up with Jenny Odell in Odell’s beloved rose garden—where she has spent hours paying attention, “doing nothing,” finding and losing and saving time—to discuss their work and how and why they do it.

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JENNY ODELL: There’s a part in your book where you say that everything started to seem like a memorial.

LAUREN MARKHAM: Yes.

It’s like you’re putting on those kaleidoscopic glasses, but everything looks like the shape of the thing you’re making. So I think it can be really hard to tell when you’re even “looking.”

I find that to be such a gift, in a way—even though it can be annoying to friends and family. Because you can just be living your life and absorbing or metabolizing something on the terms of the thing you’re looking at. You know what I mean? Like you don’t just have to google “memorials.”

I feel like there haven’t been that many times where I sat down and was like, “Tell me about X.” More commonly, there is just some kind of thread you pull on. Really early on in writing Saving Time (2023), I went to the Prelinger Library, and I told Rick Prelinger [the librarian] that I was working on a thing about time. And he was like, “Oh, you have to read that E. P. Thompson paper.” I would have found it at some point because everyone references this Thompson paper. But that was very generous of him to say: “You should start here.” It was a great place to start. From there, I could go outward, either to the things it was citing or to people who cited it, or to something that came up while I was reading it. It was infinitely generating.

Once, I was onstage with Aleksandar Hemon in Vancouver and he referenced a book called The Future of Nostalgia. It’s an incredible book, and it was very much the book that I needed to read to start writing A Map of Future Ruins (2024). It was the root system of my thinking and quest. It was so nice to have someone be like: this. And you’re just like, “Thank you!”

oI really appreciate that about your writing—you can see the usefulness of these other sources. There’s a part where you’re quoting Sarah Jaquette Ray in A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (2020): “The myopic focus on action at the expense of theorizing, cultivating collective and personal resilience, and even plain-old contemplation is also a kind of anti-intellectualism.” I think about that a lot. But you’re sort of enacting this idea in the book. I can see how useful these other writers have been to your work, helping you think through something.

I find the same thing so satisfying in your writing. I know you have a thing with corvids and a deep corvid relationship, so maybe this is where this metaphor is coming from, but I experience you as a sort of magpie. You’re flying away and coming back with things to build your nest. Like, here’s a shoelace.

Or a piece of book branch.

These things don’t necessarily belong together intuitively, except through the filtration of the questions you are grappling with. It’s incredibly satisfying to read your work and to be in that nest. Do you ever have experiences, though—I certainly did for some of my work—where you’re like, Am I just a high idiot thinking all of this is connected?

I think I asked myself that today, yeah.

How do you move through that?

This is very silly, but the image that comes to mind is something I talk about in Saving Time. There’s the Osprey Cam that I kind of rediscovered during the pandemic, and they use crazy things for their nests: big, industrial stuff. There’s this osprey couple—Rosie is the female’s name, I can’t remember the male’s—that always come back to the same nest. This male osprey brought in an old, ratty baseball cap, and Rosie just looked at it and was like, “No.” She threw it out of the nest.

So you need to be both the person who brings the thing back to the nest and the creature who is like, “Hard no. This does not belong in the nest.” That’s amazing. Yes.

I think the impulse for me to go get all the little pieces of things comes from two places. One is from teaching, because I was teaching nonhumanities students, typically, and so I liked to use whatever I needed to use to communicate, and hopefully make it fun. But the other thing is that when I was making new media–type art, I was very influenced by people who wrote about how art changes when you have a field of information that everyone has access to. My takeaway from that was that the path you trace through the material is what makes it new. Even the path, say, that you trace through the library stacks—that’s new, right?

I wonder if you have to have it all in a big pile, at least for certain sections, before you understand it. Otherwise, it’s hard to have Rosie’s immediate intuition of “that’s a no.”

You have to put things in a side drawer. I once wrote about Jess, a collage artist who had like thousands of unused cutouts from magazines all throughout the drawers of his house. Sometimes he would wait like 20 years to use one of them.

I’m thinking of what you’re saying about that path because your books are animated by questions. My first book was incredibly narrative, but my last two were also really animated by questions. I’m curious about how you structure a book of ideas. How did you think through and grapple with structure? Does the structure just reveal itself?

For How to Do Nothing (2019), I thought about the order of the questions, and the logic that follows the questions, and then questioning those questions. But Saving Time was more spatially arranged, in a road trip structure. And that was honestly in part because I was playing The Legend of Zelda at the time. (I had never really played a full video game before in my life.) This was an open world, but there’s also a story, and you have to go around and talk to people. There’s all this visual foreshadowing that I found really interesting. I think they did a great job with the way that you experience the story, how you remember things from earlier.

Do you think you’re less daunted by structure because you’re working on your third book?

Probably, yeah. I don’t like to do the same thing over and over. The only thing that has remained the same is that I really like learning stuff. I’ve been fortunate to be in a lot of situations where I can try things out and experiment, push myself in a way in which I’m only competing with myself. It’s just for fun. I want to see if I can do something—and I can fail in private. It might even be funny.

I just got back from Greece on a reporting trip, looking at the impacts of climate change on the olive harvest. And I was there in this olive mill in a place I would never have gone before, learning all this stuff, just feeling how fucking cool it is that I get to do this—that this title of “journalist” has afforded me entry into a place where I can learn something. I have a responsibility to do something with that. This is a stance that I try to hold, and I think you do too: to make a reader feel as though they are learning alongside someone, as opposed to being told something or lectured to. I think it’s so satisfying to be on an intellectual and even ethical quest alongside the writer.

Especially for something like grief, it’s really important to feel like you’re not totally alone. Reading the beginning of your book, it just starts with a feeling. Here’s a feeling I had. It’s probably a recognizable feeling for a lot of people. That’s a starting place. And then the journey begins from there. I think this can be frustrating for some readers, but it depends on what you’re looking for. I find it to be the opposite.

I do think some readers want answers. I’m a reader who’s much more interested in questions. Honestly, I think the older I get, I’m even more interested in the questions. Of course we need urgent answers and action on climate change. But, in fact, the answers actually aren’t all that complicated. It’s how to do them, how to convince people. It’s the moral and ethical tangle around all that which is so potent for me.

When I first turned in this book, it opened with this really long passage about finding all these dead fish on a beach in Mexico. My editor was like, “Okay, I think you might want to start somewhere else.” He helped me realize that what I was actually trying to do, at the time, was prove climate grief, prove how awful this is. See how legitimate it is for me to feel deep grief? And that’s so useless. Everyone on this planet has had some encounter with climate-related grief at this point. No one can look at what’s happening in Los Angeles right now and not feel it. So, it was a funny instinct to prove that climate grief is a thing. I wonder if I was speaking to some imagined paranoid reader who was like, “Prove it, bitch.”

What—grief?

I was singing for my supper.

When you finish writing the thing, it feels like it couldn’t have been any other way. But of course, it could have been another way, and it may even have been better.

A framework that really helps me with research is that there are research holes—like, I need to know more about the Greek debt crisis in order to write this book. Then there are research hungers, which are just things that are compelling and interesting to me. These may or may not end up in the book or be important—I might just be bringing a hat back to the nest here. But I find it useful to toggle back and forth between those because they suit different qualities of mind. I might wake up with a checklist mind, like: Let’s get shit done. Other days, it might be much more porous—Let’s read this book and see where it takes me.

People think of writing as like, you’re typing, you’re writing a page. And obviously you have to do that. I don’t know what the cutoff is, where the writing begins, but there are so many different things involved in the process. Sometimes, it’s just walking around, and maybe I don’t have any pages—but in an extreme case, it could actually be that I’m almost done.

Right, right. You’ve sorted it out, you just have to transcribe it. Rebecca Solnit has said that writing is not all typing. That’s very helpful to me because I’m someone who tends toward checklist and productivity concrete markers.

It’s funny because you brought up that quote that I referenced about the anti-intellectualism of action over contemplation. I felt totally called out by that because part of what my book reckons with are the failures and breakdown of language in the age of climate catastrophe, but also—what good is language anyway? We have to do something.

I recently wrote the foreword for a book of poems by my undergrad thesis advisor (he is a Dickinson scholar). There’s a lot of grappling with climate-related emotions in that book. Still, poetry is always the first thing to seem expendable in a crisis. People are like, “Yeah, we’ll get rid of that.” But there are things that we need right now, and we’ll need even more in the future, that are beyond the realm of practical solutions [things like language], that have to deal with heart and soul, the ability to go on another day.

When I was reading the book, I looked up the word “stanza,” which means a place to stand. I need a place from which I can experience the things I’m experiencing, like a thing that’s under me. I think I had this image when I was reading your book of the opposite—not processing grief as kind of a Wile E. Coyote situation, where you’re just like, Don’t look down. Because when you do that, you’re not getting away with anything.

I think that notion of a stanza—a place to stand—is the very thing that drew me to thinking about memorials: these physical, sanctified spaces to mourn and grieve. Because I was feeling that language was breaking down, I was excited at the prospect of physicality, of spending more time where language was not the primary mode. It felt soothing and dynamic thinking about physical spaces, as opposed to the space of word and argument.

There’s that part of your book where you’re having conversations with Heidi [the artist from the Bureau of Linguistical Reality] about how a memorial doesn’t have to be physical.

Yes, that was very helpful.

That was interesting, because the conceit of Saving Time is: “Okay, we go to Pescadero so we can think about geological time, we go to the port so we can think about this industrial time,” and so on. But obviously you don’t always have access to those places. Years ago, I had a conversation with someone about ritual, how it’s actually this very basic tool for reminding yourself of something you’re always forgetting. Whenever I used to go to the Santa Cruz Mountains, which I can only go to once in a while, I would be like, “Wow, I need to come up here more often.” I would write myself a note: Future Jenny, you need to come up here more. Then I’d come back and forget all about it, and be like, What is this weird note that I wrote? Maybe the ritual would be a way of conjuring the experience in those spaces between.

There’s this hike I always do and have done for around 15 years or so. Every time I go through periods of not doing it, I do think I feel a little discombobulated, whether I recognize it or not, and I have an experience of encounter every single time that I go back. I’m reencountering and remembering something about myself and presence—even though I’ve remembered it a thousand times! I do have to go back to remember. I can conjure it now, but it’s just a memory of the feeling. There’s a remove about it.

Another thing I was thinking about while reading your book was that there’s the grief of losing things you love, but also the grief of losing the thoughts that happen between you and the things you love. Every winter, I go to Lake Merritt in Oakland, and I look at the ducks. We’re so fortunate: there are very special migratory ducks here. But this year, there aren’t canvasback ducks. I don’t know if I just haven’t seen them yet, but …

And there’s something amiss in your ritual because they’re not there?

Yes. I mean, if you compare that with something like the fires that are happening, it’s so quiet. I don’t know that there are a ton of canvasback fans, or people who even know what they are. But it does matter to me, and I did notice, and it’s small and quiet, but it’s devastating.

A trick of climate change, or the trick of the effects of climate change, is that some of the biggest devastation is unseen by most of us. There are these cathartic awakening moments, like Hurricane Helene and all the flooding, or these horrifying fires, and we pay attention. But the problem is that the fire ends, the flooding recedes, and it’s like, “Oh, that was horrible.” And then we move on. You’ve written books about this, about how it’s much harder to stay attuned to the subtler catastrophes, the slower catastrophes.

In a class I’m taking [on native plant restoration] in the East Bay Hills, you each get assigned a sliver of this hill, this very steep little hill, that’s yours and has your tag on it—“Jenny’s sliver.” The first thing we had to do was weed around the native plants that were already there. This is like year one restoration, before you do a bunch of other stuff. There was this moment where I was just seeing what’s on the sliver, and registering it—kind of like meeting a person, honestly. It’s an extremely small area, and we’ve all been assigned to pay attention to our slivers until May. And if one plant dies in that sliver, we’ll know.

You’ve been given the task of conscious attention.

Yeah. I’ve been really struck by writing by people who have lived in one place for a long time. My friends who live in the Santa Cruz Mountains remember when the coastline was different. They’ve been there for 50 years, and they’ll say, “This type of thing used to grow here.” It’s always such a strange experience for me because it’s still really beautiful there, but they’re telling me—they’re in their seventies—that it used to be so much more beautiful. So I’m experiencing their grief and also my grief, but I’m also still very moved by the beautiful things that are still there. It’s a weird mix.

I feel it’s such a beautiful mix of feelings, and quite a hopeful one in terms of climate change. Yes, there will be loss. But not everything must be lost—you know what I mean? How do we inhabit a space of deep grief that is also a recognition of deep beauty? That’s almost what we’re fighting for.

I mean, it’s like how we all know that we’re going to die—and yet we are [fighting].

I wanted to ask you about the utility of making art in a time of crisis. You’ve written profoundly and beautifully about how not everything needs to have concrete utility. But I wonder, on an almost psychic level, what it means for you to write in times of despair.

I always think about a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s book Orwell’s Roses (2021), which I think I even have folded up in my reading copy of my own book, about George Orwell. She’s talking about an artist who was taking pictures of clouds and was kind of embarrassed about it, and then an activist tells the artist that we need the vision of the beautiful thing that we want: “You go through all of the fighting not because you want to fight, but because you want to get somewhere as a people. You want to help create a world where you can sit around and think about clouds. That should be our right as human beings.” It’s not all fighting.

And also, I really don’t presume to know what people want or need—I don’t even presume to know what I want or need—in any particular moment. I’ve been thinking a lot about recipes and what counts as a recipe. I was just talking to my friend yesterday about this, and he sent me this article by Mark Bittman, “101 Simple Salads for the Season.” Each one is just, like, two sentences, and his whole thing is rules of thumb: if you are using soy sauce, you’ll need a sugary thing, and also a vinegar thing. The recipes are not precise “two cups of blah blah blah”—they’re an arrangement of categories of things that work together to make something.

You see that in ecology too. There’s an overstory and an understory. This is an identifiable structure. What’s so beautiful is that this structure shows up differently in each place. There’s a book about native plants that I’m reading, and I love all of the photos of oak woodlands in different parts of California because they look somewhat familiar, but it will be a different type of oak from ones we have here. I’ve been thinking of these [sets of relationships as] different kinds of recipes.

Maybe that’s the middle ground between telling someone what to do and just leaving them all on their own. I don’t want to do either of those. Because it’s such a burning question: what is the usefulness of art in this crisis? Maybe with a recipe, someone can say, “Oh, I know what I can use for that. Or I have some of this.” Then, the person who used the recipe can have ownership of it. I don’t know who you are or what you have access to, but here’s something general enough that you might be able to apply to your own context in ways I could never think of.

That’s so beautiful.

Even if you don’t do that as a writer, I think readers do.

I do that as a reader. I think it underlines the notion of a work of art being an offering of sorts. Something to be engaged with, a starting point. I also really like the idea of art as something we can eat. As sustenance.