She wanted to include each of the complications of their lives, their poor choices, and their adolescence.

Cliches like painting them as the sad heroes, perfect, as one-dimensional victims. Lauren was hyper-aware of the cliches in writing about immigrants through the entire writing process. She believes that building honest, real, and genuine relationships that come from your heart with whomever you are interviewing makes for much better and more humane journalism. In order to elicit such an early experience, she relied on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects, rather than the expertly crafted interview question. This was perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. She went on a bike ride with both twins and they told her this story about the time when they were little El Salvador they had stolen some corn and used it to buy a bike. She describes her interviewing process for this book as “entering through the side door”. Lauren spent a total of two years reporting “The Far Away Brothers”, a devastating and beautiful nonfiction epic that follows Raul and Ernesto Flores (pseudonyms that Markham used to protect their real identities) from El Salvador. She teaches writing at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, Left Margin Lit, and the University of San Francisco. In addition to writing, Markham has worked for more than a decade at the intersection of immigration and education. She has been awarded fellowships from UC Berkeley, the McGraw Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Mesa Refuge, and the French American Foundation. Lauren’s work has appeared in outlets like VQR (where she’s a Contributing Editor), The Guardian, The New Republic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Freeman’s, Guernica, Lithub, Zyzzyva, and Narrative Magazine. It was named a New York Times Book Critics’ Book of 2017, a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, the LA Times Book Award, and was shortlisted for the J. “The Far Away Brothers” won a California Book Award Silver Prize and the Northern California Book Award. Lauren Markham is a journalist, essayist, and fiction writer her work is most often concerned with issues related to migration, the environment, youth, and her home state of California.

The far away brothers by lauren markham