Joanna Pocock [Ione Saizar]<\/p>\n
BETWEEN the demands of teaching, book signings and an upcoming promotional tour, Joanna Pocock found an hour to chat with me in the cosy confines of a caf\u00e9 in Hackney\u2019s gentrified Broadway Market.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, we focused on her self-described \u201chybrid book,\u201d Greyhound. Her second major work, stretching to 400 pages, has rightly garnered critical praise.<\/p>\n
The book takes its name from the US coach company. Greyhound buses have often provided the only form of public transportation available across vast swathes of the United States, especially for America\u2019s poor.<\/p>\n
Joanna drew heavily on the journals she compiled during two extensive journeys on Greyhounds 17 years apart \u2013 2006 and 2023 \u2013 from Detroit and the Midwest to Texas, into the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona, and ultimately California via Las Vagas, which she describes as \u201chuman folly\u2026 and most importantly an environmental catastrophe\u201d.<\/p>\n
What she has achieved \u201cafter about 12 versions\u201d is a remarkable book that interweaves memoir, commentary on several earlier writers\u2019 works, reportage and observations on both the built and natural environment.<\/p>\n
One of seven children, raised in suburban Ottawa, the Canadian capital, Joanna was keen to escape what she saw as a somewhat dull existence. After finishing secondary school, she followed an older sister to Toronto. A miserable two years at the city\u2019s Trinity College followed. She eventually gained a degree at the Ontario College of Art.<\/p>\n
In 1990, Joanna, a dual Canadian-Irish national by then in her mid-20s, arrived in London where she has spent much of the ensuing 35 years.<\/p>\n
Her first Greyhound odyssey in 2006 came against the backdrop of personal tragedy after multiple miscarriages and the loss of the beloved sister with whom she had once lived in Toronto. So, what prompted her return to the US and long-distance bus travel 17 years later?<\/p>\n
\u201cCuriosity about the country and also about myself,\u201d Joanna replied, adding that she was keen on \u201ctaking the [post-Covid] temperature \u2013 before times and after times\u201d.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s no Covid sceptic. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, she didn\u2019t question the case for lockdowns but feels we have witnessed \u201ca proliferation of mistrust\u201d. She speaks of damage to \u201cthe collective psyche,\u201d perhaps reflecting \u201cthe unintended consequences of conscious actions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Much of the America she chronicled in 2023 was a poorer, uglier place. She bears witness to \u201calarming levels of poverty, disen\u00adfranchisement, addiction and hopelessness\u201d. In particular, she remains shocked by the scale of the opioid crisis, qualitatively worse 17 years after her first journey, compounded by \u201cthe absence of health care [for many] \u2013 it\u2019s barbaric at some level\u201d.<\/p>\n
Having seen so many ravaged lives day after day around Greyhound bus stations in several US cities and having to use station restrooms with excrement-stained walls, Joanna recently saw first-hand that her native Canada has hardly been immune. During a late summer visit to Toronto, she found \u201ca changed city\u201d.<\/p>\n
Joanna is an eloquent commentator on environmental degradation, clearly driven by capitalist imperatives. She is particularly scathing about the impact of Big Tech. During her second US journey, she became ever more acutely aware of \u201cthe appification of travel\u2026 Everything seems outsourced to our phone and [digital] devices. This gives me a sense of existential dread.\u201d She spoke of the \u201ccolonisation of a new reality by Big Tech\u201d and the difficulty of living our everyday lives \u201cfor these constantly cyber-mediated transactions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Her relationship with the United States is deeply ambivalent. Her prose voices a controlled but passionate anger at inequality, waste and the remorseless squandering of natural resources even as she remains awestruck by countless stars in the sky over New Mexico.<\/p>\n
She witnessed \u201ca lot of people being kind to each other. The \u2018little people\u2019 often do care, but don\u2019t have the power.\u201d<\/p>\n
She recalled that her two years in Missoula, Montana \u2013 home of the state\u2019s main university \u2013 between 2014 and 2016 proved transform\u00adative for her writing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing there kind of unlocked something,\u201d she says. She hastens to add that Montana\u2019s university town is almost certainly a more expensive place to live than London.<\/p>\n
Whatever success she ultimately enjoys with Greyhound, Joanna seems unlikely to quit her day job at the University of the Arts. She has taught creative writing \u201coff and on since 1999\u201d.<\/p>\n
She still exudes enthusiasm for her work. She describes her students as \u201cdiverse and very keen, up for reading. I had an 18-year-old student from T\u00fcrkiye and an 80-year-old from Essex in the same classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all the elements of personal memoir and anecdotal observation of life on the interstate buses, Greyhound is a deeply researched book. Despite her anger at Big Tech, Joanna readily acknowledges that she relies heavily on the JStor digital journal, though her most crucial resource remains the Camden-based British Library. Without it, she says, \u201cliving in London wouldn\u2019t be the same\u201d.<\/p>\n
An especially astonishing section of the book deals with Amarillo, a small city in the Texas Panhandle, a region dominated by industrial scale cattle farming , producing roughly a fifth of all US beef. Amarillo left an olfactory impression, an overpowering pong from what she describes as \u201cshit lagoons\u201d 45 miles away. Tens of thousands of calves face months of systematic overfeeding before their slaughter. The byproducts are tonnes of manure and a windswept \u201cfaecal dust,\u201d which descends periodically on Amarillo, as a \u201cgiant brownish grey cloud\u201d.<\/p>\n
Amarillo struggles under an odour generated by \u201cBig Ag, intensive cattle farming and unfettered greed\u201d.<\/p>\n
Joanna pulls no punches in exposing the overweening power of the Texas Cattle Feeders\u2019 Association lobby group. She braced herself for potential legal comeback by \u201ccompiling something like 288 footnotes\u201d. After all, this was an organisation that had sued, albeit unsuccessfully, the billionaire queen of US daytime TV, Oprah Winfrey.<\/p>\n
At the same time and as a sign of Joanna\u2019s generosity of spirit, she felt genuine happiness on learning from a Greyhound employee that his brother had gained a $28.50-an-hour job at a Tyson meat processing plant with the crucial \u201cperk\u201d of health insurance.<\/p>\n
As we said our goodbyes, I left impressed by Joanna\u2019s quiet courage in exploring some of the darker recesses of a broken \u201cAmerican dream\u201d, and having captured some of the nation\u2019s contradictions for the rest of us. I look forward to her future pursuit of answers to the question, \u201chow can we live on the earth in a harmonious way?\u201d<\/p>\n
We shared the view that for most of us \u201ca pure life is impossible\u201d and a cautious optimism that collectively we just might \u201cchange the system.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Greyhound. By Joanna Pocock. \u00a314.99, Fitzcarraldo Editions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joanna Pocock [Ione Saizar] BETWEEN the demands of teaching, book signings and an upcoming promotional tour, Joanna Pocock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,48391,61,60,1428,1429,1430],"class_list":["post-72674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-george-binette","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-the-camden-new-journal","tag-the-islington-tribune","tag-west-end-extra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}