Joanna Pocock [Ione Saizar]

BETWEEN the demands of teaching, book signings and an upcoming promotional tour, Joanna Pocock found over an hour to chat with me in the cosy confines of a Broadway Market café, a low-key but undeniable embodiment of Hackney’s gentrification. Midst brief downpours outside, our meandering conversation ranged across regional accents, her far from happy times in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the cardinal sin of appearing in a supermarket clad in pyjamas and slippers (definitely not one she has committed). Inevitably, though, we focused on her self-described “hybrid book”, Greyhound. Her second major work, stretching to some 400 pages, appeared in mid-August and has rightly garnered critical praise.

The book takes its name from the not quite century-old US coach company. Greyhound buses have often provided the only form of public transportation available across vast swathes of the United States, especially for those on modest incomes. Pocock drew heavily on the journals she compiled during two extensive journeys on Greyhounds 17 years apart – 2006 and 2023 – through the US 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 “human folly . . . and most importantly an environmental catastrophe”. Having spent my own afternoon in Vegas in 35C temperatures in July 2006, I can only agree with her assessment: “None of this should be here.”

Vegas, of course, is a gargantuan drain on water supplies in a region dominated by large stretches of desert. Pocock reports that a sole property, owned by a prince from Brunei, in the city’s Spanish Trails neighbourhood, consumed 12.327 million gallons on its own in 2020.

What she has achieved “after about 12 versions” by her own account is a remarkable book that interweaves memoir, commentary on several earlier writers’ works that had drawn on transcontinental journeys, reportage and observations on both the built and natural environment into a nigh seamless whole.

One of seven children, raised in suburban Ottawa, the Canadian capital situated between Toronto and Montreal, Pocock was keen to escape what she saw as a somewhat dull existence. After finishing secondary school, she followed an older sister to Toronto. She endured a miserable two years at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College before abandoning her course and eventually pursuing a degree at the Ontario College of Art. In 1990, Pocock, a dual Canadian-Irish national by then in her mid-20s, arrived in London and has spent much of the ensuing 35 years in the capital.

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? “Curiosity about the country and also about myself,” Pocock replied, adding that she was keen on “taking the temperature – before times and after times.” She was referring to the Covid pandemic and its ongoing aftermath.

Pocock is no Covid sceptic. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, she didn’t necessarily question the case for lockdowns but feels we have witnessed “a proliferation of mistrust,” not least in the US. She speaks of damage to “the collective psyche,” perhaps reflecting “the unintended consequences of conscious actions”.

Much of the America she chronicled in 2023 was a poorer, uglier place. She bears witness to “alarming levels of poverty, disenfranchisement, addiction and hopelessness.” In particular, she remains shocked by the scale of the opioid crisis, already evident in 2006, but qualitatively worse 17 years later, compounded by “the absence of health care [for many] – it’s barbaric at some level”.

Having seen so many ravaged lives day-after-day in the vicinity of Greyhound bus stations in several US cities and having to use station restrooms with excrement-stained walls, Pocock recently saw first-hand that her native Canada has hardly been immune. During a late summer visit to Toronto, she found “a changed city.” On a Toronto subway carriage, she witnessed a woman collapse from a Fentanyl overdose and in general there were “a lot more homeless people, a lot more drugs on the streets.” Policing had also become more overtly aggressive with city cops almost literally sweeping the streets of the unhoused in the run-up to Toronto’s annual Labour Day parade.

There is no overarching ideological framework to Pocock’s work, but she is an eloquent commentator on environmental degradation, clearly driven by capitalist imperatives. She is particularly scathing about the impact of Big Tech on our lives. During her second US journey, she became ever more acutely aware of “the appification of travel . . . Everything seems outsourced to our phone and [digital] devices. This gives me a sense of existential dread.” She goes on to speak of the “colonisation of a new reality by Big Tech” and the difficulty of living our everyday lives “for these constantly cyber-mediated transactions.”

Her relationship with the United States is deeply ambivalent. There is often a controlled, but passionate anger at inequality, waste and the remorseless squandering of natural resources in Pocock’s prose even as she remains awestruck by countless stars in the sky over New Mexico. She witnessed “a lot of people being kind to each other. The ‘little people’ often do care, but don’t have the power.”

Pocock recalled that her two years in Missoula, Montana – home of the state’s main university – between 2014 and ‘16 proved transformative in the development of her writing. “Being there kind of unlocked something,” she told me. Talk of Missoula sparks enthusiasm in Pocock, as well as challenging my own Northeastern US preconceptions of this vast Rocky Mountain state. She hastens to add that Montana’s university town is almost certainly a more expensive place to live than London!

Whatever success she ultimately enjoys with Greyhound, Pocock seems unlikely to quit her day job. She has taught creative writing “off and on since 1999”. In contrast to many university lecturers I’ve met in recent years, Pocock exudes enthusiasm for her work. She describes her students as “diverse and very keen, up for reading. I had an 18-year-old student from Türkiye and an 80-year-old from Essex in the same classroom.” To date she has retained the freedom to design the courses she teaches and “no one’s breathing down my neck”.

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, Pocock readily acknowledges that she relies heavily on the JStor digital journal, though her most crucial resource remains the Camden-based British Library (BL). Without the BL, “living in London wouldn’t be the same.” (Coincidentally, I learned soon after our conversation that PCS union members at the BL are currently balloting for strike action).

An especially astonishing section of the book deals with Amarillo, Texas, a small city in the centre of the Texas Panhandle, a region dominated by cattle farming on an industrial scale, producing roughly a fifth of all the beef marketed in the US. Amarillo left an olfactory impression, an overpowering pong from what she describes as “shit lagoons” 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 “faecal dust,” which descends periodically on Amarillo, obscuring the sun midst a “giant brownish grey cloud”.

Amarillo and its environs struggle under an odour generated by “Big Ag, intensive cattle farming and unfettered greed.” In the pages that follow she pulls no punches in exposing the overweening power of the Texas Cattle Feeders’ Association lobby group. She braced herself for potential legal comeback by “compiling something like 288 footnotes.” After all, this was an organisation that had sued, albeit unsuccessfully, the billionaire queen of US daytime TV, Oprah Winfrey, for having allegedly driven down the price of beef.

At the same time and as a sign of Pocock’s generosity of spirit, she was able to feel a genuine happiness on learning from a Greyhound employee at Amarillo’s bus station that his brother had gained a $28.50-an-hour job at a Tyson meat processing plant with the crucial “perk” of health insurance.

As we said our good-byes under east London’s overcast skies, I left impressed by Pocock’s quiet courage in having explored some of the darker recesses of a broken

“American dream,” not once but twice, and having captured some of the nation’s contradictions for the rest of us. I look forward to her future pursuit of answers to the question, “how can we live on the earth in a harmonious way?” We certainly shared the view that for most of us “a pure life is impossible” and a cautious optimism that collectively we just might “change the system.”

• Greyhound. By Joanna Pocock. £14.99, Fitzcarraldo Editions