Joanna Pocock [Ione Saizar]

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 café in Hackney’s gentrified Broadway Market.

Inevitably, we focused on her self-described “hybrid book,” Greyhound. Her second major work, stretching to 400 pages, has rightly garnered critical praise.

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’s poor.

Joanna drew heavily on the journals she compiled during two extensive journeys on Greyhounds 17 years apart – 2006 and 2023 – 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”.

What she has achieved “after about 12 versions” is a remarkable book that interweaves memoir, commentary on several earlier writers’ works, reportage and observations on both the built and natural environment.

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’s Trinity College followed. She eventually gained a degree at the Ontario College of Art.

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.

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,” Joanna replied, adding that she was keen on “taking the [post-Covid] temperature – before times and after times”.

She’s no Covid sceptic. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, she didn’t question the case for lockdowns but feels we have witnessed “a proliferation of mistrust”. 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, qualitatively worse 17 years after her first journey, compounded by “the absence of health care [for many] – it’s barbaric at some level”.

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 “a changed city”.

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 “the appification of travel… Everything seems outsourced to our phone and [digital] devices. This gives me a sense of existential dread.” She spoke 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. 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.

She witnessed “a lot of people being kind to each other. The ‘little people’ often do care, but don’t have the power.”

She recalled that her two years in Missoula, Montana – home of the state’s main university – between 2014 and 2016 proved transform­ative for her writing.

“Being there kind of unlocked something,” she says. 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, Joanna seems unlikely to quit her day job at the University of the Arts. She has taught creative writing “off and on since 1999”.

She still 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.”

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, “living in London wouldn’t be the same”.

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 “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, as a “giant brownish grey cloud”.

Amarillo struggles under an odour generated by “Big Ag, intensive cattle farming and unfettered greed”.

Joanna 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.

At the same time and as a sign of Joanna’s 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 “perk” of health insurance.

As we said our goodbyes, I left impressed by Joanna’s quiet courage in exploring some of the darker recesses of a broken “American dream”, 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 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