This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with Joanna Pocock, author of Greyhound (Soft Skull Press).
About the book:
In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz—who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity. Greyhound is longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Book Circle Award for Criticism.
This conversation has been edited for time.
About Joanna:
Joanna Pocock is an Irish Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain Project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Award. She was short-listed for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2023 for Greyhound.
Mentioned in this episode:
“Literature of the road” by John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon, Simone de Beauvoir, Irma Kurtz, and Ethel Mannin
Anthropologist Marc Augé, who coined the term “non-place”
New Topographics, a group of American photographers—and a photography movement that began in 1975
Surrender: The Call of the American West by Joanna Pocock (House of Anansi Press)
Joanna Pocock recommends:
Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey by James Rorty (Legare Street Press)
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller (New Directions Publishing)
Black Boy by Richard Wright (HarperCollins)
America Day by Day by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman (University of California Press)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Random House)
An American Journey by Ethel Mannin (Hutchinson; Boiler House Press/Neglected Books will be reprinting this title in April 2026, with an introduction by Joanna!)
Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon (Back Bay Books)
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy (Counterpoint Press)
Lauren Korn recommends:
Greyhound (Soft Skull Press) and Surrender: The Call of the American West (House of Anansi Press) by Joanna Pocock
A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Vintage Books)
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Vintage Books)
Here After by Amy Lin (Zibby Publishing)
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller (Grove Press)
Stay True by Hua Hsu (Vintage Books)
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Alfred A. Knopf)
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton, Montana, a literary and community resource for the Bitterroot Valley—providing space to explore, discover, and share passions since 1974. More information can be found at Chapter1Bookstore.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss.
Funding for The Write Question comes from members of Montana Public Radio and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. A hat-tip to Humanities Montana for supporting this program since 2008.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
