Joanna Pocock’s Shelf Life

Joanna Pocock is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. In 2018, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, her book-length meditation on the shifting landscapes of the American West at a time of personal and ecological crisis. Surrender was published in the UK in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Canada by House of Anansi. An American edition was published in 2020. Her writing and photographs have appeared in Dark Mountain, Dazed & Confused, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, The New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and 3:AM among other publications. She is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of the Arts.  

How and where are you?
A light dusting of snow outside my window here in East London has cheered me up. It’s already January, and our winter has been so warm, which I find deeply unnerving. Thankfully colder, crisper days seem to have arrived.

What are you reading right now?
I have just finished Kate Briggs’ The Long Form. I think it is the only book I have ever come across that makes a connection between the beginnings of consciousness (in this case in the character of a baby) and the beginnings of the novel form (in the shape of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones). Briggs re-imagines what a novel can do, how much it can contain and how narrative can both expand and contract time and space for the reader – in much the same way time and space feels so elastic and mysterious when one is with a newborn as they learn clock time and the unnatural rhythms we impose on life.

Other books that I have read recently and absolutely loved are: Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink about the photographer W Eugene Smith. It’s also about jazz and how to live a life and make work according to one’s conscience. Doreen Cunningham’s Soundings beautifully and movingly connects the author’s relationship to whales with her role as a mother. Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death is also about motherhood, but from the point of view of a daughter. She is unsparing and honest in her examination of the process of a dying. Linn Ullman’s Unquiet blew me away. The novel (which reads more like memoir) shows the reader what it must have been like to grow up in the shadow of two loving but very complicated artists. Xiaolu Guo’s Radical: A Life of My Own is another brilliant memoir. The author meditates on desire, motherhood, writing and freedom through a deep dive into language. She watches herself with a nerve-wracking honesty.

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
My husband is a film-maker and I am a film nerd so we watch a lot of films. At the moment we seem to be in a South Korean phase. One of the most beautiful and poignant films I have seen in a long time is Poetry by director Lee Chang-dong. It is about a 60-year-old woman finding herself through writing – but it somehow avoids being sentimental. It’s stunning. His compatriot, Hong Sang-soo’s Rohmer-esque film The Woman Who Ran about a woman searching for meaning is quietly profound.

What did you read as a child?
I was severely dyslexic as a child so it took me a long time to get to the point where I could read for pleasure. For most of my childhood, reading was extremely difficult. Eventually after years of ‘special classes’ (as they were called when I was a kid), I was able to decipher the alphabet. The first book I truly loved – the first one to make real life disappear completely – was E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I cried and cried when I finished it. I still get stupidly sad thinking about Charlotte’s death.

One of my sister’s read me Alice in Wonderland which really opened my mind. Lewis Carroll made me see that you could do anything with language and that you could be playful with it.

My father was a photographer and an engineer. My mother was a librarian. Our house was full of books. Too full. In order to find a chair to sit on, you had to relocate several towering piles. Because of my dyslexia, I used to spend hours looking at my father’s photography books. I learned to read images before I could read text. I use photography a lot in my writing practice.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
The writer who gave me permission to write is Terry Tempest Williams. Her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place which links the rise and fall of Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the cancers in her own family showed me that you can write about the Earth in a way that profoundly connects land with the humans who live on it. In fact, the two are not separate or distinct.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is another touchstone for me. She demonstrates that you can write about political and environmental issues and do so with beautiful, fluid language. She doesn’t proselytise. The opening to that book reads like a novel. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is another such book: a work that takes its writing as seriously as its subject matter. His chapter ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ changed my view of how we can write about land.

As a young woman, just starting out, I devoured Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit along with Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. I was hungry to understand how women writers were able to make space for themselves at the literary table.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I am very lucky that Surrender was well received.

The responses that have touched me the most are from people who track me down via social media or via my agent to tell me how my book has affected them, what it has meant for them. Those are the stories that make me feel that what I am writing about really matters. I have made friends through people who have stumbled upon my book. Sometimes they are fellow writers; sometimes they are geographers or rewilders living nomadically or school teachers – a whole range. It’s been a wonderfully enriching experience to connect with people via my writing.

Tell us a little about your creative process.
My creative process is pretty chaotic. Ideas, words, phrases, bits of dialogue and situations often come to me in my dreams or on walks. When I get an idea, I have to write it down immediately. Or I lose it. I have a journal for that. I think best when I am moving. Once I’ve written something longhand I type it into my computer. Most of my work requires research. Being in London is a gift, as I can get my hands on pretty much any book at the British Library (that is, until the hacking of their system). I read whatever I can on the subject I am writing about and make notes as I read. I find that my subconscious takes over at this point and I begin formulating responses to what I am reading and have been thinking about, often in my sleep. I wake up with lines of text on my lips, which I write down. Then I shape my ideas and put them in order.

I never send a first draft of anything to an editor. I always sleep on my first draft and come to it fresh to edit and rework it. I do at least several drafts of a piece before sending it out. If it’s important, I will print it out and read a hard copy. I can’t edit properly on a screen. I love working with editors. They often see things (flaws or qualities) that I haven’t.

I always have several projects on the go. Each project has its own ‘pile’ in my study. They are like little mounds to be excavated when time permits. They are full of photos, books, notes. My writing area looks like a mess, but to me, I can see order. I would really like to be more organised, but at least with my pile-shaped filing system, I can access things quickly.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
In 2018, I sent a manuscript to the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. As I do with all submissions, I pressed ‘send’ and then immediately forced myself to forget I’d submitted. It’s the only way to survive rejections and indifference. I was then called in for an interview. I thought I had botched it as I went off on a tangent about getting my period at an ecosex convergence in the woods and how I wasn’t supposed to get my period because I was in perimenopause. Afterwards, I felt like a complete idiot. Anyway, I won the prize and since then I have won a few other prizes and, well, I haven’t looked back. Fitzcarraldo are an absolute dream to work with. I love their list and I find the conversations I have with them about my writing and literature in general make me not only a better writer but a better person. I could not imagine being with a more wonderful publisher.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
My favourite piece of advice is from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.” She is referring to chopping wood. The same applies to writing.

What are you working on right now?
I am waiting for the editorial notes from Fitzcarraldo Editions for Greyhound, my second book in production with them. It’s finished, but it needs a final going over and maybe some cutting. I am also trawling through my photos to find images that will work with the text. I had over 40 photographs in my previous book, Surrender. I will probably have a similar number in Greyhound.

My third book, Gold Mine, has begun percolating and I am planning a research trip to Northern Ireland for it.


Like many writers, I wear several hats. I have just this moment handed in the introduction to a book being published by the University of Montana. It’s a wonderful novel by the poet and novelist Norman Macleod who lived in Missoula for many years; I am reading Leslie Jamison’s latest book, Splinters, which I have been asked to review; I am planning lectures for a creative writing course that I am teaching next week, along with a webinar I am running on the subject of Life Writing. I have also just handed in the manuscript for Hannah Vogel’s novel The Last Sane Woman which I proofread for Verso Books.

The next Dark Mountain anthology is gearing up. I am one of the editors, so I will be casting around for work from writers and artists to include in the book.

This term I am teaching three courses at the University of the Arts: Beginners Creative Writing, Life Writing, and Environmental Writing. So that will be intense but wonderful. I love teaching.


Days off are a rarity.