Surrender - Joanna Pocock

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Résumé :
The mid-life crisis handed to Joanna Pocock came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana. With their seven-year-old daughter in tow, Joanna and her husband packed up their house, filled one suitcase each, and left the rhythms of life in England behind for their great adventure in the American West. Blending personal memoir with insightful reportage and vivid nature writing, award-winning writer Joanna Pocock investigates the changing landscape of the West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in the Mountain States. She witnesses the annual tribal bison hunt near Yellowstone Park, where she meets a scavenger community honing ancestral skills. She joins Finisia Medrano, a transgender rewilder who for many years has been living on the 'hoop,' following her food source by seasonal migration. She attends the Ecosex Convergence -- an annual gathering of people who place their relationship with the earth above everything else -- and attends a workshop led by Reverend Teri Ciacchi, a sexologist, priestess of Aphrodite, and holistic spiritual healer in the Living Love Revolution Church. In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the outsider cultures of the old American frontier in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wildfires.

Biographie:

JOANNA POCOCK is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London, U.K. Her essays, reviews, and travel pieces have appeared in Distinctly Montana, Litro, the Sunday Independent, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, Orion, Tahoma Literary Review, and 3:AM, and on the Dark Mountain blog. She was a finalist for the 2017 Barry Lopez Narrative Nonfiction Award and the 2021 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Environmental Writing, and she won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in London and works as a freelance editor for a variety of publishers.