In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in response to the increasingly urgent climate crisis.
Blending personal memoir with insightful reportage and vivid nature writing, award-winning author and essayist 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 National 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.
Surrender is a keen and compelling examination of the outsider eco-cultures blossoming in the new American West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wildfires.
In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in response to the increasingly urgent climate crisis.
Blending personal memoir with insightful reportage and vivid nature writing, award-winning author and essayist 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 National 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.
Surrender is a keen and compelling examination of the outsider eco-cultures blossoming in the new American West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wildfires.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Sep 24, 2019 |
| Specifications | 384 pages | 5 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | environmentalism; ecosexual; Montana; American midwest; ecological; ecosystem; radical movements; mid-life crisis; climate change; Cultural anthropology; memoir; American studies; black and white photographs; Greta Thunberg; Educated Tara Westover; J.D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy; Cheryl Strayed; Edward Burtynsky; narrative nonfiction; personal narrative; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
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. |
| Written By |
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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. |
Winner, Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, 2019
Short-listed, Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction Prize, 2019
Short-listed, Arts Foundation Futures Award for Environmental Writing, 2019
Winner, A Quill & Quire Book of the Year, 2019
“A bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock’s elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.” —Spectator
“[A] poignant, insightful examination of the American West.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Joanna Pocock’s compelling debut, a tapestry of personal narrative and vibrant reporting, explores the fresh, unconventional, and often hopeful relationships with nature that are clashing with the tintype images of the American West. So much more than a memoir, Surrender is an important enquiry into the ground upon which we find and establish a home.” —Harley Rustad, author of Big Lonely Doug
“Surrender is an astonishing book about the fragility of nature, grief, the American West, the consolations of travel, and the exquisite agonies of mortal life. Pocock travels widely in time and space, through memories, visions, the deaths of her parents, and the birth of her child. Beautiful, wise, and deeply moving, this is ambulatory philosophy at its finest — for readers of Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Elkin, Garnette Cadogan, and Iain Sinclair.” —Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality
Land and water, flesh and blood. The planet and the body. Society and the person. Surrender maps these profound fractal relationships with a precision and sensitivity that stunned me. Here is a singular spiritual travelogue of the American West that is worthy of D. H. Lawrence.
” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air and Blood Will OutWritten with great narrative richness and an anthropologist’s intrepid gaze, Surrender is fascinating, urgent, and profoundly compelling. It is an important addition to nature’s library.
” —Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters