Joanne Pocock to Speak about her Townships Memoir Geneva’s Scrapbook in Lennoxville
On Saturday May 27 the Lennoxville Library will partner with Shoreline Press and the Eastern Townships Resource Centre to host an author event featuring author Joanne Pocock in conversation with Jody Robinson, Executive Director of the Eastern Townships Research Centre.
As a sociologist Joanne Pocock has devoted her professional life to better understanding the experience of Quebec’s English speakers and the challenges that they face. Organisations like the Townshippers’ Association use her evidence-based research and analysis to add scientific weight to their advocacy work on behalf of anglophones.
With her research credentials and her PHD in sociology, it might surprise some to see that her newest publication is written in a very different register. Geneva’s Scrapbook: the art of piecing a life together is personal and poignant. It tells of her own coming of age in places like Waterville, Hatley, and Lennoxville during the politically turbulent ‘70s and ‘80s, weaving her story into the lived experience of generations of Townshipper women, in particular the Gaelic speaking Megantic County “Downhomers” driven from their homes in Scotland’s Western Isles during the Highland Clearances of the 1820s and forced to adapt to a very different way of life in rural Quebec.
The result, as Sharon Mccully, publisher of The Record puts it, is a book full of “insight into the rural character and sense of connection among Eastern Townshippers that sheds light on the enduring vitality of these resilient minority language communities,” but it is also “beautifully written with images and smells that conjure the warmth of a country kitchen.” Far from being at odds, Pocock’s sociological inquiry and her personal, poetic memoir writing inform and nourish each other. Her career as a researcher and advocate for minority language communities is the natural and logical continuation of her desire to probe and question the historical context and various factors that shaped her family and her community.
The May 27 event will be an informal and wide-ranging conversation between Pocock and Jody Robinson of the Eastern Townships Resource Centre about Geneva’s Scrapbook, the genesis of the book, the writing process, the historical context that inspired it, the transmission of knowledge between generations of women, and the importance of personal narrative in telling the story of a people. As an archivist and historian who leads an organisation dedicated to the preservation of materials showing the development of the Eastern Townships and its English-speaking communities from the beginning of colonisation to the present, and a Townshipper herself, Robinson is well-poised to engage with these questions. The dialogue between two generations of Townships women promises to be a lively and fascinating deep-dive into what it means to belong to this place.
The event starts at 4 p.m. on Saturday May 27 and will be held in the Upper Hall of the Lennoxville United Church. Tea and pastries will be served starting at 3:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.