Personal Minutiae: The Millions Interviews Sasha Pearl
Author, artist, and bus driver Sasha Pearl recently republished an extraordinary book of poems with McSweeney’s. Pearl’s tender observations of the world come filtered through the eye of a lover. There’s humor in our bad behavior and grace that emanates from the steel box of Pearl’s bus.
Samantha Hunt: Can you tell me the birth story of Bus Poems1 and II Plus. How did you come to write this collection?
I was driving a school bus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a job, and every morning after dropping off the high schoolers, I had about 45 minutes to kill before picking up the first student on the middle school run. The bus company called this “staging”—when you wait somewhere in the bus before starting a route. I went one of two places: the Blake’s Lotta Burger parking lot (usually to use the restroom) or the Lobo Stadium parking lot. The break was from 7:15 to 8AM. I tried different things to take up the time. I watched a lot of TikTok. I did language lessons. Then my friend , who is an Albuquerque-based artist and writer (and now a professor at UNM) suggested writing poems, so I tried it. When I showed people the poems they laughed, which was very encouraging. So I made little Xeroxed books of them to send to friends.
