Michael Perry
Michael Perry is a New York Times bestselling author, humorist and radio show host from New Auburn, Wisconsin.
Perry’s bestselling memoirs include Population 485, Truck: A Love Story, Coop, and Visiting Tom. Raised on a small Midwestern dairy farm, Perry put himself through nursing school while working on a ranch in Wyoming, then wound up writing by happy accident. He lives with his wife and two daughters in rural Wisconsin, where he serves on the local volunteer fire and rescue service and is an amateur pig farmer. He hosts the nationally-syndicated “Tent Show Radio,” performs widely as a humorist, and tours with his band the Long Beds (currently recording their third album for Amble Down Records). He has recorded three live humor albums including Never Stand Behind A Sneezing Cow and The Clodhopper Monologues, is currently finishing his first young adult novel, and can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com.
Perry’s essays and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Backpacker, Outside, Runner’s World, Salon.com, and he is a contributing editor to Men’s Health magazine. His writing assignments have taken him to the top of Mt. Rainier with Iraq War veterans, into the same room as the frozen head of Ted Williams, across the United States with truckers and country music singers, and—once—buck naked into a spray-tan booth.
In the essay collection Off Main Street, Perry wrote of how his nursing education prepared him to become a writer by training him in human assessment, and he credits singer-songwriters like Steve Earle and John Prine with helping him understand that art need not wear fancy clothes. Above all, he gives credit to his parents, of whom he says, “Anything good is because of them, everything else is simply not their fault.” His mother taught him to read and filled the house with books; his father taught him how to clean calf pens, of which Perry has written, “a childhood spent slinging manure – the metaphorical basis for a writing career.”
Perry has recently been involved in several musical collaborations, including as lyricist for Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Geoffrey Keezer, and as co-writer (with Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon) of the liner notes for the John Prine tribute album “Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows.” Perry also collaborated with Vernon and Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne on a project that began when Vernon approached Perry and said, “Say, you’re a nurse…” The results were bloody, but then that was the point.
Of all his experiences, Perry says the single most meaningful thing he has ever done is serving 12 years beside his neighbors on the New Auburn Area Fire Department.
Mike says:
If I had to sum up my ‘career’ in one word, it would be gratitude. I get to write and tell stories all around the country, then come home to be with my family and hang out at the local feed mill complaining about the price of feeder hogs. It’s a good life and I’m lucky to have it.
“Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millenia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat... ourselves.”
“Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go. _Population: 485_, p 178.”
“We spend this life looking for a center, a place where we can suspend without a wobble. The specific coordinates are elusive, scalable only by the heart. _Population: 485_, p 202”
“If you had gone around the table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question -- "Who among you is proud of this?" -- I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache.”
“Grievance is a sullen little boat, blown in the creepy breeze of ridiculous sighs.”
“I am no sort of art expert. I have only been to the Whitney once before, on a previous business visit that coincided with the Biennial. I enjoyed great swaths of that, although I was tempted to leave a note for several of the artists that said, "Great Start!" I would write it in crayon and add a smiley face so as not to seem rude. And I just do not have the patience for video installations, having yet to encounter one that conveys the absurdity of the human situation more effectively than a night spent channel surfing in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Rapid City. But I like to look at everything.”
“It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!”
“The pesto and angel hair are warm in the bowl on my lap, the fragrances of olive oil and basil blending the exotic and familiar, equal parts sunny Tuscan hillside and hometown dirt. A meal like this makes you want to live forever, if only for the scent of warm pesto in January.”
“I am content in bachelor life, but at moments like this, I admit to old-fashioned sexist longing. Sometimes I cook up comfort food, but cooking your own comfort food is akin to scratching your own back. Same sensation, less watts.”
“Cynicism is overrated, and far too easy. In small doses, cynicism--like irony--provides an essential tempering quality. But to wallow in it, and to dismiss things like hope and faith, is cowardly and unoriginal.”
“You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7.”
“It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth-one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.”
“It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.”
“[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.”
“We plunge into love with a naivete that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again.”
“Sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom you can admit your failings is a lasting comfort indeed. This is not about "mea culpa" as surrender, it is about "mea culpa" as mortar in binding together the uneven bricks of a human foundation.”
“I got religion in the third grade, and jeepers, did I need it. The devil was in me, and Hardy Biesterveld wasn't helping.”
“The amateur study of philosophy is like taking a few laps with a NASCAR driver. You’re not qualified to do it on your own, you have no business behind the wheel, but for a few laps or paragraphs, you’re right in there with ‘em, and when it’s all over, you’ve learned something. Or, as my local fire chief once said, you’ve simply exasperated the situation.”
“In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups -- big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups -- so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.”
“From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs.”
“It’s hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I’m pro-gun the same way I’m pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won’t be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.”
“I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factors—he is well-kempt, we are in a laundromat, and as a registered nurse, I have seen this sort of thing before—but they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger.”
“Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun.”
“Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context?p 342”
“We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.p 294”
“...here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.p 135”
“The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.p 127”
“Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can't help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material.p 97”
“Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.p 44”
“But I hope we don't burden Amy with the idea that living outside the city limits is an inherently pious act. That rural equals righteous.p 3”
“Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.”
“In specific moments of ground-level clarity, I recognize the dumbing down of the nation for what it is: an act of charity committed specifically for knotheads like me.”
“Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious.”
“As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted. . . ”
“Even as a guy with pickup truck sensibilities, I have always gone a little in the liver for patchouli.”
“There commenced an epic snit.”
“I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I've stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes.”