I borrowed a copy of Michael Perry’s best-known book, “Population: 485,” from a small library in the flats with a population not much larger than his hometown.
The 2002 book still had a pocket in the back with a stamped list of reader check-out dates. It also included, in tiny librarian handwriting, a seven-word notation: “Funny sense of humor, a bit gory.” I emphasize that this minuscule opinion was penciled in among the check-out date stamps. It just seemed like a strange place for a review. But it’s quite accurate.
Perry’s memoir of life in a very small town focuses on New Auburn, Wis. He grew up there, moved away, and then moved back after 10 years. He re-integrated by joining the local fire department, which is why the book’s subtitle is “Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time.”
“If we get a call during a weekday, we are likely to have more fire trucks than firefighters to drive them,” Perry wrote. So he went on a lot of calls. Fortunately, he was a registered nurse and EMT, so not much got by him.
When you start peeling back the layers to see what Perry, 62, is made of, you have a lot of layers. Yes, he is a firefighter, a nurse, and an emergency medical technician. But he is also a cowboy, a farmer, a rancher, a poet, and a writer. And a singer and a musician. And a husband and a father. Today, he lives on a farm in rural Wisconsin, not far from his hometown, because he cherishes his roots. And he has found that he can do it all.
Perry went to the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and right out of college went to nursing school, paying for school by cowboying summers in Wyoming. Think about that: He was a teenage cowboy putting himself through nursing school. Later, he quit nursing because the hours interfered with community theater, which he was also interested in, and all the while, he was writing for hours and hours every day with no particular goal in mind. Just writing. He also hitch-hiked through Europe.
Perry recently came to Estes Park through the Library Speakers Consortium, which makes author interviews available as webinars to more than 500 library districts and hundreds of people at a time.
For the webinar, he was interviewed in his cluttered home office in Wisconsin. He was an interviewer’s dream — ask one question, and he was off and running, telling his story while barely pausing for a breath.
Perry said he was a voracious reader as a child and loved books, but never knew that he could become a writer.
“I didn’t know that you could get paid to write,” he said. “Writers and artists weren’t denigrated (in my hometown) … They just didn’t exist.”
He quit his last formal job more than 30 years ago and has been a writer ever since, publishing memoirs, essays, short stories, and poetry.
“I would get teased by guys in the fire department about going to dance recitals,” he said. “But they knew I would rush into a burning building, too.”
Perry said he’d been writing for nearly 10 years when, somewhere in New York, a random agent read one of his essays and gave him a call.
“Do you have anything else?” the agent asked. They began working together, and the result was the memoir “Population: 485.”
“For 23 years, it has been selling,” he said. “I go on tours to big cities, and it’s filled with folks who grew up in a place like that.”
Perry sings the praises of small towns but is well aware of the downsides, too.
“In a small town, you have to work together no matter what,” he said. “We probably don’t vote the same, but we need each other. However, there’s no place to hide in a small town. You can be 50 and still living down something that happened when you were 15.”
Still, Perry is very proud of the fact that, as he likes to put it, “I grew up on the wooden end of a pitchfork.”
And no one would have predicted that he would end up doing what he’s doing, which included writing about country music for 10 years, writing a newspaper column, and touring with his band, “Michael Perry and the Long Beds.”
“I love writing, and I’m so glad I get to do it,” he said. He is also a public speaker, available to open an EMT convention or a business gathering.
He knows about the twin collapse of small family farms and community newspapers. He moved his newspaper column to Substack and can be found at Michael Perry’s Voice Mail, which offers both free and paid subscriptions.
“I shoot the breeze into the microphone,” he said.
His webpage is SneezingCow.com, and his two most recent books are “Improbable Mentors and Happy Tangents” and “Forty Acres Deep.”
“I tour with my band and set up a table to sell my books,” Perry said. “I’m always hustling.”
Perry said he hopes his works will “open the door both ways.” Meaning, he wishes poets would go to stock car races and firefighters would go to poetry readings.
What a good thing to wish for.