Perry, the accidental author, comes to Shawano

Michael Perry considers himself to be an accidental author, not even thinking about writing as a profession until after he was out of college.

Perry had planned to become a nurse originally, but his detour into writing has definitely reduced the chances he could be splattered with bodily fluids. Perry has been on the New York Times bestseller list, toured many different places to tell his tales of Midwest life and even had one of his memoirs turned into a stage play. He has produced some humorous albums, raised a couple of children and some chickens and still finds time every once in a while to put out fires in his community of New Auburn.

Now, Perry will be visiting Shawano in September to share stories from his various books with titles like “Population: 485,” “The Jesus Cow,” “Truck: A Love Story” and “Off Main Street.” With life being as serious as it is today, Perry believes folks can use a little humor now more than ever.

“Some of the ways that we’re mean to each other in this world are also the things that make us ridiculous and goofy,” Perry said. “That just leads to humor. I grew up in a place where pain was a reality, whether it was just hitting your thumb with a hammer or your best milk cow dying or just growing up poor, and one thing that roughnecks turned to all the time was humor. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but laugh at the ridiculousness of your fate.”

Perry’s presentation is expected to please locals when he talks about rural living at the Shawano Public Library on Sept. 17. With Shawano County being mostly rural, audiences will likely resonate with him as he talks about his chickens and volunteering with his local fire department, as well as how he was raised by farmers, loggers and truckers.

“I definitely try to tailor a little of what I do with wherever I’m going. But the thing that I always stress with my library and book events especially is that, if people are going to take time to come to an event like that, they ought to get a little bit of entertainment,” Perry said. “We always have a lot of fun. I always focus on the humorous aspect of how I write just because that works best in the live situation.”

Perry started off his writing career as a freelancer for various magazines, “back when magazines still existed,” he said. Back then, he considered book authors to be people living on either coast of the United States, not in the heart of farming country.

“I feel like I walked into it backwards, but once I got there, I just feel really fortunate,” Perry said. “Every morning when I get up, all I want to do is write.”

Perry self-published his first four books at a time before the era of print-on-demand through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online companies. He recalled having to find a local printer, print a pre-arranged number of books and then try to sell them one at a time. He remembered trying to get the names and contact information of each person who bought a book so he could notify them when his next book published.

What got the attention of publishing companies was when Perry wrote a story about volunteer firefighting for Esquire and another story about being an emergency medical technician for Salon. An agent from New York saw those articles and asked Perry if he could write a book based on those items. He was able to show the four books he’d published himself, and that’s when he signed with Harper Collins to get “Population: 485” published.

“That’s one of those books that, even today, continues to sell under the radar,” Perry said.

“Population: 485” was adapted for the stage when Perry was talking with a musician friend — who was a neighbor — and that friend suggested turning the book into a musical. Perry thought that meant a collaboration, but he soon realized the friend meant he needed to do it on his own. So he researched play scripts and holed himself up in a chicken coop once owned by renowned author Norbert Blei but now in possession of Write On, Door County to turn it into a script.

“I wasn’t allowed to come out,” Perry said. “I took a Thermos of coffee and two granola bars, and I wasn’t allowed to come out until I made a certain word count. Three days of doing that, I finished the draft.”

For a time, Perry took the script on the road and hired actors to make “Population: 485” come alive. The play has also been performed by a number of community theater groups, as well. There have been a couple of times when the book was optioned by Hollywood for a movie, but nothing has come of it, he said.

Another notable title in Perry’s collection is “The Jesus Cow,” a humorous novel about a farmer waking up one day to one of his Holstein cows having a calf whose spots looked like they formed an image of Jesus. He said it was fun because most of his books are non-fiction, but it was fun to create characters and a whole new world without real-world repercussions.

“Like any piece of fiction, it draws on real life,” Perry said. “There was a coffee house in Nashville, and they had this cinnamon bun that everyone said looked like the head of Mother Teresa, and it was called the nun bun. It just planted a seed in me about seeing a stain on a table or a wet spot on a concrete wall, and some people believe they’re seeing the image of Christ or the image of the Virgin Mary.”

Even though it’s a profession where he gets to sneak a little “art and heart” into his work, Perry said he approaches writing as a job that has to get done, no matter what.

“I write a weekly newspaper column, and I do it on Wednesdays,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I ran out of my special candles or if I didn’t feel inspired. There’s a job to do, and you turn it in, and you go on to the next thing.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com