The 2009 Fox Cities Community Read was an area-wide collaborative program of Fox Cities libraries: Appleton, Kaukauna, Kimberly-Little Chute, Menasha, Neenah, and the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley. We hope the 2009 Community Read facilitated dialogue, cultivated a love of reading and promoted a sense of community.

January 2009 was the kick-off for the annual Fox Cities Reads.
We read the books of Michael Perry, a Wisconsin author of poignant and emotionally powerful stories of small town life. Many in the community came together for discussions, presentations, and related activities -- including Michael Perry and his band The Long Beds in a free performance at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center's Kimberly-Clark Theatre..

Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoir Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, and the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin, where he remains active as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com

Raised on a small dairy farm, Perry equates his writing career to cleaning calf pens – just keep shoveling, and eventually you’ve got a pile so big, someone will notice. Perry further prepared for the writing life by reading every Louis L’Amour cowboy book he could get his hands on – most of them twice. He then worked for five summers on a real ranch in Wyoming , a career cut short by his fear of horses and an incident in which he almost avoided a charging bull. Based on a series of informal conversations held around the ol’ branding fire, Perry still holds the record for being the only cowboy in all of Wyoming who was simultaneously attending nursing school, from which he graduated in 1987 after giving the commencement address in a hairdo combining mousse spikes on top, a mullet in back, and a moustache up front – otherwise known as the bad hair trifecta. Recently Perry has begun to lose his hair, and although his current classification varies depending on the lighting, he is definitely Bald Man Walking.

Perry has run a forklift, operated a backhoe, driven truck, worked as a proofreader and physical therapy aide and has distinguished himself as a licensed cycle rider by careening into a concrete bridge completely unassisted. He has worked for a surgeon, answered a suicide hotline, picked rock in the rain with an alcoholic transvestite, was a country music roadie in Switzerland , and once worked as a roller-skating Snoopy. He can run a pitchfork, milk a cow in the dark, and say “I don’t understand” in French, Greek and Norwegian. He has never been bucked off a horse, and contends that falling off doesn’t count. He is utterly unable to polka.

-- biographical content taken from www.sneezingcow.com/biography.htm, Oct 28, 2008
-- image taken from www.sneezingcow.com/

Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, And Gatemouth's Gator

Thirty-three previously published essays ruminating on the author's childhood and painting word portraits of unique people he's met.

Some of the pieces appeared in the two collections Perry self-published before HarperCollins released his memoir of life as a volunteer fireman in his Wisconsin hometown (Population 485, 2002); others appeared in various, generally very-small-circulation periodicals. They deserve wider release: Perry has a real talent for mining quirky humor from even the most mundane situations, and humor isn't his only strength. He may write about Mrs. Oregon's eyebrows looking as if they'd been applied with motor oil, but he also poignantly depicts such memorable figures as Mack Most, a meat-market worker whose six-year-old daughter experiences kidney failure. Perry's description of the grinning slaughterhouse veteran, who has killed untold numbers of animals, leaves a lasting impression, as does his funny tale of dismantling Big Boy, the grinning, chubby-cheeked statue that adorned the front of many a Big Boy restaurant. This little vignette quite naturally leads to a discussion of other outsized restaurant creations, such as the 50-foot-tall Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Meanwhile, lying somewhere in tone between the gritty realism of the story on Mack Most and the shaggy-dog absurdity of the Big Boy piece is a perceptive profile of Aaron Tippin, a country singer obsessed with trucks who has quite an extensive collection of them. Aaron's recollections of how he acquired each truck are warm and funny, and Perry perfectly conveys the singer's character.

A delightful mix of humor and pathos, touching the heart and tickling the funny bone.

"Perry, Michael: Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets and Gatemouth's Gator." Kirkus Reviews. 73.2 (Jan. 15, 2005): p108. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Appleton Public Library. 28 Oct. 2008
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Population, 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time

Being a volunteer EMT is no small challenge, even in a town as small as New Auburn, Wisconsin. Perry mixes his tales of heroic rescues with his stories of small-town life. His book opens with his team attempting to rescue a teenage girl from a disastrous car wreck on a dangerous bend of road. As part of the volunteer fire department, Perry--along with his brother and mother--pulls people from mangled cars and answers 911 calls from critically ill people. He also relates how New Auburn got its name (after going through three others), and shares the lives of his fellow volunteers, such as Beagle, a man who can't use the town's only gas station because both of his ex-wives work there. He details the technicalities of being a volunteer--the many terminologies one needs to memorize, and also crucial, life-saving techniques, such as CPR and controlling a house fire by puncturing a hole in its roof. Tragic at times, funny at others, Perry's memoir will appeal to anyone curious about small-town life.

Huntley, Kristine. "Perry, Michael. Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time." Booklist. 99.4 (Oct. 15, 2002): p368. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Appleton Public Library. 28 Oct. 2008
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Truck: A Love Story

A year in the life of a man and his truck.

The vehicle used by country chronicler Perry (Off Main Street, 2005, etc.) is his 1951 L-120 International Harvester pickup, altogether rusted and busted. The best repair, he's told, "would be to jack up the radiator cap and drive a new truck in under it!" But Perry resurrects the handsome old L-120. In this vivid Wisconsin Book of Days, the truck is put to work hauling plywood, paint and feed sacks. Perry portrays himself as a flannel-shirt-wearing prairie bachelor who eats his lunch in a sagging armchair. Among the topics he covers here are cooking, bad weather and good women. It's artful Americana, Homeboy Style. He owns three rifles, two shotguns and one revolver. He's a member of the New Auburn Volunteer Fire Department and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (Ean Claire) School of Nursing. He doesn't drink, he makes bruschetta for lunch and he appreciates the work of Raymond Loewy. He knows when to grow a deer-hunting beard and how to appreciate a painting. And he writes for a living. He can offer a fine set piece on such matters as dirt-track racing and the fire-department barbecue, as well as his growing relationship with the fetching Anneliese, a woman who also knows a bit about the fabric of a good life.

A reminder, by a talent of the hinterlands, to celebrate small-town life and to treasure human relationships.

"Perry, Michael: Truck: A Love Story." Kirkus Reviews. 74.16 (Aug. 15, 2006): p828. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Appleton Public Library. 28 Oct. 2008
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