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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘photos’

Did Not Fly the Coop

The wind is still freight-training, so I’m not sayin’ we’re in the clear, but I did wake up three times last night to peer out of the window to see if the chicken coop (which is mounted on the running gear from an old haywagon) was still upright, and it was, and is now in the daylight.  I was worried, because when I was in there at dusk, she was just a-rockin’.  It was parked broadside to the wind and the rain had left the ground too soupy to move it.  So, as the blurry rain-whipped cellphone photo below demonstrates, I took measures…

That’s a ground anchor, a boomer, and the chain from my deer-skinner.

Chicken on Wheels

Once upon a time I wrote a book about (among other things) building a chicken coop:

Now we have a new project in the works…

Coop on Vacation

I’m taking a week to just hang out with my family.  We’re not going anywhere exotic, in fact most days we’re just knockin’ around the farm.  But posts for this week may or may not reflect reality or current events, as I’ve set them up to publish themselves so I can be off splitting firewood or toasting marshmallows or re-inventing myself as the Chicken Whisperer.

While we are very much enjoying our vacation right here on the farm (doing terrific things like picking up old bread bags stuck in the pine trees, cleaning the pole barn, and boiling down lard), some people (and some books) are going on real vacations:

Thank you MJ and Tim for the photo!

Rear View Mirror

Just came across these photos sent to me months ago.  They were taken at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington, during the Coop hardcover tour.  Photos like this always remind me how beautifully strange this life can be…a couple of hours in a bookstore, laughing and sharing stories with readers, then it’s back on the horse and on to the next spot, and suddenly a year has passed.  But when I revisit these photos and see the smiles and heartwarming connections (note two women, one wearing a UW-Eau Claire shirt and another a Point Beer shirt) (specific Cheesehead signals) it only reinforces my feeling that the fleeting nature of the moment makes it all the more precious.  This is why I always offer the blanket thank-you to anyone who makes the effort to attend any of my/our events.

A special thanks to the family posed in the last photo with me.  They are members of the faith in which I was raised and wrote about in Coop.  I cherished our conversation and their willingness to attend.

Thank You, Captain Tim

We are working on a new Long Beds album. I’ll explain more when the album is finished (it’ll be a few months).  For one of the songs, we needed about 7 seconds of the sound of an airplane.  Available online in roughly .32 seconds.

But why go online when you can record the real thing?  Here’s Jaime at work:

Jaime and the N3N

That’s a World War II vintage N3N.  An open-air two-seater.  Piloted from the rear cockpit by Captain Tim.  This is the airplane that appeared in Coop.

When the “work” was done, we all got to take a ride.

It was a pretty fun day.  “Pretty fun” is Midwestern Scandinavian for “YEEEEEHAAAAWWW!!!!”

Here’s some video: (more…)

Gratitude Night in St. Paul

Back in the hotel room after spending the evening at the Midwest Booksellers Association Trade Show.  I was on hand to say thanks for Coop being given a nice award.

I said thanks because the room was full of people who spend their every working day introducing readers to books, one by one, hand-to-hand.  I would be nowhere without them.  Above all I thanked them not so much for helping me tell my stories but for helping me share the stories of others…because it is in the unanticipated stories of others that readers seem to find resonance and – sometimes – a measure of peace.  With these comments I had my brother and his little family in mind.

Before the event, I signed a mountain of books.  This is only one stack.  There were many more.  Still, it seems easier than logging.  Again, a tip of the hardhat to my brother.

Pre-signing at MBA

After giving my heartfelt thanks, I used the remainder of my time to share critical insights related to bovine artificial insemination, because that’s what I think people expect at a literary gathering.

Most of all, though, I gawked.  I love my mostly non-literary life.  As in: I fed the pigs sour goat milk and old bread right before I left for this event (did shower first).  And took the dang garbage out to the mailbox.  But then a short drive later, I was listening to Neil Gaiman spin an effortless, wry, witty tale of how he came to discover he had accidentally become Midwestern – even as he spoke in his fabulous burbling English accent.  I got to talk shop with David Wroblewski, a gentle man and engaging conversationalist.  I was able to witness as Elizabeth Berg paid loving tribute to her parents.  I got to hear Todd Boss read a poem that brought my father to mind and tears to my eyes.  I got to look over three tables and think, “Holy shnikies, that’s Jonathan Safran Foer!“  I got to hear children’s book authors discuss the creation of books I’ve read to my own little girls.  And I got to meet some of the people who put my books in boxes and ship them all across the United States.

In short, it was kid-in-a-candy-store time.

Finally, in the category of things a guy never anticipates when he’s in nursing school twenty-some years back, I got Twittered by Neil Gaiman.  I would be a disingenuous fakey-fraud if I pretended that’s not the coolest thing since the new chickens started laying.  Thank you, sir.

The COOP Photos: Chapter 2

COOP Photo Chapter Two - Silos

Each chapter of Coop features a photograph taken by my friends John and Julie.  This is the photo at the head of Chapter Two.  These are the wooden silos that stood attached to my father’s barn since the day it was constructed.  They were marvelously done, made of many laminated strips of wood nailed together with thousands of hammer blows.  I remember shoveling silage early mornings before deer hunting and seeing the fuzzy buttons of frost on each nail head.  Dad only used the silos a couple of years.  Mostly they stood empty, and we used to scare ourselves by climbing them and looking down.  They seemed even taller than they were because each one had a five- or six-foot concrete-lined pit dug in it at the base.  Up at the very top there was a platform and railing covered in pigeon poop.  The roof was very low and if we crawled around up there during the day we’d hear the gritch-gritch of disturbed bats, which made us duck even lower and not want to put our fingers anywhere we couldn’t check first.  The gallery of snapshots below illustrates some of those details.

In the spring (much the same time as when the chapter heading photo was taken) I used to nestle with my back to the concrete in the space where the two silos curved together.  It was out of the wind, and I could feel the sun.  I wrote about this nook on page 162 of Coop.  There was another deeper nook on the other side of the silo that used to grow up with brush and my brother John and I would hide in there with our bows and arrows to ambush grackles when they came to steal from the corn crib.  Mom planted asparagus around the barnyard side of the silo decades ago, and it still pops up there every year.

The silos are gone now.  Dad had them taken down last year.  I wished he wouldn’t, and even made some contact with some barn restoration and vintage lumber folks, but in the end it just didn’t work out.  Salvaging an old wooden silo is something everyone always says “you should do”, and when you get right down to it, you find out why it so rarely happens.  Time and finance.  Meanwhile, Dad had done the numbers on how much it cost him to have the silo roof rebuilt (it was beginning to fold) and re-shingled, and with the year’s planting to be done and the roofers coming, opted instead to have my brother over with his track-hoe, and now the silos and all those nails and that concrete are buried deep for some other millennial generation to discover.  I am a sentimentalist and a preservationist, but I am slowly finding ways to appreciate the practicality of old farmer moves like this.  Writing about it in the next book.  In some ways, they are on to something about freedom.

Studying these photos while posting, I have only just now noticed that the black and white silo image is reversed, and that it is also reversed in the book.  Does that qualify as an “OOPS”?  It wouldn’t be the first time.  The cover image on the hardcover version of Truck is also reversed.

The COOP Photos: Chapter 1

COOP photo Chapter One - Woodpile

Each chapter of Coop features a photograph taken by my friends John and Julie.  This is the photo at the head of Chapter One.  That’s our actual firewood, the stuff I was splitting in Chapter One.  The tall plants between the firewood and the oak trees are nettles.  Big old honkers.  The pigs love nettles.  I was worried that this photo wouldn’t make sense in the book since the chapter is set in the dead of winter, but maybe it works to see the firewood drying in the sun for the winter to come.  What you see there is a fraction of what we need to make it through the winter.  I never did catch up that year.  Had to buy some firewood.  A real humiliation.  I did a video essay about the experience for Wisconsin Public Television.  Hoping one day they’ll make it available as a Clodhopper Report on YouTube so we can have a look.

This year I am happy to report that the woodpile is five times this size and growing.