If you’re here because you just watched the PBS Wisconsin special “Michael Perry: Where I Come From,” here’s a quick intro to Mike’s work.

This is the book that started it all:

The rest of Mike’s books, live humor recordings, and music albums are here.

And if you’d like to know when Mike has a new book out, or will be performing near you, please sign up for the two-tier mailing list.

Mike is headed over to the studios now. You can stream the special live right here. 7 pm Central time.

Every week the Wisconsin State Journal runs “Roughneck Grace,” a weekly column written by Mike (many of the columns will be adapted from Mike’s Tent Show Radio monologues). This week’s column “Conceptual Art in a Pickup Truck” can be seen online here.

This interview goes off on some fresh tangents. My favorite quote (if I may quote myself):

“I was the third or fourth funniest person in my family; I just didn’t know how to fix a tractor. So I had to figure out how to do something.”

You can watch PBS Wisconsin on your television or stream the special here tonight at 7 pm Central time.

Just spent a week creating and performing with a fascinating batch of artists, famous and not. It was an invigorating, challenging, uplifting, disorienting (in the best sense) experience. Now they have scattered around the world, leaving their work to echo where it will. The experience highlights my appreciation for the photo above, taken a couple weeks back with a man named George who–along with other community members–volunteers his time to study literacy with inmates at a county jail and allowed me the privilege of joining him for a session.

I wedged the visit in during one of my unadorned minivan tours. A couple of hours with George and the fellows inside, then off to the next thing. But it was a powerful visit, with its own echoes. And now, after a week of bright lights and microphones and flash and avant-garde and art oddities, it was nice to look at this photo taken of of George and me that day, and remember all those like him, out there doing good where there is no spotlight. Doing good against all odds. Doing good even as so many are content to deceive or deride or derail. Sometimes it seems those losers are winning. And maybe they will. All the more reason to cherish the echoes left by George and his kind. And beyond cherishing, maybe add a little reverb of our own.