PowellsBooks.Blog

[Editor's Note: Don't miss Michael Perry's reading at Powell's City of Books on Burnside on Thursday, May 14th!]

As I wrap up the week here and head off for book tour, I want to say thank you my wife Anneliese and my two little girls. I must say it again: I am a lucky knucklehead, I love what I do, and I am grateful to do it. Can't wait to hit the road and meet a whole bunch of you, thank you face to face. But back here at home, my wife will be preserving reality. I wrote this two years ago:

Earlier this year when I was booking speaking engagements and book tour commitments and setting up a smattering of jobs for the band, I promised Anneliese that in light of the new baby and the new farm, I would keep the summer as clear as possible. Naturally this got nibbled down some, and last I checked my calendar, ten days of August are shaded green for the road. But I had managed to keep July relatively clear

...

Yesterday I wrote of the singer Greg Brown referencing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Near as I can tell, Brown was referencing "Cierto Cansancio." I am not 100 percent certain of the following translation, but it goes something like this:

I am weary of chickens:
no one knows what they are thinking,
and they look at us with dry eyes
and consider us unimportant...

Regarding Neruda's chickens, I have heard Greg Brown say (and — full attribution — I have seen him similarly quoted): "It's true. They do, and we are...but it's hard to take that from a damn chicken."

I'd like to say I did the Neruda translation on my own, but I did not. My wife is fluent in Spanish, and she is raising our two girls to be bilingual. I have picked up some vocabulary, but the best I can manage is a Midwestern version of farm-boy Spanglish recently demonstrated when I cautioned my daughter Amy against running into the street with the phrase, "Cuidado dere, Snortburger."

I picked up the term cuidado during a visit to Mexico. I was ...

In the office (a room above the garage) early this morning, trying to get my homework done so we can spend the afternoon tearing up last year's chicken fence and replacing it with stouter panels to hold this year's pigs. They're due in June, the day after I finish my book tour.

Right now, listening to "Brotherhood of Man" by The Innocence Mission.  I mention that song on page 181 of Coop.  As with many writers, I use music to bust myself loose when coffee or the usual garden-variety neuroses prove insufficient.  As a roughneck-folk kinda guy, I owe great debts to people like Patty Griffin, Steve Earle, Waylon Jennings, Fred Eaglesmith, Nanci Griffith, Eric Taylor, John Prine, Loretta Lynn, Neko Case, on and on...  But I also cherish the time I spent in England, where I picked up some mopier, continental favorites.  On pages 178 through 179, I cite Marillion, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Bronski Beat.  As a fellow who's written a lot about small towns, I can tell you "Smalltown Boy" by Jimmy Somerville will expand your ...

One of the joys of seeing a new book hit the shelves is that I get to show the world a little more work by my good friends John and Julie. They shot the cover photo for Coop, and in an added bonus, the publisher used ten of their photographs as chapter headers.

John Shimon and Julie Lindemann self-portrait.
© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann

Here's a shot they took of me and my rooster.

You lift me up.
© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann

And here's a shot they took of one of our pigs bathing.

Certain high-tone spas charge a fortune for this very experience.
© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann

We sure enjoyed getting pigs and chickens, and I sure enjoyed writing about them. But if my fondest dreams came true, I would have a herd of big slow-moving Holsteins. I wouldn't milk them, you understand. Rather I'd ask that they arrange themselves artistically along the pastureland hillsides, because few things soothe my soul like the sight of black-and-white cows ranged across the distant ...

[Editor's Note: Read the Powells.com interview with Michael Perry.]

"Which came first, the chicken or the coop?"
— my wife, 2007

She didn't really say that, but she certainly earned the right. We first discussed the idea of getting chickens way back when we were dating. Shortly after that I began fantasizing about the perfect chicken coop. I came up with a lot of really terrific plans. And just kept coming up with them...even after we were married, and the chicks arrived...even after the chicks grew feathers...even after the chickens had been moved from the garage to the old pump house because the garage had gone to smelling like a rendering plant. At certain family meetings, it was posited that if I didn't get the coop built soon, we would settle into a perpetual Easter with every day an egg hunt.

With help from my buddy Mills, I did get the bloody thing built before the snow flew. And I don't mean bloody in the light English profanity sense. While constructing one of the walls, Mills managed to shoot himself through the finger ...