You know Michael Perry. He's the guy who writes funny, poignant memoirs about life in rural Wisconsin. He's written about his town ("Population 485"), his truck ("Truck") and his chickens and pigs ("Coop"). He's a musician and an essayist, and in pictures he is bald, strong, and sometimes holding farm animals.
His new book ("The Scavengers," in bookstores Sept. 2) is pretty much the opposite of everything he's done before. It's fiction — speculative fiction. The main character is a girl. And it's written for middle-grade readers. This all seemed worth asking about. So I did.
Q: Can you talk about what prompted such an enormous shift?
A: It was a convergence of elements, including the adventure stories I read as a child, my recent experiences as the father of two book-loving daughters, a fundamental need to pay for shoes and braces and a desire to write about someone other than my knuckle-headed self.
Q: What was the genesis of "The Scavengers"?
A: The seed was planted several years ago by a pair of editors who asked if I'd consider writing something for a younger audience. I held off, in part because I'm a respecter of genres. I didn't assume I could just switch gears and get traction. But then I started making notes and writing little scenes, including the one where Maggie decides to change her name to Ford Falcon. Then we had a rooster that couldn't crow properly. And from there …
Q: Why did you make the book nail-bitingly tense but also funny?
A: On long drives, when my daughters were listening to audiobooks, I noticed how they loved to discover a laugh in the middle of an otherwise cliffhanging adventure story.
