Population: 485

I’ve been incommunicado of late, huddled at my computer, struggling with the opening of my new book – a contemporary story set in Elko, Nevada. I’ve only come up for air twice this week, once to visit Grandma Allie in the hospital, and once to thumb through this month’s The Writer, which features a story by Kurt Chandler on essayist Michael Perry. Chandler makes Perry’s book, Population: 485 – Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, sound like so much fun, I instantly ordered it from the library. (If I like it I’ll buy it, then read it again – Standard Operating Procedure.)

Chandler offers a para:

In the surrounding countryside, farmsteads with little red barns have been pretty much kicked in the head, replaced with monster dairies, turkey sheds, and vinyl-sided prefabs. … There is a sense of decline. Or worse, of dormancy in the wake of decline. But we are not dead here. We still have Friday-night football games. Polka dances. Bowling. If you know who to ask, you can still get yourself some moonshine, although methamphetamine has become the favored homebrew.

Check out Michael Perry’s website – his new book is Truck: A Love Story, which Chandler calls “…clever, poignant and often hilarious…”