Small Towns, Big Stories: Michael Perry in Conversation at Burlington Public Library

By: Maisha Hasan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Burlington Local-News.ca

 

Correction notice: this article has been corrected to note that Michael Perry’s talk is on March 4 rather than March 2; apologies for the inconvenience.

 

Burlington is one of the mid-sized cities in the GTHA that holds magic in its everyday stories — something bestselling author Michael Perry is well aware of. His work centres on small towns; the richness found outside major metropolitan centres has shaped his career. Perry will be coming to the Burlington Public Library (BPL) on Wednesday, March 4, 2026, for a virtual conversation via the Library Speakers Consortium, to discuss his genre-spanning works on small towns and the sincerity and humour they hold. 

 

Aside from being a bestselling author, Perry also works as a speaker, humourist, and volunteer firefighter — all products of his lived experience in his own small American Midwest town. That rural flavour permeates his written work, from his memoir, Population 485, to his debut work of fiction, The Jesus Cow.

 

Here, Perry speaks on growing up in a very small town and its effect on his work and life’s path. This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Your work often portrays rural towns as places layered with memory and quiet intensity. What draws you to centre small communities in your writing? 

It comes to me naturally because I grew up on a tiny little dairy farm in rural Wisconsin. It was a village of 383 people. [In school], we joked about town kids. I got to travel a lot starting at about 16, mostly just hitchhiking or working on ranches, so I [began] to see more of the world and meet all kinds of different folks with different lifestyles and different cultures. But I always return to the small town because that’s the scale I balance everything against. Not in a negative or positive sense, it’s just my frame of reference. 

 

For instance, when I first started going to New York City, I pretty quickly realized that everyone talks about this giant city, but New York is just thousands of small towns, really, because each block has its own personality and has its own people you begin to recognize even after a brief stay. I love travelling to big cities, but right now, as I’m talking to you, I’m looking out my writing window, and I can’t see anything but trees. I cherish the quiet of the rural area.

 

You’ve been a writer, a firefighter, a cowboy, a musician, a script writer, and a lot more. Do you see this as a product of rural life? If so, in what ways? 

I can answer that specifically with two things. Number one: none of it was planned. I’ve never been that person who writes down a list of goals. I have just gotten up each day, and kind of followed wherever chance led me. 

 

As far as the more specific relevance and relation to my rural upbringing, I was raised on a small dairy farm in a very large family. We were poor. I always rush to point out I was loved, and I never went to bed hungry. I had the two greatest privileges and advantages in the world. But having said that, there wasn’t money to throw around. And in order to survive, my dad, he milked cows, had a dairy, just a very small herd of milk cows. But then he also had a flock of sheep, and every winter we logged. So I grew up skidding logs and working on sawmills. 

 

It wasn’t until later in life that I realized what he had done, in his own small way, was created what corporations refer to as multiple revenue streams. So if the price of milk went down, or if the price of lumber went down, he wasn’t relying on just that one thing. 

 

I started working away from home, in another state, when I was 16, and then I got into college. I got a nursing degree, and I started working as a nurse. Then I got interested in writing, and I just started writing. I kind of reverted back to what my dad and the farmers I grew up with taught me, which was not to rely on just one thing. 

 

Why is humour such an integral part of your storytelling, and how do you balance it with heavier emotional themes?

I grew up with people who had a lot of bad luck. The way they dealt with it was to just keep going and often to make jokes about it. Whether it was a little thing like a piece of equipment breaking or a really awful thing like someone being killed or injured, you dealt with it, and then you realized that you couldn’t just dwell on it, and so you had to find ways to move on. Humour and dark humour were always a part of my upbringing. I’ve also spent many years volunteering as a firefighter. You learn that tragedy and comedy just live right next door to each other constantly. The other answer I’m always careful to give is that I can write about tragedy and humour within a page or a paragraph of each other because that’s how life unfolds.

 

How has the evolution of your humour impacted your writing?

A lot of my early humour was based on that roughneck, blue-collar working-class humour. Then, [it developed] as I travelled and read more, and met folks from all walks of life who fascinated me and were kind to me. I can also get humour sometimes by “heightening” my prose: making a silly joke, but using a really fancy word. Or making a joke about manure spreaders, but couching it in some form of existentialism. And part of that is just my gratitude for being allowed to exist in both worlds. 

 

You do podcasts and speeches, and you’ve even written for a trucking magazine. Where do your stylistic choices differ, and how do you figure out where humour fits?

When I was just starting out, I’d write anything to pay the rent. I learned pretty early how to not be precious about what I was doing and just realize that if I want the gig, my voice needs to match the publication. What all writers want, of course, is to write just what’s in their heart and head. I now get to do that, but I’m really grateful for all those days when I had to write within the strictures of very different publications. I used to write chapters for medical-legal textbooks, where you were writing to an audience of doctors and attorneys. It was not the most exciting work ever. Just writing those medical-legal chapters or writing that column every week, you maybe weren’t free to be as artistic as your dreams would lead you to hope to be, but you were writing, you were using words, you were arranging them. That muscle memory kicks in and actually accelerates your creative process when you are set free — or at least, that’s my theory. 

 

In difficult or uncertain times, people often question whether humour is necessary. What’s your response?

I was reading about George Orwell. He just returned from some sort of terrible war-torn scene. But then he was writing about the two days that he was home. He was taking care of his garden. Weeding your onions seems silly and insignificant if there’s a war happening, and yet, those onions still need weeding. 

 

I try to be reflective, thoughtful, and compassionate, and address the dark things, but then lighten them with some humour here and there. I try to at least give some thought to where the joke is coming from. Where is it landing? Again, I’m imperfect. I’m sure I’ve completely flubbed it many times. I’ve had people come up to me and admonish me and say, you’re being insensitive. I think sometimes we can take ourselves a little too seriously.  At what point do you have to give someone some grace? But it’s a balancing act. I know not everyone thinks I’m a genius. I read my one-star Amazon reviews. 

 

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Perry’s virtual talk takes place on Wednesday, March 4, at 2 p.m. through the Burlington Public Library and the Library Speakers Consortium; click here to register. Past virtual talks from the BPL-Library Speakers Consortium partnership can be found here.