Welcome to SneezingCow.com

(This is a pinned post summarizing the SneezingCow basics…scroll down for newer posts.)

Mike’s two most recent books: Improbable Mentors & Happy Tangents and Forty Acres Deep. (Indie booksellers scroll down to lower left for wholesale info). All the other books (including Population 485) and CDs and DVDs and T-shirts and can koozies and whatnots.

The Voice Mail page. (This is the weekly podcast — for free samples, click on the episodes without the miniature padlocks.)

Mike’s ability to spin his 20+ books and wide range of life experiences into humorous and heartfelt live presentations have put him in great demand as a public speaker. In addition to his one-man theater shows, Mike has delivered entertaining keynote addresses at conferences for software companies, hospitals and health care organizations, fire and EMS providers, farming and agricultural groups, national and regional utility cooperatives, business and economic development entities, governmental agencies, mental health organizations, dental hygienists, faith-based organizations, logging conventions, book festivals, MFA programs, libraries, and countless others. If you’re interested in retaining Mike for your event, please contact his booking agent here.

The mailing list signup (explained very specifically). We hope you’ll consider joining; it’s old-fashioned but way more loyal than social media. It’s also the best and most direct way to know when Mike’s got something new or is performing near you.

Upcoming live events.

My Grandma Perry loved the Milwaukee Brewers. I can still see her in the recliner over by the big wooden console stereo, tapping her Carlton 100 into a cut glass ashtray, hollering in exhortation or cussing in despair, depending on how the game was going. She carried her portable radio and its extendable antenna with her into the kitchen, down to the laundry room, and to the backyard when she’d sit in her lawn chair and let the dog run. To this day when I hear a Brewers game playing in another room, or through a screen window, I think of Grandma.

All of this to say, when I was given the opportunity to record a voiceover for the video below, I welcomed it as a fan myself, but I especially welcomed the chance to send one out in memory of the most loyal Brewers fan I ever knew, my late Grandma Perry:

I first started listening to Brewers games in high school. This was the era of manager Harvey Keunn’s “Harvey’s Wallbangers” and their World Series run. I remember listening to a playoff game on the radio in high school English class. But my most distinct memory is of cleaning the sheep barn in the spring, eyes watering from the ammonia, arms tired from wrenching forkfuls of matted manure loose and flinging them into the spreader, but the time passing easily to the sound of Bob Uecker narrating the day’s game on a farm truck radio (must have been the neighbor’s as ours didn’t have a radio). I recall names like Gorman Thomas, Cecil Cooper, Ben Oglivie, Pete Vuckovich, and Sixto Lezcano. Gantner, Yount, Molitor. And freezing at the crack of Ben Oglivie’s bat, then breaking into a huge grin as Bob Uecker’s voice rose to a shout, “Get up! Get up! Get outta here! Gone!”

Anyways, as we say. Regarding these jerseys, my two favorite things are the bobber (symbol of my childhood) and the word FORWARD–Wisconsin’s state motto and one I try to maintain myself. So: Here’s to Grandma Perry, and forward we go.

Sometimes you just gotta go talk to a banker. This is Mike’s third visit with Jerry the Banker, and the third time Jerry has had to drink N.A. beer because It’s Banker With A Beer but Mike doesn’t drink!

Michael Perry’s Voice Mail

A note from Mike:

Unless I slip and fall and break my larynx, I’m about to record the 300th episode of Michael Perry’s Voice Mail. We fired the first episode into the atmosphere on July 31, 2020, and have been putting one out pretty much once a week ever since. What is it, exactly? A mini-podcast? An email? A photo album? An audio essay? I know when I first conceived of it, I named it Voice Mail because I wanted it to come through like a call a friend left on your answering machine (the pioneer version of voice mail). Informal and relatively brief (10-15 minutes, give or take some either way), yet still worth your time. I wanted some of it to be polished, and I wanted some of it to be off the cuff. I wanted to include some behind-the-scenes stuff that gets at the day-to-day of what life as a self-employed writer/yapper/whatever-this-might-be is like. And I also wanted it–for lack of a more artful term–to be “value-added.” That is, sharing material that doesn’t appear in my books or on our other social media platforms. Sometimes that’s a peek at early drafts of a book or an essay in progress. Sometimes that’s a phone recording of a new song that’s still in the “figuring it out” stage. Sometimes it’s me digging into a box in the pole barn and revisiting a poem or a magazine piece or a pizza commercial I wrote back when I was still “Michael Ryan.” Over time we’ve also added what I call the “Marginalia” section, where we drop annotated excerpts from books I’m reading, or photos related to the audio or the essay, or just random moments of goofiness or peace.

At the end of the day, I’m a writer. No matter what form it takes, none of it happens if I don’t sit down alone and practice that craft. The Voice Mail project grows from that, and I hope serves to both uplift and expand the experience of the folks who subscribe and listen. Each week when I sit down to the microphone I imagine we’re at the kitchen table or cafe counter together, visiting.

Links to all the free episodes below, but first an example of recent Marginalia:

“Michael Perry’s Voice Mail” is subscription-based but once a month or so there is a free episode. For ease of access we have collected all the free episodes to date in one spot. Please click on any or all of the links below to listen to any and all of the free episodes. If you enjoy the episodes and would like to listen to the paid episodes for a month free on us, please send an email to [email protected].

EPISODES

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Thank You for Subscribing

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Forward

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Went out looking for sheds. Turned on my tracker. Walked 2.56 miles. Through hill and dale. Mud and burdock. Green dot is where I started. Red dot where I ended. Blue dot where I found the shed. Literally within view of the swing set.

But did get real close to a big ol’ fisher: