Among farmers, depression rates are high. So are thoughts of suicide and alcohol abuse. Western Wisconsin author Michael Perry tells the story of one troubled farmer in his novella, “Forty Acres Deep.”
Perry is in La Crosse this week for an event highlighting the need for mental health resources taking place at The Pump House on Saturday, Sept. 14.
Perry spoke with WPR’s Ezra Wall on “Morning Edition.”
Stay informed on the latest news
Sign up for WPR’s email newsletter.
"*" indicates required fields
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ezra Wall: When you write a story like “Forty Acres Deep,” do you just have a really good story in your head that you want to get out on paper? Or are you thinking, ‘OK, this is a really important issue that we need to shed light on?‘
Michael Perry: You know, it was a little bit of an evolution with this one. They all happen differently. Sometimes I know going in exactly what I’m going to write about it. Other times you just let it develop as you’re working on it.
What happened here is, several winters ago we had one of those winters where the snow just kept coming. Now, I don’t farm myself, but I grew up on a farm and now I live on a farm.
We have two big old pole barns and the snow was just stacking up day after day and I started to worry about them collapsing. And finally, it got to the point where several buildings in the neighborhood had gone down.
All across the state, farmers not only lost buildings but their cattle and in some cases, their lives.
So I was out there trying to save my shed and I was using torpedo heaters trying to melt the snow off. It was 2 in the morning and I was dragging the torpedo heater from one shed to the other.
I was sweaty and cussing and mad and feeling sorry for myself and falling over in the drifts and all of a sudden it just hit me. You know, I’m a writer with a couple of pole barns full of mostly junk. But if I was a farmer and my livelihood was in that pole barn, how would I feel?
And that was the seed of this story. And so I started to think about this farmer who was trying to save his sheds, and he knew if his sheds went down, he was in trouble.
EW: When you have a character like this — dealing with the loss of his wife, the loss of his son — how far down that dark path do you personally have to go? Are you writing from a somewhat objective point of view, or do you have to go all the way there with him?
MP: It’s a mix. When this book came out I got a lot of calls and texts and emails from friends saying, “Are you doing OK?”
The truth is it’s a conglomeration of things — I do come from a long line of depressive Scandinavians, so I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety for a long time. I’m one of the fortunate ones, though. I can usually just see my way through it.
I’m not being stoic about it, that’s just how I’m wired. But in my family, we have some serious depression and at times it has required intervention. So that was part of it.
Also, I am blessed to say that I just celebrated my 20th anniversary with a wife who is a partner in every way. And yet I know that I fail on a regular basis as a husband. I’m loyal, faithful and true, but it turns out there’s more to a successful marriage than that. And there are things said and unsaid in every marriage.
So, I was really hard on myself, looking at how I am in my marriage, and then inserted that into the character. And his troubles went to a much darker extreme than mine.
And then finally it’s just the issues that affect farmers where I live now where I grew up. Farmers are struggling all around me and I talk to them and I shoot the breeze at the Fire Hall when I’m up north where I came from.
So, I just drew on all of those things and then wove them together. The story is fiction. I made it up. But there’s a thread of reality through it all.
Michael Perry will appear at The Pump House with Dr. Michael Smith of Emplify Health by Gundersen. Perry will perform and Smith will lead a conversation about mental health and resources available in the Coulee Region.
If there’s something going on in western Wisconsin you think we should be talking about on “Morning Edition,” let us know about it by emailing southwest@wpr.org or western@wpr.org.
