Micah Perks


Micah Perks is an American fiction writer and memoirist. Her three books, We Are Gathered Here, Pagan Time, and What Becomes Us examine the utopian impulse in U.S. history.

Biography

Micah Perks grew up on a commune in the Adirondack Mountains. She later went to high school in Middlebury, Vermont, and received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She is a 2008 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship Grant, five Pushcart Prize nominations and has been a resident of the Blue Mountain Center several times. She has taught at Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is Professor of Literature and Co-Director of The Creative Writing Program, with her partner, Latin American/Latino critic Juan Poblete. They live in Santa Cruz, California with their four children.

Literary works

Novels

We Are Gathered Here is set in the 1880s. Regina Sartwell, a wealthy young woman with epilepsy, and Olive Honsinger, her maid, join in friendship and a fierce desire to escape Victorian conventions. As Perks describes in "Escaping the Ending," this novel is based on her great, great aunt Regina, who was imprisoned in her home because she had epilepsy. She jumped from her third floor window three times before she succeeded in killing herself. Perks writes: "I wanted to reach back in time and find another way out for her." In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Feb. 18, 1996, Erin J. Aubry writes "We are Gathered Here is nothing short of a woman's manifesto. It addresses an astonishing array of issues--independence, marriage, work, female companionship, goddess worship, pregnancy, abortion, emotional repression, sexual abuse--all in a tightly woven story that is as fanciful as it is grimly real...This is a book that reaches across more than 100 years of difference between its time and ours to affirm an eternal human need for love, with not a whit of energy lost in the translation."
What Becomes Us. In this novel, twin fetuses tell the story of their mild-mannered mother who abandons her controlling husband to start fresh in a small town in upstate New York. But her seemingly ideal neighbors are violently divided by the history Evie is teaching at the high school—the captivity and restoration of colonist Mary Rowlandson, a watershed conflict that leads our little narrators to ask big questions about love, survival, coveting the man next door and what exactly is a healthy appetite. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, writes "I've been obsessed with Mary Rowlandson for 20 years. Micah Perks writes about her with fireworks. This is a warm, wild, hilarious, eccentric and moving book."

Memoir

Pagan Time is a memoir about Perks' childhood growing up in an experimental commune school in the Adirondack Mountains during the sixties and early seventies. "This wonderful book has distilled the sixties into a rare and potent tincture. It is bittersweet, dangerous, full of mad enthusiasms, wild adventures, sexual excess, and genuine tragedy. Micah Perks never loses her perfect pitch...I could not put it down and cannot forget it." Peter Coyote

Short stories