Micah Perks
Micah Perks is the author of the upcoming book of linked short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape (from Outpost19) and the novel What Becomes Us, winner of an Independent Publisher’s Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her memoir, Pagan Time, tells the story of her childhood in a log cabin on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness. She is also the author of We Are Gathered Here, a novel, and Alone in the Woods, a long personal essay. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, The Toast, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won an NEA, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC. More info and work at micahperks.com
Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, my daughter, and me
What do you do when fate hands you a wild daughter? As Micah recounts her struggles to raise a brave daughter and to keep her safe at the same time, she also tells the story of her own sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing two week solo adventure in the Adirondack Mountains as a teenager. Micah Perks’ candid short memoir takes an insightful look at women and the wild, the wildness she experienced as a child on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness, the ways women and wildness are depicted in movies and books like Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild, and the wilderness she discovers inside her own daughter.