Danger, Man Working

&quote;Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father's calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you've got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life's work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug-still the poets are my favorites-but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling.&quote; The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls &quote;shovel time&quote;-a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, &quote;It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.&quote;) But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: &quote;My greatest privilege,&quote; he says, &quote;lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another.&quote;