Perry apologizes for postponing the original interview time. He had an ambulance call. Before he settles back into the futon to face an onslaught of questions, he unzips the top of his bright blue and yellow ambulance coveralls, presses his palms to his eyes-pushing up the brim of his New Auburn Area Volunteer Fire Department cap-and groans a little, lamenting that he's still a little scattered from the call. He's also trying to sort out exactly how he's going to rearrange his life to travel to Arizona in four days for a magazine assignment he received just the day before. Free-lance writing is how Perry supports himself, and even though his first book through a major publisher is just days away from release, he can't refuse the work.

Perry, a New Auburn native who resettled in his hometown after 19 years away, writes about his experiences being reintroduced to the New Auburn community "one siren at a time," in his new nonfiction book. He is a New Auburn First Responder and a volunteer firefighter for the New Auburn Fire Department. He's also an EMT for the Chetek Ambulance Crew.

"They market this book as a memoir. But it's a book about a place," Perry says. "It's not about me; it's filled with characters, yes, but it's a book about a place. I had never intended to write about his area," Perry admits. "I moved back to New Auburn wanting to write from this area, because I love it here, and I thought what a cool thing it would be to live in New Auburn and write. But it just naturally progressed from there."

Life in New Auburn as a smalltown EMT/firefighter was not Perry's original idea for the book proposal he and his agent were shopping to New York publishers.

"I had been in the process of pitching a book on cowboys, of all things, because I used to work on a ranch," Perry explains. "The idea was to send me back to the ranch, and I'd do a story about what it was like to go back to the ranch 15 years later. We worked on the proposal for about six months, and the day my agent was leaving the office to pitch it, she glanced in the adjacent office on the way out and saw an advance book jacket on that agent's desk with a picture of a cowboy on it. She asked, 'What's this?' And the agent said, 'Oh, I've got this guy in his thirties, and he went back to work on this ranch....' So I got this letter from my agent-I still have it up on my wall-that says, 'Dear Mike: Arrgh! Call me.' That's all it says," Perry laughs.

The eleventh-hour cowboy showdown that killed the first book proposal was unfortunate, but Perry points out that it was actually an unforeseen blessing.

"In the meantime, I had written an essay for Esquire Magazine about volunteer firefighting, and then subsequently wrote an essay about rural EMS (Emergency Medical Service) for Salon.com," Perry explains. "When my agent saw them, she said, 'I think you can do a book on those.' I make most of my living writing magazine pieces-1,000 to 1,500 words. And to have someone say, '85,000 words-whatever you want,' was a real treat."

And so from his upstairs room on Main Street in New Auburn, Perry set out to capture the often unspoken beauty of life in upper northwest Wisconsin. For two years Perry nurtured and eventually harvested the characters, images, and words that would become Population: 485.

"The last three or four months were just intense," Perry says shaking his head. "I would write for 16-20 hours at a stretch, then sleep for six, get up and go again.

"I write every day, but when I've got a really big project, I will hit a point when I need momentum. There were times when I was stuck, so I would go out and write in my brother's cabin. That whole thing sounds very artsy, but it wasn't that at all. I had to force myself to do something, because it wasn't happening. So I would go out to my brother's cabin. I'd allow myself one granola bar, one thermos full of coffee, and then I had an old manual typewriter out there (there's no electricity). I was not allowed to go home until I had five single-spaced pages. Sometimes that was the only way I could make myself crank out work."

Perry also had the added distraction (sometimes welcomed) of ambulance or fire calls to work around while writing. It's all in the book-the toil of crafting words, the adrenaline rush of emergency calls, the reflective look at a hometown, the daunting pressures of donning the uniform of a "life-saver," the reminiscing with old-timers. Still, because of pressures from "The Industry," Perry was afraid his book would be pushed in the wrong direction.

"One of my greatest fears when they first asked me to write this book was that I'd get done and the marketing people would decide they were going to sell it as a 'lights-and-sirens hero book,'" Perry comments. "They didn't, and I'll be eternally grateful for that, even if it hurts the book's sales.

"Yeah, there is lots of excitement: fires and blood and crashes. But I spent a lot of time looking at the serious effects that has on us as neighbors and friends, and what it's like to deal with those things with people who aren't at all anonymous. To tell what it's like to pick someone's grandma up in the ambulance, and maybe she doesn't make it, and maybe you see that person in the store the next day.

"I'm not going for any big, higher ground," Perry quickly points out. "There is a lot of goofy stuff in the book. I make a lot of jokes. But the editors have allowed me to write about the more contemplative and serious sides of these things."

Perry says that one of the big signs that the publishers were supporting his vision for the book was the choice of the title, Population: 485.

"I didn't pick the title," Perry admits. "There was some talk early on about putting fire trucks and ambulances on the cover. I just said that I was really uncomfortable with that. I feel so fortunate to volunteer and be part of the ambulance service and fire department. It's a wonderful way to discover your community. So this isn't about flashing lights and heroes. It's just about what it's really like to try and live with your neighbors and try to help your neighbors once in a while, and having these responsibilities-and sometimes searing tragedy-that comes out of that.

"They had kicked out some titles, and they were fire and rescue titles. And then one day, somebody in New York-you always hear about these big bad marketing guys, but no-in this case, one of the publicists said, 'What about Population: 485?' That was perfect, because it describes that it's about a small town. It also makes it very clear that this is a story about a place. Not about me. Not about any one particular person."

The place, New Auburn, is sort of a character in and of itself in Perry's book; however, he also introduces readers to many of the charming, gruff, admirable, daft and just plain outrageous characters who inhabit the village. The depth of details Perry reveals about life in New Auburn, particularly about some of his friends, neighbors and fellow firefighters, might cause people to wonder whether he sacrificed longtime friendships to write some sort of exposé on smalltown living. He didn't.

"I hope that anyone who reads the book realizes first of all that I love this place, and I am grateful to the people who live here who make it such a neat place. Anything I write starts first with respect. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to make us show our warts," Perry adds. "But I'm showing my warts at the same time. Now, I tell goofy stories, but nobody gets more goofy stories told on themself more than me. That's obvious if you read the book. There are interesting characters in every single town-in Chetek in New Auburn, everywhere. And I'm just lucky in that I, a) get to live with them, and b) get to write about them occasionally.

"I talked to several of the people before I wrote the book," Perry explains. "And, again, it's very respectful. It's a true book, but I've also gone to great lengths to change specific details. Certainly all the names are changed, and in some cases even locations and identifying landmarks. I did this out of respect for the people.

"In a couple of cases, there's a character that some people might be able to recognize, and I sat down with him at my kitchen table and went over what I was writing and asked, 'Are you OK with this?'"

"I'm very aware that there are 485 people in New Auburn, and the truth is, that means there would be 485 different books. This is just my perspective, and I'm not always right," Perry states.

As a New Auburn native, he has a solid sense of the people and places that make this area unique. Perry can pick out details that might go unnoticed by a writer who is unfamiliar with the true nature of northwest Wisconsinites.

"So often with books like this, they send someone from the outside in to write, and it always ends up being, 'Look at these cute little country people,'" Perry says. "I don't make us look any better than we are, but at least it's being written from the inside. I live here, and this is what it's like. What I hope comes through is that it's written with respect."

As an insider, Perry has the "been there, done that" license to pull off a mildly humorous but heartwarming look at, say, smelt feeds without it coming off as a ticket to a "country bumpkin side show."

"I'm overwhelmed by the gift that such simple happiness is," Perry says of smalltown living. "It's astounding to walk from your house to the Legion hall and have some smelt with your neighbors. There are people in this world by the millions who can't even fathom such freedom, such bounty. Those are the kinds of things that make me feel so lucky to have been given the chance to write. It's fun to tell funny stories, and it's fun to tell a few stories about what it's like to fight a fire. But I feel really blessed to be able to write about just simple, beautiful things like smelt feeds," he chuckles. Beautiful and smelt in the same sentence? Then he proceeds, "I can joke and call it 'deep-fried bait,' but it's obvious that I show up every year and go back for several plates!"

Though the book stays true to simple beauty, Perry peppers some language throughout that might cause readers to reach for a dictionary about as often as they would go for a beer at a Jamboree Days softball tournament. Perry's intermixing of plain speak and spelling-bee terms is demonstrated well in his essay, "My People," where within the short span of two sentences, he effortlessly links a man in a "Hooters cap" to "the tools of the proselyte pushing orthodoxy via aphorism." While he generally keeps his language true to that used at the local coffee shop, as a wordsmith, Perry can't apologize for inserting a potentially difficult word if it is the correct word for the situation.

"I'm very nervous about the vocabulary," he admits. "There's nothing worse than someone who trots out a word to show off, so I'm very self-conscious about that. For a long time, I was really apologetic when the question of vocabulary came up. But as I've been thinking about it, I get less and less apologetic."

Perry mentions one of his favorite writers, Dylan Thomas, who spoke about using words for their "taste" as opposed to their meaning.

"I'm just beginning to understand that. I use the word 'vertiginous' in the book, and it's because if you look up vertiginous, that's exactly what I meant.

"The good news for readers is-do you think I didn't have to look that word up?" He laughs. "The truth is, I just didn't go, 'A-ha, vertiginous!' Writers aren't supposed to admit this, but I went to the thesaurus, and there was this word vertiginous. Now, you're in trouble with a thesaurus if you are just using it to always use six adjectives when only one will do. But if you go and find out vertiginous means exactly what you meant...there you go.

"The downside is I don't like the idea of people hitting a speed bump when they're reading. But I don't know in this day and age if we should feel sad about learning new words or relearning old ones. Anybody can use big words. To say that a girl is 'pulchritudinous' instead of saying she is 'cute,' now that's just silly," Perry smiles big. "But the reason those words are in the book is they are exactly the right word."

All anomalous words aside, Perry's book brings smalltown Wisconsin life into the mainstream. His publisher has lined up a book tour that will take him across the country to promote Population: 485. Perry will be hitting the road in the next few weeks, but he doesn't expect a cushy ride.

"It's not a huge book tour. I'm doing most of the driving myself," Perry notes. "Stephen King-they fly in and pick him up-but no, I'm driving the Impala. They are flying me to New York to do a reading out there, and a couple of other places I'll fly. But 90 percent of my book tour is me getting into my car and driving for five hours, finding a Motel 8 or 6, or whatever, then finding the book store and saying, 'Hey, how ya doin'?' to however many people show up, sign some books, then getting back in the Impala. It's great, actually, for a country boy who grew up shoveling calf pens. This seems fine for me."

Perry will be doing two readings in the area during October. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, he will make an appearance at the Northern Star Center for the Arts in Rice Lake. Look for details at a later date. Perry will also do a reading as part of the Festival of the Turning Leaves at the State Regional Arts Center in Eau Claire, Wis., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m. Check www.sneezingcow.com for more information on Perry's upcoming appearances.