Population: 485 by Michael Perry

I realize Mike Perry didn’t create the genre of creative non-fiction, but if anyone is able to perfect it in my lifetime, I believe it will be him.

Population: 485, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At a Time is about Perry’s experiences on the volunteer fire department of the town in which he grew up, left for a spell, then returned to. As a 911 dispatcher, I’ve never come across a firefighter who can talk so pretty as Mike Perry. Yet he doesn’t try to sugar-coat what he’s reporting, and he doesn’t try to make a hero out of himself or anyone else.

I wrote an entire book about what it’s like to dispatch 911, but in Population: 485, Perry sums it up beautifully in a few short lines:

The dispatcher is hip-deep and detached all at once. Think of a football coach locked in an office during the game, calling plays and relaying them to the quarter-back based on reports given him by a fan on a cell phone.

Like the Hokey Pokey, that is what it’s all about.