How great to welcome back Michael Perry! The acclaimed author returns with Visiting Tom: A Highway and the Road to Roughneck Grace. It’s the tale of Tom Hartwig, an old-timer best known locally for building and firing homemade cannons. We always have a good time with Michael, and you will too.
What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an eighty-two-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit—often with his young daughters in tow—author Michael Perry is about to find out.
Toiling in a shop Perry describes as “an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake,” Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and—now and then—batches of potentially “extralegal” explosives. As he approaches his sixtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, Tom, famous for driving a team of oxen in local parades, has an endless reservoir of stories dating back to days of his prize Model A, and an anti-authoritarian streak refreshed daily by the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps over 8 million vehicles past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man’s equanimity and ultimately—when he and Perry converse over the kitchen table as husbands and as the fathers of daughters—unvarnished tenderness.
Michael Perry has written for numerous publications, including Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and the Utne Reader. A contributing editor to Men’s Health, he lives in northern Wisconsin with his family.
