Regional Studies - Northeast & Middle Atlantic U.S., U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, New York (State) - State & Local History, Teachers (by subject or specialization) - Biography

Pagan Time: An American Childhood

Name: Pagan Time: An American Childhood
Author: Micah Perks
ISBN: 9781582431475

by Micah Perks

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Overview

For fans of Geoffrey Wolff's Age of Consent and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, a wrenching and beautiful memoir of a child's life in a sixties commune.
"Sometimes it seems like I've spent my life searching for the words that will open my childhood for you. It's always the same-even as I'm trying to use my story to knock down the wall between us, I can see that I'm turning myself into a freak, my childhood into a sideshow." Pagan Time is the story of Micah Perks's struggle to make comprehensible her unorthodox childhood. She was raised at her family's commune in the Adirondack wilderness, and at the core of her book lie memories of and feelings for her wildly eccentric father, a self-proclaimed pagan intent on demolishing conventional boundaries and morality. This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires-especially for the children involved. How could the campaign for a perfect home and family create such confusion and destruction? The sixties, for many, became a laboratory of hope and chaos, of good intentions run riot. "There is breathtaking beauty in this memoir... Micah Perks writes with great sympathy, subtlety, and precision about the explosive paradise of her youth." -Joanna Scott, author of Make Believe.

Author Biography: Micah Perks is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and currently lives in Santa Cruz where she teaches at the University of California.

Synopsis

With little more than a run-down Jeep and their newborn baby in tow, author Micah Perks' parents set out in 1963 to build a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school would become known as a place to send teens with drug addictions and emotional problems, children with whom Micah and her sister would grow up.

This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires — especially for the children involved. How could the campaign for a perfect home and family create such confusion and destruction? The '60s, for many, became a laboratory of hope and chaos, as young idealists tested the limits of possibility.

Micah Perks has cast her unflinching and precise eye on her own history and has illuminated not only those years of her childhood, but a wide-open moment that marked our culture for all time.

Publishers Weekly

Perks's breakneck memoir of her childhood on a commune in the Adirondacks is a vigorous, dead-on portrait of the joy and confusion of counterculture life in microcosm. Her idealistic mother grew up under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln while her charismatic English father came "from a long line of liars." Together they abandoned the cement of Brooklyn to found a school for troubled kids on 550 wooded acres in the Adirondacks, where Perks (We Are Gathered Here) grew up, precariously balanced between the solidity of her parents' love and the instability of a life without clear rules. She watches as her father bonds with the students at the Valley Commune School through constant, rigorous play by waging elaborate wars in the woods and taking spur of the moment road trips while her mother diligently reckons the books and provides steady, heartfelt affection amid her overwork. They strive to create a new world, complete with "free love," the edgy fun of no-holds-barred exploration and the topsy-turvy emotions that accompany an utter lack of boundaries. When things start to go awry, Perks keeps her eyes open and confronts the collapse of her parents' small utopia. Surrounded by this chaos, Perks herself is "exceptionally, always, all right." From her mature perspective, she looks at the children of hippies she now teaches at the University of California and observes: "They tend to be careful, lightly ironic, slightly morally anguished people." But through her frank, sensitive writing she shows they can also be funny, absolutely smart and great storytellers. (Sept. 30) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Depending on the reader's point of view, Perks's childhood can be viewed as an example of what now would be called extreme experiential learning or as documentation of a bad case of child neglect. During the late Sixties and early Seventies, Perks's parents submerged themselves and their children in a culture of free love and adventure at a commune in the Adirondacks, where they ran a boarding school for troubled children. Perks (We Are Gathered Here) takes the stories she collected from the main participants in her life there, including her parents, students, and teachers, and makes them her own in order to describe a complex time when idealism and the complications of real life collide. Perks's mother emerges as a loving woman trying to raise two girls in the confusion of the commune lifestyle, while her father takes shape as a combustible hippie who drinks rum to fuel his quirkiness. Perks makes no attempt to psychoanalyze her father's antics of mock wars, thievery, and seduction. Instead, she faces her unconventional childhood straight on and courageously documents her thoughts and interpretation of what she witnessed. A good book for nonfiction creative writers and students of pop culture, this complements recent works about growing up in the counterculture such as Lisa Michael's Split (LJ 8/98) and Wild Child, edited by Chelsea Cain (Seal, 2001). This thoughtful and unusual memoir is recommended for larger public and academic libraries. [See p. 198 for an interview with Perks. Ed.] Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board Lib., Pinellas Park, FL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A somewhat precious account of a run-of-the-mill bohemian childhood, by novelist Perks (We Are Gathered Here, 1996). "The time of my childhood was the nineteen sixties," begins the author, who immediately seeks to stifle all nascent yawns by admitting, "I know what you're thinking-marijuana, free love, Woodstock and Watts and Vietnam." Her 1960s were different (in the first place, she was too young at the time for sex or drugs), but they still conform in a general way to the pattern of the era. Her family lived in a remote town in the Adirondacks, where her parents were involved in the experimental Valley Commune School, which was part commune, part halfway home for disturbed adolescents. Her mother was from Brooklyn, her father from England. Jovial and well-read, they were not hippies exactly, but they had both dropped out of society to some degree-and they certainly didn't run a very tidy ship, either. Lessons were erratic, sometimes quite advanced, and often overlooked altogether. The author was sent for some time to the much more conventional local public school, where she found herself predictably out of sorts among classmates used to the daily routine and boredom of ordinary school life. For a while the entire family was taken back to England with Dad, who settled them for a while in Devon. Back in the States a few years later, the father becomes very involved in Buddhism. Eventually, the author grows up. As an adult, Perks doesn't know what to make of her childhood or her parents. Does she resent them or love them? Was she neglected or lucky? As in all memoirs of any depth, the answers here are bound to be both yes and no, but for some reason this ambivalence seems to go fartherthan usual in Perks's case-to the point that her story begins to seem as pointless to the reader as it does to the author herself.