Pagan Time: An American Childhood

by Micah Perks

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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 16, 2001

About the author

Micah Perks grew up in a log cabin on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness. She is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here, a memoir, Pagan Time, a long personal essay, Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter and Me and her new novel, What Becomes Us. Her short stories and essays have won five Pushcart Prize nominations, and three of them are available separately on audible: Ghost Deer, There Once Was A Man Who Longed For A Child, and King of Chains. Excerpts of her new novel, What Becomes Us, won an NEA and The New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She lives in Santa Cruz with her family where she co-directs the creative writing program at University of California, Santa Cruz. More info and work at micahperks.com

Reviews

[Marilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

surprising and tragic; this memoir took me down a road I didn't know I was travelling. Micah Perks life is so incredibly different than anyone I have ever encountered in person or in literature. She grew up with hippie parents and lived with no real boundaries nor realities for how the rest of American kids were growing up. While I found it tragic, I also found myself envious of having NOT grown up in the cookie cutter life style that we seem to have deemed the "American Dream". Her perspective seems to have flourished because of her life, not dimished, although you would have thought the opposite. Definitely worth reading if you are looking into your own childhood and seeking the answers to the patterns that shape your life.

[Dan White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my. What a beautifully crafted book. She is a beautiful writer, and yet the book has a strong narrative engine in addition to the gorgeous language (all too often in memoirs, those two valuable qualities seem to run up against each other). Now I know why Tobias Wolff is such a fan of Pagan Time. (and in terms of memoirs about American childhoods, this one is right up there with This Boy's Life).

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book until I got to the very end, where there was a rather nasty moment of smug dismissiveness toward a transgender person that, for this mother of a trans daughter, was like a slap in the face with a cold, wet towel. I couldn't even focus on the rest of the book after that. It was enough to obliterate any sense of sympathy I had toward her. Yuck.

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back at the stream, my sister's wool sweater is heavy with water, her rubber boots are filling. The stream is pulling at her so intently. She can't swim, but she thinks, Maybe I should just let go. And then she opens her hands and drops off the log. (In her memory, this is the defining moment of her childhood—she does not save herself.)
...
Bo is a few feet belong the log. He sees Beky tumbling towards him in the current. He wades in and grabs her sweater, hauls her out. Beky is choke-hollering. He looks around, it's just him and her. (This is Bo's crystallizing moment—grown-ups will not save you.) (53)

Perks is clear from the beginning that this is not the 60s memoir you might expect. It is not hippies and Woodstock and Malcolm X. But it is most decidedly counterculture, and in ways that get more complicated as the book goes on. She was raised on the campus of a school for 'problem' kids, in a quasi-commune run primarily by her father. Anarchy and non-monogamy and a father who at first seems an idealist and later less idealistic and more eccentric.

It's clear that, as a child, Perks couldn't imagine living outside this world, but also that, as she grew older, she started to understand how much it differed from the average American experience. And then...it was sort of a commune, but it wasn't equal; there were different roles and expectations for men and women, and Perks's father wanted to remain the one calling the shots. Whatever else this is a story of, it's not a story of utopia.

Interesting from a child's perspective, but it must have been especially fascinating from an adult's perspective.

[Lynette Towning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Read

I really enjoyed this book, Myself being born in 1960. It is a fun, eye opening read that clues You into life in the 1960s and early 70s

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you enjoy reading about other people's traumatic childhoods, like Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, and Jesus Land: A Memoir? If so, this is the book for you: short, fast-paced, with jaw-dropping moments in every chapter.

Micah Perks's parents started a commune/school for troubled teens in the Adirondacks in the late 1960s. That went as well as you can imagine. She wrote this book thirty years later, based on her own memories, interviews with both of her parents, her younger sister, and some of the other people who lived at Valley Commune School.

She opens the memoir explaining how difficult it was to explain her childhood experiences to classmates and others after she moved to a town in Vermont and started attending public school. Her choice to write much of the memoir in second person, as if to someone who is trying to imagine themselves in the story, is alternately interesting and awkward.

Read for Popsugar Reading Challenge 2025
Prompt #14: A book about a nontraditional education

[Jenn is reading · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very interesting read. I will admit, I expected more of a witchy vibe form this book given the title. However, the definition of Pagan is when on holds a religious belief other than main world religions. Which is exactly how the authors father came across.

It was definitely a childhood out of the ordinary, however, I think Perks could have emphasized a bit more on her family background. What brought us here. How did we end up in the Adirondacks. I need more.

Another thing that turned me away from this book was the lack of quotations. Dialogue between her mother, sister, members, etc. were not quoted and there were times that as I was reading, I wasn't aware that this is a discussion between two people. It was difficult for me to determine if this was a conversation with another person or a conversation with the author.

Overall, an interesting read but two stars mostly because of the writing, not the events.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this memoir! Most of the book is through the perspective of a wild little girl who makes up her own rules. She’s like a princess on the commune and I think the power dynamic of her family is very interesting. It’s such a complex story and I really enjoyed the writing style. There are no quotation marks, kinda like Sally Rooney books so it takes a minute to get used to. But the way Micah describes the setting paints the picture for me very well. As I read, I felt like I was there. If you liked this book, I’d recommend “The Girls” by Emma Cline.

Micah was my professor for Children’s Literature, so I loved how a large portion of the books she mentions in her memoir we read and analyzed in class! It honestly made reading this book perfect because I understood most literary references. Anyways you should definitely read this memoir, I finished it in a few days.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not an easy read for me. It was both fascinating and deeply disturbing sometimes at the same time. The story pulls you into a childhood shaped by chaos, isolation, and unconventional beliefs, and there were moments that left me unsettled in ways I didn’t expect. This memoir was incredibly difficult to process.

[Maurean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasn't really what I was expecting when I purchased it from Bargain Books. I suppose I expected a more idealized account of a 'hippie' childhood.

In "Pagan Times", the author, Micah Perks, recreates a truly fascinating account of growing up in an isolated, New Age commune in the Adirondacks during the late 60's. While she relates some disturbing visions of growing up in such eccentric surroundings, she shares her positive learning adventures with us in just as vivid and precise in detail.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit

[Kirstin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't like it. Not judging her life or anything, but I just didn't really like her writing style and the story didn't pull me in. I got about half way through it and the sense of everything on the brink of destruction was such a strong undercurrent, I decided not to spend the time with someone else's indecision about whether or not they were happy. Arcadia, another story about a commune, was a much better read.