Scars Have a Unique Power | Michael Perry and Aaron Gwynn on Lived Experience and Literary Becoming

Michael Perry grew up on a small dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. Aaron Gwynn was raised on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma. When they sit down together, it becomes immediately clear they've been living the same story from different angles. Both had mentors appear at exactly the right moment, teachers who recognized something in them before they recognized it themselves.

What ties them together runs deeper than farms or machinery. Both come from deeply faithful backgrounds, Michael from an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and Aaron from Pentecostalism. Both left, but not in anger. What stayed was the language - the cadence of the King James Bible, in that particular style, with its incantatory power. Michael has never taken a drug in his life but reads Cormac McCarthy and feels like he's hallucinating. Aaron spent years studying literature, learning to hear beneath the surface. This immersion in creative work separates them from people who've settled into rigid conviction. They've learned to listen rather than declare, and made habits out of practicing it they continue with today.

Near the end, Aaron quotes Cormac McCarthy: "Scars have the unique power to remind us that the past is real." Not as an idea, not as religion, but as a marker of lived experience. The past prints itself on the world or sometimes on you, and that's where the real work begins.

Watch Michael Perry meet Aaron Gwynn for the first time ever on Just Press Record, out now.