Mike Pulley (right) with legendary Mexican psychotherapist Salvador Roquet (1920--1995). Pulley participated in and served as staff for many of Roquet's "convivials" or spiritual retreats in Northern California during the years 1988 to 1995. He also traveled with Roquet in 1991 and 1992 to bring medicine and supplies to the remote indigenous villages of the Mixe in Oaxaca. An account of Pulley's years with Roquet was published in the Sacramento News & Review

Mike Pulley (on right) was one of several featured readers at a 1995 celebration of a mural painted by beat artist and poet Jack Micheline (seated on left) in a back room of San Francisco's Abandoned Planet bookstore. "He reminds me of [Jack] Kerouac," said Micheline, when introducing Pulley to the Mission District audience. Micheline's own career was launched when Kerouac wrote the introduction to Micheline's first book, River of Red Wine (1958). The book was reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire Magazine.

Mike Pulley reading at Word Jam, a notorious open mic poetry series in Sacramento, Calif. that flourished from the late 1980s to 1993. The poetry series was launched by Sacramento poet Gene Black.

This photograph of Mike Pulley was taken by author William T. Vollmann in the late 1990s during one of Vollmann and Pulley's many train-hopping expeditions. Vollmann and Pulley spent several months train-hopping out of Sacramento. Pulley's experiences were written up in a feature article for Sacramento News & Review. Vollmann used the experience for a chapter in his novel "The Royal Family" (2000). Later, Vollmann expanded upon this research in a nonfiction book "Riding Toward Everywhere" (2008). In the photograph above, Pulley and Vollmann had just crawled out of an open boxcar near a field in the vicinity of Marysville, Calif. It was more than 100 degrees on this particular summer day. The duo had caught the train out of a Sacramento train yard, but when it stopped here, Vollmann and Pulley, staggered by the heat, gave up on the idled train and walked two miles into town where they caught a Greyhound back to Sacramento by evening. They headed for the nearest bar for a cold beer and called it a day.

Mike Pulley (on right) with poets A. D. Winans (on left) and the late Kell Robertson (center) at the Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach in the late 1990s. On this occasion, Pulley had rode down to San Francisco with the late poet Ann Menebroker to catch Robertson's performance with his band, the Last of the Museekans.

Mike Pulley's poem "The Father Poet" was published in The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology by Lamar University Literary Press in 2016.