Personalize Your Book

Garrison will be returning to Lake Wobegon for a short visit so we have decided to offer personalized copies of his 2 newest books: The Lake Wobegon Virus and That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life.   Whether it's a present to yourself or a gift for someone you know, a personally inscribed book makes for a wonderful keepsake!  Type in the general idea for your message and Garrison will personalize it followed by his signature. We will be limiting this to 150 copies of each book and the order cut off will be March 6th as Garrison will be inscribing each book between the 8th and 10th.

Order the Books:
Personalized copy of That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life >>>
Personalized copy of The Lake Wobegon Virus >>>

Blame it on the internet, why not?

Every time I mention Joe in my column, I get ferocious mail from a few readers describing him as a criminal and a moron who is out to destroy America, which I forgive them for, but Scripture says that’s not enough: “Bless them that curse you, pray for them which despitefully use you,” which is easy with email, you just say, “God bless you, sir” and press Delete, but Scripture is not geared for digital, it’s about the up close and personal, and what if someone in a red cap walked up to me and started yelling this stuff? People, I just plain don’t have time for that. I’m busy writing sonnets, I want to talk with my wife, baseball season starts soon, I don’t have time to hear about the landslide reelection that was stolen by Venezuelans. 

The Christian faith sets some very high standards: “Ye cannot be my disciples unless you give up all you possess,” Jesus said, which is disturbing to me as a homeowner with an IRA and a closet full of clothes. The guys sleeping on cardboard in the bus depot — are they former Episcopalians who gave up their apartments for discipleship? Did they used to go out to French restaurants and then to a musical with a big dance number, actors with hands over their heads, singing about a beautiful tomorrow, and one Sunday morning the verse from the Gospel of St. Luke hit them on the head and they gave up materialism? And what did their wives say? Renouncing materialism is not an individual decision: others are involved. Was St. Luke married? 

My wife and I enjoy materialism all the more in this pandemic. The coffeepot is basic to our life, and the laptop computer. We sit drinking coffee and talking and questions arise — did Nichols & May once do a sketch in which he kisses her passionately and while locked in the kiss she opens the corner of her mouth and exhales cigarette smoke Yes, and it’s on YouTube. The laptop holds the answers to all questions. Was Luke one of the twelve apostles? Nope. He came later, a disciple of Paul, a physician and a Gentile. How popular is the name “Gary”? Not so much. In 2020, only a few dozen American infant boys became Garyed, making it 774th on the list. (Liam is at the top. When I was born, in 1942, there were no Liams around. You could’ve aimed a fire hose down a crowded street and never dampened a Liam.) 

Where would we be without Google? We’d be at the library, wasting our lives searching through reference books in the basement, looking up odd facts. I googled, “Where would we be without Google?” the other day and in 39/100ths of a second Google located 4,530,000,000 results. If I spent one minute examining each result, it would take me thousands of years. So there’s your answer. Thanks to Google, we get enough information to kill us many times over. In the old days, we experienced the world directly through sight, sound, touch, and personal memory, and now we look for it in a computer. 

I worry about memory loss now after my cousin told me about a family reunion I had forgotten I put on years ago where there were bagpipers and her little daughter Maggie sat on my lap and said my eyebrows looked like caterpillars. I don’t think I’m demented, but how would I know? Thank goodness, my sister found pictures of the party on her computer. 

I was a writer back then, and now the young writers I know are working as Uber drivers because the publishing business is going the way of carriage-making and nobody I know is making a living from it. The Internet killed it, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And so I write sonnets for lefties to amuse people who consider me to be one.

When I think of you, Christina, my eyes get misty,
If any sensible man wished to be kissed he
Would want it to be your sweet lips.
You were a beautiful radical left-winger,
Marcher, protester, and folksinger,
With forty pins on your bosom for all your memberships.
I see you holding a sign on campus long ago,
The big letters: CAPITALISM HAS TO GO
Oh my darling Chris, if you kissed
Me I would gladly be a communist. 
Your kisses would set off bright sparks
That turn this man toward Karl Marx.
We’d find a cabin to get warm and spoony in
And there would be a Soviet union.

Posts the Host

(In reference to February 24, 2021 column, Excuse me while I have a few words with Joe)

Dear Sir,
While you’re suggesting President Joe take up bird hunting with a shotgun, perhaps memories of Dick Cheney blasting away at his hunting buddies is slipping your mind.
Andrew Kleeger

That was way back in the aughts, Andrew. Vice President Cheney was hunting quail and he turned to fire and his hunting partner was probably standing too close and he got some buckshot in his cheek and neck. If you’re going to get shot, there’s no better place to be than alongside the VP of the U.S. Secret Service tended to him, there was an ambulance nearby, he was flown by helicopter to a hospital. I ask you: do we allow an old mistake to rule our lives forever? If you’ve gone through divorce twice, does this mean you should avoid marriage forever? I say, NO. We learn from our mistakes. There was beer involved in the Cheney shooting. I assume the USSS would check the lunch basket for the clink of glass bottles. And my recommendation that Joe Biden take up pheasant hunting had everything to do with optics — I see no need for live ammunition. Just raising the gun and shooting is what we need to see in order to make the Democratic Party more viable in rural areas. I rest my case. 
GK

Although we would love Joe to come to South Dakota, we think fishing for trout in the Black Hills would be much better for his health.
Janna in South Dakota

Janna, fly-fishing involves a good deal of dexterity and also status-consciousness as to whether you tie your own flies and how well, and I don’t want Joe Biden to get in the middle of a stream and suffer a backlash and wind up with a hook in his left eyebrow, and all of it on video going viral. I see pheasant hunting as a pretty straightforward thing: you walk through the cornfield, the birds fly, you raise the rifle and shoot. The aim here is to move the Democratic Party into the mainstream of Midwestern life. Right now, the heartland sees it as the party of Croquet, Cross-Country Skiing, and Croissants. Work with me on this. I also think he should take up bowling. Anything but golf.
GK

I moved from New England in the ‘90s to teach at St. Olaf College, and your novels and PHC helped me understand and appreciate Minnesota. I’m back east now and read your new novel and memoir; I found the latter surprisingly moving. From your store I once bought a cup printed with a witty Keillorism and the print has long since disappeared and I forgot what it said. Any idea?
CG

Sorry about the inferior merchandise. I don’t think there’s a warranty on those coffee cups but frankly I wonder if they are safe for microwave or dishwashers — the show goes back a long time, you know, and some of these appliances were less powerful back then. My best guess about the witticism is: “Some luck lies not in getting what you want but getting what you have, which once you think about it you may realize is what you would have wanted had you known.” That would’ve been for the XXL cup. The regular cup might’ve said, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” Thanks for being in touch. 
GK

In the sailboat photo, JFK was holding the “tiller.” It was attached to the rudder, which was mostly underwater. The Navy taught me that at Annapolis, where I cast my first absentee presidential ballot for him, and sent it by mail to Ohio, where it was counted by my mother, a Republican poll worker. My dad grew up in Cottonwood, which is much like Lake Wobegon. He said that the best gift you can give someone is to make them laugh. Thanks for many good gifts.
Pete Schilling

My brudder was the sailor, not me, Pete; I didn’t know a rudder from a stick of butter. Now I do. But I’m glad if my ignorance made you laugh.  
GK

Sure would have been nice if you gave Trump half a chance. Not saying you had to like him or support him, simply saying that it would have been nice to be fair. Biden has tons of faults that you gloss over like a myopic old friend. 
Thomas Cook

What book do you recommend I read about him? But first, tell me if you think his landslide reelection was stolen by Venezuelan voting machines. 
 GK

Dear good man,
Many years ago, I forced my two little children to listen to ”A Prairie Home Companion” and their enthusiasm was frustratingly absent. But today, my 49-year-old daughter keeps me up to date with your writings.

More recently, I was a columnist for my small town’s newspaper and one of my last columns was about you. Even though I’m a South Carolinian, when I say to you, ”Bless your heart,” I mean it from this heart you have so blessed.
Charles Rowland

I read the column you sent, sir, and won’t print it here out of embarrassment at the praise, but I salute you for your stubbornness. A small-town South Carolinian who publicly defends a Northern Democrat is a brave man and your children have a good model to follow. We old retired guys need to demonstrate independence. I’ve admired Charles Portis of Arkansas for years and said so to people who looked at me in disbelief. I’m a George Jones fan. I have family in South Carolina and we disagree about what time the sun rises and everything else but I still love them all. Bless your heart right back. 
GK

This week on A Prairie Home Companion

Heather Masse 
“I am excited to share a little project I recorded remotely with my friend Ivan Rubenstein-Gillis.” Yes, there is new music from one of Garrison’s favorite duet partners. The pair recorded five cover songs from artists including Neil Young, Billy Joel, The Eurythmics, The Police, and Led Zeppelin. And Heather used her iPhone to create her first music video for “Walking on the Moon.”

Watch the video >>>
Get the music >>>

Billy Collins

Peter Ostroushko

The Download Project

Our store has undertaken a download project and has been updating the CD product pages to include detailed track listings and easy links for downloads from Amazon and iTunes. Each release will be promoted daily with classic stories or songs on our Facebook fanpage as part of our download project. So we hope you follow our fanpage to listen to many classic sketches or stories.

A Year in Lake Wobegon

One might think not a lot happens during a course of a year in a small town, but one would be wrong! This collection gathers 12 “above-average” stories representing all the goings-on in Lake Wobegon during one calendar year. Family gatherings, holiday celebrations, the predictable, the unexpected — it all happens in “the little town that time forgot and decades could not improve.” Each monologue is culled from episodes of A Prairie Home Companion that aired between 2014 and 2016. As an added bonus, liner notes contain a poem for each month written by Garrison Keillor.

Plus, between monologues you will hear music by the late Peter Ostroushko, and each CD ends with a full song that was originally performed on A Prairie Home Companion.

Stories: Polar Vortex – Train Robbery Romance – Mysterious Divorce – Mr. Berge & the Ice Melt – Mattress – Graduation Prank – Parade – Cemetery on the Hill – Bears – Lunar Eclipse – Thanksgiving – The Messiah

Full songs: “McCully’s Waltz” – “The Whalebone Feathers” – “Heart of the Heartland”

Listen to 'Heart of the Heartland' >>>
Get the CDs >>>