| In Living with Limericks, Keillor posits that limericks are the poems that can be written in the empty spaces between life. This compact book illustrates the full range of the form's utility: thank-you notes to doctors, odes to "Prairie Home" performers, postcard greetings from exotic and not-so-exotic places, succinct biographies of favorite writers, and scribbles in the margins of Sunday church programs. Readers who have always pined for the perfect limerick hinging on the place name "Schenectady" will at long last be placated. Meanwhile, longtime Keillor fans will gain insight into a whole new side of the bestselling author, whose obsession with limericks goes all the way back to when the bespectacled, lanky youth wearing hand-me-down jeans (from his sister) recited to his Anoka High School class: There was a young man of Anoka
Who tried to write a great limerick.
He tried and he tried
And some were not bad,
But something seemed to be missing.
Here is a prose excerpt from the book with more background about that day:
And the laughter in Miss Person's speech class was an enormous moment I remembered for years afterward, an awkward kid with glasses and all of that good feeling directed his way.
Success at the age of fourteen. My life saved by Miss Person in her ruffled white blouse, her green plaid wool skirt, her knee socks and loafers, fresh out of Augsburg College, standing in the back of the room and laughing harder than anyone. Many years later, I told the story at her retirement dinner, and she beamed, and ten years after that, at her memorial service. The school is on Second Avenue in Anoka. I know which room was hers, and one of these days I might go put a bronze plaque on the wall: Lavona, the day you stood here
And your laughter rang loud and clear
At the limerick I wrote,
You launched my boat
And gave me, my dear, a career.
Everything starts from somewhere.
A scratch of the match lights the flare.
They laughed, you guffawed,
And thanks be to God,
I went and told jokes on the air. | 