Post to the Host

GK,

How many hours per day do you spend writing? Do you ever become frustrated by the process? I imagine you’re like the Energizer Bunny and you just keep going.

Elaine

I love to write first thing in the morning, starting at 4 a.m. if I’m lucky, and sit enveloped in silence, drinking coffee. I emerge from sleep sometimes with clear ideas and I pursue those and they lead to others. It’s unpredictable. Jenny tolerates this very well though she’s intensely sociable, a violinist, an orchestra person, engaged with her surroundings, and I’m a lonely blue heron standing in shallow water looking for minnows. My current project is a book of poems, Brisk Verse, that I’m very fond of, poems intended to be read aloud by one person to another, and I also have a musical comedy in the works and am planning a Prairie Home book for the 50^th anniversary next year, in which Guy Noir, Dusty and Lefty, Duane and his mom make extensive appearances, and the sponsors of the show have their say. Then I think maybe I’m done, but who knows? Somebody should write an objective history of PHC that gives credit to the supporting players and tells how this odd remarkable creature came to be, but that person isn’t me. (Where’s Robert Caro when I need him?) GK

GK,

I was really hoping to see you here (I think it was scheduled October 22) and planned to couple it with seeing the 50-year retrospective of John Rosenthal’s photography hanging there — you may have run across John and his work, he used to commentate for WUNC the local NPR affiliate and is a very fine man. A bit younger than you, a bit older than I. You’d get to see his work if you were to perform in GSO (that’s the airport code they use for the area — like PDX for Portland, Oregon. I recall you said it’s a pesky medical procedure that is keeping you from us. Wishing you well on that and hoping to see/hear you again soon. I saw/heard you at the Cary, North Carolina, Koka Booth amphitheater years ago in the gloaming of summer light when you strolled the audience singing with a very pregnant and radiant Heather Masse (I think — maybe it was Aoife O’Donovan?) anyway until then …

Your fan for life, 

Blair Pollock

P.S. I’d written you years ago with my “clever idea” that your Guy Noir could have an archrival named Matte Finish — you may have not thought that fitting but here it is again in case you never saw it.

Blair, sorry I had to postpone that Carolina show due to a repair of a ventral hernia, a large bubble on my sternum, that was scheduled for the 16th and the surgeon Dr. Novitsky said, “Don’t. You won’t be feeling good.” And he was so right. Anesthesia does weird things to me and though I was mobile and could’ve shuffled out onstage, I would’ve been uneasy and cranky and might’ve started ranting and emoting so I stayed home. I’m told the show will be rescheduled. Hope you can come. GK

I am desperately looking for a poem that was read once on A Prairie Home Companion. All I can seem to remember is that it was about a woman called lady Margaret and there was a line in it that read “I was nothing to her though she meant the world to me.” Please, can you help?

Jeff Mitchener

I rewrote the poem when I realized it was not about a Margaret but about my friend and classmate Corinne Guntzel who died in 1986, soon after our class’s 25^th reunion. I feel some responsibility for her death because I could see the travail she was in and I didn’t know how to do what needed to be done for her. This is the current version.

CORINNE She sat in class with me The girl in the seat right there As we studied poetry I studied her shining dark hair. I wrote her a poem one night Which she never would see For I meant nothing to her But she was the world to me. September was golden brown, So cool and dry and clear. I watched her sitting down To read sonnets of Shakespeare. I wrote a poem for Corinne About what I wished would be But I never gave it to her Though she was the world to me. She fell into deep despair And put rocks in her pockets one night And weeping got in her canoe Under the full moon And without making a sound Tipped it over and drowned. Now she lies in a quiet grave And I think of what never can be. I am nothing to her She remains the world to me. I think of that moonlit night. Imagine I’m out for a walk And see the flickering light As she moves to the end of the dock. I want to speak but I can’t, It all goes by in a flash, The canoe rocks aslant, And I hear the splash. It happens over and over. She climbs into the canoe. I think I’m going to save her But I never do. 

Hello, sir.

In Monday’s Post to the Host, Douglas Masterson asked if print newspapers were obsolete and said he’s getting all his information instantaneously on his phone. You responded that it’s difficult for some readers to maneuver around a tablet or smart phone. Here’s the thing, despite the gloom and doom, newspapers are going to be okay because there still is a demand for both digital and print. Sure, the publishers need to figure out the economics, but, by and large, you and Mr. Masterson continue to get the best information available from legitimate news organizations delivered to you how you prefer. As a working newspaperman myself, I think the trouble — and all the handwringing — boils down to one thing (to paraphrase the publisher of theNew York Times): When talking about the future of newspapers, way too often the focus is on the second word instead of the first.

Thanks for all you do.
Louis Llovio

Thanks for your optimism, sir. I’ve loved newspapers since I learned to read, I miss the personalities of yesteryear whose columns were in the tradition of Twain, Stephen Crane, Liebling, Pyle, Hemingway, taking up-close looks at life around them, and I love blazing editorials when they appear, which isn’t often. I shrink from graphic accounts of crime and violence — I come to a point and can’t read any further. I ignore sports and the lifestyle stuff. But I need to see a newspaper every morning for assurance that the world is still out there. GK

The other day I was thinking about the many Saturday evenings my partner, Bill, and I would listen to A Prairie Home Companion. I want to thank you for all the good times you gave us with me sitting on the kitchen counter and Bill sitting someplace in the kitchen. I hope you are enjoying life and are in good health. Love to you and all your people.

Karen

Thanks, my dear. You make me wish I could be sitting in the kitchen invisibly and watching you two listening and try to figure out what the appeal was. I was so busy trying to keep a handle on business that I couldn’t quite imagine the home audience, which maybe is how it’s supposed to be. Anyway, life is good and I’m a lucky man, I still roam around and do shows, some solo, some with others, and I sit down at my desk in New York every morning and write, usually starting around 4 a.m. And sometime around 9 or so, I feel a pair of hands on my shoulders and there she is, the light of my life. Thanks for the note. GK

Dear Garrison,

In addition to the quest for a unified theory in theoretical physics, Patty Saunders has added another mystery in the grand scheme of things. And that is, why anyone who thinks Donald J. Trump was and is a good human would have the slightest idea of your existence in the arts. It’s as if matter and antimatter met up on your computer. Your response was like dark matter ... very quiet and calm. And not reticent of Earl Weaver kicking dirt on the ump. You at least walk the walk of Cheerfulness, in the face of dreadfulness.

Thanks for continuing to share so much of your thoughts and feelings with us, GK.

Don Paul

I’m too old to hold grudges, I’ve decided, and so I’ve gotten squishy and respectful of people I once would’ve walked away from. Everybody has some good in them and if they choose to conceal that, still I need to recognize the fact. Anyway, it’s the children we need to be concerned about, not their cranky elders. It’s heartbreaking to see what some children must endure in this world and yet the human spirit is resilient and if given half a chance, can prevail. GK

This letter was sent to the Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky). It was published.

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Friday night (September 15, 2023), at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Lexington, I listened to a two-hour, nonstop, monolog from a person whom you might have heard about. His name is Garrison Keillor. He was, for many years, the host of a Sunday afternoon radio program that I listened to on National Public Radio (NPR). It was called “A Prairie Home Companion,” and it was broadcast from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Garrison was, and still is, very much in love with this country. The characters populating his show, his descriptions of Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average, and life is good, are a comfort for many of his loyal listeners. 

For some of us, the man is an institution, like Mark Twain, Ernie Pyle, Abraham Lincoln, Jim Thorpe, FDR, Daniel Boone. When I think of Minnesota, or the Midwest, I think of wide flat spaces sometimes, gentle rolling hills at other times, islands of wheat, rows of corn, many lakes, really big mosquitoes, villages settled by Scandinavians, sometimes unusual accents, AND Garrison Keillor. They all kinda of go together for me — a member of a certain generation and with maternal roots in the upper Midwest, including Minnesota. Unfortunately, I have never met any of my maternal kin in that state, or in Iowa, and neither in North nor South Dakota. This remains a sad gap, like a personality half-completed, a life only partially lived, a joy never experienced, the absence of a sense of place, of belonging. Garrison helps to fill that void with those tales from that magical Lake Wobegon and the fascinating, quirky, all-too-human characters he tells us about. Again, constantly, for a full two hours of uninterrupted one-man conversation, and my desperate need to visit a bathroom.

Garrison is now so conscious of his mortality. He did not seem that way the two previous, and relatively recent, times I heard him. He just turned 81 years old. But he accepts the future, whereas I fight it. But Garrison is a reminder that, no different from him, I am mortal, and listening to his expressions of care for his fellow Americans, permits me to take my mind off sad stuff, troubling stuff, like current politics and a persistent sinus infection. 

Thank you, Garrison. Thank you. You are valued. You are remembered.

Paul Winther

Good of you to come to the show, sir, and then to supply the paper with a review. Newspapers seem to be short on reviewers these days. I do wish you’d been more critical, but that’s your business, not mine. I do think you should reach out to your Midwestern relatives. These are fractious times and social media seems to divide people more than bring them together and I’ve found that family relationships can be restored even after long neglect and relatives can become friends. I was too busy for family for decades and am trying to make up for it. Give them a call. You may be surprised. GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

My mom and dad listened to your show when I was a kid (I’m 38 now), and so that means I did, too. I see that you’re celebrating 50 years of APHC. It’s strange to think that it’s been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. Looking back, when do you believe the show was at its best?

Greg P.

St. Paul, Minnesota

It was spotty, Greg, as variety shows tend to be, but I think the best shows were ones in large outdoor venues like Tanglewood, Wolf Trap, Ravinia, the Greek Theatre, and the big Methodist camp at Ocean Grove, NJ. Musicians who weren’t used to big crowds could get electrified by them and the solo singer could be very dramatic putting her or his heart out for thousands of rapt listeners. And when the audience sang a cappella, it could be magical. I remember walking into the crowd at the Minnesota State Fair and the crowd singing “My country ’tis of thee” and “Amazing Grace” and “Tell Me Why” and “In My Life” and it was an experience like nothing else, the spirit moving on the waters. In the distance, the double Ferris wheel turned and the roller coaster rolled and the deep-fried grease wafted over us but we were in an open-air church, united with strangers. I walked past parents holding small children who seemed awestruck by it and I was glad we gave them this experience. GK

I am a faithful listener to The Writer’s Almanac each morning. It’s a great way to start my day. A question for you. Where did you come up with your final words when you are ending a writing, story, or performance and how did you decide to make it part of who you are? “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

Bill Testerman

It’s just the three basics of the good life, sir. My doctor after a visit puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Be well” and sometimes I end a phone conversation with “Keep in touch” but it’s the “Do good work” that really counts. I admire competence, all the more so for coming from innately modest people who’d never claim their work was good, only that it might be “good enough.” I especially admire people working jobs that might be considered menial but who do it with style and generosity of spirit. I’ve encountered parking lot attendants whose spirit made me happy to see, EMTs, cops, waiters, bus drivers, grocery clerks. The happiness of being useful is a sweet thing. GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I am about your age (79), and I am wondering what you think about the lack of public decorum these days. I remember dressing up to go to the opera or to a fancy steakhouse. I’m shocked that people now wear jeans and T-shirts to these things! At my grandson’s high school graduation last spring, the crowd whooped and hollered when their kid’s name was announced like it was a sporting event. What has happened to social norms and respect for these things? It makes me cranky.

Annie Dower

I notice in summer that some people come to Sunday morning church in shorts and T-shirts and I feel a little shocked, standing there in a suit and tie, but the feeling passes. At plays, it doesn’t matter so much. At the opera in New York, intermission is a parade of fashion, people like to get glittery and express their uniqueness; it’s a show in itself. I think our generation did some damage to the idea of decorum and maybe it can’t be repaired. I’m sitting here at 8 a.m. in my pajamas as I write this. GK

Dear Garrison,

I wrote this recently and I’m just sending in appreciation from the UK — written a few books myself (see on Wikipedia) but none as good as yours!

What’s The Big Deal?
Garrison Keillor’s Liberty

Garrison Keillor occupies a curious place in the modern literary consciousness. This is partly because he is thought of as a radio artist first and a writer second. His original broadcasts of Lake Wobegon Days in the 1980s made an impact on the BBC, not least because of the distinctive and wry voice with which he read them. In America, he hosted A Prairie Home Companion (effectively “Garrison Keillor’s Radio Show,” as it was sometimes billed in syndication), from 1974 to 2016. So for 40 years. That, as one of his characters might say, is a long marriage.

The books have sometimes fallen in the shadows of the radio shows. As over the decades he expanded the literary franchise with more stories of Lake Wobegon, his imaginary town in Minnesota, reviewers met them more with indulgence than interest; here was Keillor expanding an ongoing soap opera.

But this is to underestimate the literary accomplishment. And in particular those novels of an astonishing burst of creativity in what one might call his middle years: Pontoon (2007), Liberty (2008) and Pilgrims (2009), a trilogy which between them should be up there with Updike for their portrayal of American life.

All are in different ways concerned with ageing and death. Because Garrison Keillor is thought of as essentially comic, this is not always acknowledged, if at all. It does mean a constant humour emerges through the dark streaks. I can honestly say I’ve never laughed so much as when listening to these books.

For yes, I listen to them, because to hear them narrated by the man himself adds an incalculable layer of pleasure to proceedings; even though, like Seamus Heaney, once you get used to his voice you will always hear it in your head when seeing his words on the page. Does this diminish the literary experience? No more than hearing a poem read aloud, as we are always told we should. They are still superb in print as well.

And the central novel of this trilogy, Liberty, is the one in which he really hits it out of the park. It is centred around Lake Wobegon’s annual parade for the 4th of July, which he uses with an incomparably light-touch to talk about small town American life and some of its changes.

His hero, garage owner Clint Bunsen — carefully not autobiographical, as Clint is a diehard Republican, unlike Keillor’s well-publicised Democrat views — is now in his 60s and has spent his entire life in a town when he should have, he feels, stayed in California after college and never come back. Despite his energy and determination at organising the 4th of July parade — to which the novel builds for its inevitable climax — Clint is dissatisfied with his life, marriage and small-town living.

This dissatisfaction leads him to take a DNA test which reveals he actually has Spanish blood and therefore nothing to do with the dour Norwegian genes of his Minnesota neighbours. He buys a guitar and let himself follow his instincts rather than the Lutheran religion, about which he has anyway had doubts.

He had always felt like an outsider, silent at basketball games, dark and brooding at Christmas, a non-fisherman, depressed by winter … God with his fine sense of humour had dropped him here among the Lutherans, a Spaniard by the waters of Lake Wobegon … That day he got the news, he bought a guitar, sent away for a catalog of flamenco wear, and sent Angelica a picture of himself and a note …

For at the same time he meets the novel’s greatest comic creation, Angelica Pflame, a young woman who has the ability to read minds but also cause an immense amount of trouble; a transformative presence. She once broke down in the town and ended up stepping out as the Statue of Liberty in one of Clint’s previous parades; now she wants to be in this one as well. She also wants to be naked under the Statue of Liberty robe, an impulse that inevitably causes comic mayhem.

After reading Liberty, it is interesting to revisit Keillor’s original description of the community 20 years beforehand in Lake Wobegon Days, both written and spoken. The book is one of vignettes and character sketches as he started to build his literary world. The reading voice is also more tentative; after years of radio, it has become a very accomplished instrument indeed when he reads the later fuller and more rounded novels. And Lake Wobegon Days is perhaps a memoir rather than a novel anyway. The author takes centre stage himself: his adolescent experiences, his desire to leave the small-town experience behind while being, as in his writing, irrevocably brought back to it. By the time of these later novels he has disappeared except as a narratorial voice.

But already in Lake Wobegon Days he has sketched some of the ideas that are to emerge so triumphantly later. Art’s Motel with its cantankerous owner ready to see off any guests with a shotgun. Decoy ducks on the lake, with their comic potential (the idea that if you make them ‘really big’ then any overhead ducks can’t fail to miss them, even though they then might mistake the lake for a pond). The “Living Flag” — each member of the community wears a cap so that they can be part of the Stars and Stripes when viewed from above. Even the 4^th of July parade is already mentioned, with its tendency to go round the town twice so those who missed it the first time can catch it the second. And the Bunsens are introduced with their Ford franchise.

The novels of the middle years have been deeply gestated and it shows. There is, as they like to say for television stories, substantial world-building. Not since the Grantchester of Trollope has any novelist created such an achieved and sustained vision.

All this for a small little town in Minnesota where nothing much happens. “What’s the big deal? He should get over himself,” as the inhabitants might say.

But I would rather read Garrison Keillor than any amount of Faber or Granta “fine writing,” which like fine dining can be overrated. A plate of pork cutlets with Norwegian cranberry sauce in the Chatterbox café and the locals telling their stories will do me just fine.

The nearest possible equivalent to Garrison Keillor might be Kurt Vonnegut. But Martin Amis didn’t queue up to interview Keillor for his books on American literature; a shame, as the result might have been intriguing if comical — it’s hard to think of two more different temperaments.

What Garrison Keillor has in common with Anne Tyler or Roddy Doyle is a tenderness and generosity towards his characters rarely found amongst writers of a more modernist persuasion. We come to care deeply what will happen to Clint.

Yet Garrison Keillor’s achievement goes as unrecognised as his hero in organising the 4th of July parade: “You would think maybe they would put his name on a brass plaque, or at least name a sandwich after him, or give him a trophy with seraphim holding up a golden harp, or something.”

Or write him an appreciative review.

Mr. Hugh Thomson

I am stunned, Mr. Thomson, and I’m ordering your book, The Green Road Into The Trees, and look forward to reading it. You make me want to go back and read Liberty as well. I wrote it at a busy and confusing time, writing with one hand while the other hand was tending a radio show and life seemed to be skidding sideways, and I don’t know how I’d read it now, the scene where Miss Liberty walks up the hem of her gown and suddenly appears naked in Main Street on the Fourth of July. I think I’ll take The Green Road first. GK

Share

Looking for a little mid-winter get away? How about a trip to West Palm Beach, Florida, for one of our 50^th Anniversary shows?

Saturday, February 10, 2024, 8:00 p.m.

Alexander W. Dreyfoos Concert Hall, Kravis Center, West Palm Beach, FL

A Prairie Home Companion's 50th Anniversary Tourwith Garrison Keillor and AOIFE O’DONOVAN, CHRISTINE DIGIALLONARDO, SUE SCOTT,  TIM RUSSELL & FRED NEWMAN, our music director at the keys, RICHARD DWORSKY with STUART DUNCAN on fiddle and our band.

BUY TICKETS

We are happy to announce that one of our favorite singers, Aoife O’Donovan, will be joining us this performance.

photo by Sasha Israel

GRAMMY Award-winning artist Aoife O’Donovan operates in a thrilling musical world beyond genre. Deemed “a vocalist of unerring instinct” by the New York Times, she has released three critically-acclaimed and boundary-blurring solo albums including her most recent record, 2022’s boldly orchestrated and literarily crafted Age Of Apathy. Recorded and written over the course of Winter and Spring 2021 with acclaimed producer Joe Henry, Age Of Apathy is “stunning” (Rolling Stone) and “taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell” (Pitchfork). 

Age of Apathy received 3 nominations at the 2023 GRAMMY Awards including one for Best Folk Album. Folk Alliance International named the song “B61” their 2022 Song Of The Year.

A savvy and generous collaborator, Aoife is one third of the group I’m With Her with bandmates Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz. The trio’s debut album See You Around was hailed as “willfully open-hearted” by NPR Music. I’m With Her earned an Americana Music Association Award in 2019 for Duo/Group of the Year, and a GRAMMY-award in 2020 for Best American Roots Song.

O’Donovan spent the preceding decade as co-founder and front woman of the string band, Crooked Still and is the featured vocalist on The Goat Rodeo Sessions - the group with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. She has appeared as a featured vocalist with over a dozen symphonies including the National Symphony Orchestra, written for Alison Krauss, performed with jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, and spent a decade as a regular contributor to the radio variety shows “Live From Here” and “A Prairie Home Companion.”