November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

The News...as Seen from Lake Wobegon

Garrison Keillor sounds off about what’s above average and what’s not in American culture

September/October 2001
By Karen Olson, Utne Reader 
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Garrison Keillor, the host of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, is known around the world for his tales of small town life in mythical Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Keillor started the beloved variety show—named after the Prairie Home cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota—as a morning program on Minnesota Public Radio in 1969. The first live broadcast, with guest musicians and commercials for imaginary products, was aired in 1974. The show is now performed Saturday evenings in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul or from auditoriums around the country. Keillor also hosts The Writer’s Almanac, a daily literary update.

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Keillor, 59, writes a lot. In addition to continuing chapters in his Lake Wobegon radio saga, he writes a weekly column for Salon and he’s a regular contributor to Time. He’s the author of nine books. In his latest, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (Viking), the narrator is a 14-year-old version of himself. Keillor started the book while he was on a concert tour with the Hopeful Gospel Quartet a few years ago. "I needed to do a Lake Wobegon monologue," he said, "so I sat down in a Salt Lake City hotel room one morning and wrote one, which in the course of the tour grew and developed and took my fancy, and when I got home, I was unwilling to let go of it, and wrote this novel."For this interview, Keillor corresponded with associate editor Karen Olson via e-mail from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., the seat of an airplane, and his home in St. Paul, Minnesota.What books are on your reading table?The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken? and Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems by Charles Bukowski.What book do you recommend for people who want to be writers?Roget’s Thesaurus, the 4th edition (Harper Perennial), which has those cool lists of words, like 25 different types of anchors, a hundred varieties of cheese, 40 kinds of saws, on and on. Hammers, mammals, soaps, ships. The Fort Knox of words.Your children have a wide range in age—31 and 3 1/2. Have you noticed children’s books changing over the years?Yes, when my son was little, you went into the children’s room at the library and got out E.B. White and Pinocchio and that was about it. Now that my daughter is lusting for books, there are about 10,000. It’s bewildering. I regret having added two of my own to the chaos.
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