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Comments from the week of 06.16.23

Hi, Garrison.

I’m a writer of many decades, now mostly poems, but I find I’m losing my creative passion, which concerns me. Maybe that’s because I’m 80 — but you’ve lost none of your energy for writing. You still have that fire and drive (and of course talent). Any thoughts to share on this? Philip Roth stopped writing at 70, I believe. Not quite sure what to make of that. 

May you go on and on.

Elinor Donahue

Devon, Pennsylvania

Philip Roth was Philip Roth and felt held to Rothian standards whereas I am just fooling around, and I’m not part of the canon of American lit as he was. I was shot out of the canon long ago. As for you, I recommend that you put poetry aside for a while — too ambitious, too serious, too self-conscious — and try something utterly different, such as a murder mystery in which a famous poet murders a critic — maybe Emily Dickinson murdering a critic (you’d have to invent one) who made fun of her style. Dickinson is fun to parody, all those dashes, and the murder would be carried out by poisoned tea, or maybe she’d hang him and then she’d need to write a suicide note but the style of the note would lead the cops to suspect her. Or sit down and write a memoir of your 70s. Something for the fun of it. You can always go back to poetry later, but don’t do it out of a sense of obligation. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

Paraphrasing here but Terry Gross asked you in an interview if you had anything left undone, and you responded that you’ve never been fired, and that given your circumstances working for yourself it was unlikely at this stage.

After that of course there was the disruption with MPR. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose, or do you now feel complete?

Craziness in my opinion but such is life.

As a bonus question I feel the need to ask you about the humorist Jean Shepherd. Did you ever meet him? Was there any influence between the two of you? Your stories and his bear a resemblance in form, following a similar outline. There is the premise, usually a story that the audience views as quaint or nostalgic, hyperbole, a misdirect, one or more callbacks and then the surprise ending. Really that’s just a good form for any story though I am still curious if you or he were inspired by the other.

I met you a few times and you were gracious enough to speak with me. I am an anesthesiologist and once you related the story of your recovery after dental surgery, during which the nurse asked you if you were OK, to which you replied “OK? I’ve never been this OK in my life!”

Thank you for that line; I’ve dropped it in multiple forms now for my own work.

Sincerely,
John Hemlick

John, I remember the line and you’re welcome to use it, no attribution needed: the use of “okay” as a superlative fits the anesthesia experience very well. As for Jean Shepherd, I haven’t looked at his work in ages but I should look at it, and I will. As for the MPR fiasco of 2017, it was an injustice with a very happy ending. I miss doing The Writer’s Almanac, which I think was one of the best five-minute radio shows ever, and I wish I were still doing A Prairie Home Companion and hadn’t retired in 2016: I can now see how I would’ve developed the show farther, made it a platform for young comics and writers, reduced the Wobegonian meanderings, made it more adventurous. But as a result of getting fired, my life got very small and I like that. I like playing small theaters. I did a festival in Avon, Minnesota, a week or so ago, and instead of a thousand people there were sixty, due to a pouring rain, and we all crowded in under a covered bandshell, and I did my stuff and the crowd and I sang “Singing in the Rain” and it was really delightful. They’d never gone to an outdoor show in pouring rain before. It was memorable. GK

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I have loved listening to you for years and am enjoying my daily emails. Is there a possibility of Lake Wobegon becoming a podcast? Thanks for all you do!

Have a great day!

Karen Sickler

I’ve been away from Lake Wobegon for so long, living in big cities, now in New York, and whatever insight I may have into the Midwest, I am lacking in details. So I’m travelling the slippery highway of memory, probably describing the town as it was 70 years ago. I do think of it often however and wrote a little verse the other day.

O beautiful for cornfields, for little towns and lakes,
For people who speak slowly so they will not make mistakes.
Some think that we are boring for we never raise our voices,
And the menus at the restaurants don’t offer many choices.
The Midwest, O the Midwest, the middle of the nation,
And many never see it for they go by aviation. 

GK

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Garrison,

I admire the way you fess up to your shortcomings, past and present, and credit your beloved Jenny with showing you the way to joy. Doesn’t matter how long it took. It happened, you’re grateful and it shows. Here’s to love:

How splendid a savior is she
Who taught you to know gaiety?
A hell of a wife
And a heavenly life
Are delivered at last unto thee.

Regards,
Bruce Rogowski
East Harwich, Massachusetts

Thanks for the limerick. I wrote one too.

Here’s to the marvelous Jenny
Whose virtues are golden and many
And whose faults are few,
Perhaps one or two,
Though right now I can’t think of any. 

GK

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Not really a question, just a correction as I do believe I saw a Norwegian nuthatch in Louisiana this past winter. I recently transplanted here from Ohio to be an influence on my grandkids. At least one of those birds has the good sense to migrate. You had nostalgic thoughts about being a bass. I have been expected to carry that part of the church choir since I was 11 years old. My fondest memory from the basement was at a Madrigal reunion thirty years after college. The quickest wit I ever met, one Greg Scruggs, a massive black man with a voice that could do damage to structural concrete, after one of the altos recalled the way the basses would cause their portion of the stage to vibrate along with the chairs they and the sopranos were sitting on, without missing a beat, Greg had a two-word response, “You’re welcome!” My fondest memory from the madrigal experience.

Bill Schwan

A good many Norwegians head south in winter, not only nuthatches but also nut cases and baseball nuts, for spring training. I prefer winter, but I’m not Norwegian so it doesn’t matter. GK

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Good evening, Mr. Keillor.

From my sofa here in Ireland, I’m enjoying the sight of Pakistan running rings round India live from New York, of all places, in the T20 Cricket World Cup. Which brings me to my question: what are your views on cricket, and how does it compare to your beloved baseball?

Maeve Paris

Derry, Northern Ireland

I’ve never seen cricket played, not even on the tube. So this is like asking me how the Christian faith compares to Sikhism. “Sikh and ye shall find,” is all I can say. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor, 

I was in New York City for a conference last month and took the opportunity to copy you. In a recent podcast you described taking the C train to Bryant Park then writing in the Rose Reading Room followed by a stroll in the park with an Italian sausage in a bun with mustard. I took notes and followed this itinerary exactly. It was delightful, though the generously applied mustard on the Italian sausage dripped out onto the sidewalk, momentarily interfering with my feeling of being a real sophisticated city guy. 

Thanks to your podcast I have been eating more waffles, feeling more grateful for toasters, and paying less attention to the news. 

Thank you!

David Kvamme

Welcome to the city, sir, and I hope the conference was worth it. It’s been decades since I attended a conference without being paid to speak. And my name doesn’t have a V after the K, so there’s that. GK

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Garrison,

May I suggest that you make a list of all of your favorite charities, decide a pro-rata preference for them, and then start taking all of your old papers, writings and whatnot that you know will eventually get thrown away and put them up for auction so that people who love you can have a piece of you to take beyond your grave, and the charities you love might have a few more dollars as a result.

Silly idea, perhaps it’s too morbid to suggest, but I’d buy one of your dirty napkins, a snippet of an unfinished poem or a story that didn’t end up exactly as you had hoped scrawled across a bit of notebook paper.

Warmly,

Dominic

Dominic, I’m working on a novel these days and writing shows and have another book in mind and perhaps a screenplay, so list-making is far down on my list. Whenever I look in files of old manuscripts, I feel disappointed, sometimes embarrassed, and I want to throw most of it into recycling. I am puzzled by the success of APHC and have various theories about it, none of which involve Quality, but I’m focused on today and next week and the time I have left. The show returns to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul in a couple weeks and that is sort of terrifying but then I’ll get back to work on the new book. I wake up every morning eager to get to work and when that eagerness is no longer there, I’ll think about writing a will. GK

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I grew up in Hiawatha, Kansas (northeast corner of Kansas) and remember when I was 8, 9, 10, 11ish, going on Saturday afternoon road trips to see the geese somewhere near Lincoln, Nebraska. This was the mid-’80s and the Kansas City Royals ruled the fall for Kansas kids. My parents would put on PHC and as a young kid, it would drive me and my brothers and sister crazy. Ugh. We wanted the Top 40 (RIP Casey Kasem). Come on, Dad.

Fast-forward to 2001, I am Active-Duty Air Force serving in Kunsan, South Korea. My young, military first marriage was in the crapper, the divorce papers were done, just not signed due to poor coordination on my part, and one night at our hooch bar I met an intriguing gal (active duty stationed at Osan, South Korea) from Anoka, Minnesota. She was a couple years younger, and I was immediately star struck. I was 27, she was 24. We talked all night and found out that Garrison and PHC was an instrumental piece of our upbringing. We both felt the same way about the show as children and we were both forced to listen. We talked and laughed about it all night. 

Thanks to you, Mr. Keillor, I married that gal in 2004 and we will celebrate 20 years this July. We live in Maryland now. Have three gorgeous girls in their early teen tween years. Our son (although from my first marriage) is a rocket scientist and we are proud that he works for a NASA contractor on the Artemis program. I retired from the Air Force after disarming bombs as an EOD tech for 23 years (Roadside IEDs are no joke). My better half got out of the Air Force at 5 years and shacked up with me and went to the University of Utah (Go Utes) and is an awesome civil engineer now. We have moved all over the world (our two youngest were born in Aviano, Italy). 

We try to get to any of your shows that we can afford the time to get to. It’s hard with soccer, swim, softball, dance, gymnastics, blah, blah, blah. We were happy to see you at the Wharf about a year ago in D.C.

Mom and Dad are still doing pretty good. Dad just had his heart valve roto-rootered to clear a blockage, but he came through with flying colors and seems to be ready to hit the softball field. They call him groundhog cause his feet don’t move as fast as he thinks they do, and he apparently looks like a groundhog crawling down first base line.

Anyway, thank you for your version of Americana. My wife and I love PHC and adore you. We hope to catch you the next time you are in our area. Thanks for giving us an opportunity to talk about you all night twenty years ago. You are a great matchmaker.

Thanks,

Patrick Cazalet 

Patrick, a thousand thanks for your letter, I’m indebted to you for writing. It’s good to catch sight of some of the blurry people in the seats. You are a lucky man to be so wealthy with daughters and a fine son and of course I take some credit for the romance between you and the Anoka woman — two good people united by their memories of disliking PHC. It’s such a good story, I owe the two of you lunch, or at least coffee. You know, of course, that Anoka is where I was born, in Dr. Mork’s maternity hospital on Ferry Street. Anyway, it’s good to hear from a happy man. I had to look up Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Improvised Explosive Device and thank God for good training that enabled you to survive. And best wishes to Dad with the cleared heart. Heart problems are the ones to have; so many ways to repair them now. I have a pig valve in mine and it’s working fine. GK

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Hi,

I’m Colton Miller. I live in a small town in Indiana called Royal Center, we read your book “How to write a letter” in English summer school. I just wanted to say how great the book is. What motivates you to write?

Colton 

The need to be useful, Colton. To write something that informs or amuses or distracts or inspires someone else, even if it’s only one person, such as yourself. GK

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Garrison,

For no particular reason I recently remembered one of your old sponsors: the Helsa Dender Salsa company and its premier product: Ajua! Hot Sauce.

Are there any particular sponsors you remember?

We haven’t heard from Jack’s Auto Repair in a while.

Sincerely, 

Walter Reeves 

Decatur, Georgia 

Jack’s canceled its ads around the time I quit driving. The sponsor I like is the Coffee Advisory Board because I enjoy singing the jingle with Heather Masse or Christine DiGiallonardo, “Smells so lovely when you pour it, you will want to drink a quart of coffee.” GK

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Do you ever go back to Anoka, Minnesota, to visit, reunions, visit relatives?

John V.

Richmond, Texas

I went back for a visitation at a mortuary for the wife of my cousin Ben. I’ve gone up to see the family cemetery and to visit cousins Janice and Susan but the visits are rarer now. The town is still quite vivid in my mind as it was in the 1950s but that memory is dissonant with what I see today, and I’d rather preserve the memory. GK

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In your latest column, you wrote, “When Jesus grew up, he gathered twelve single men around him. There is no evidence that any one of his disciples ever was attracted to the spiciness of a naked woman.”

Peter was married, as evidenced by Jesus healing her (Matthew 8:14-15, Mark 1:26-31, Luke 4:38-39). Although other wives were not mentioned, it would be likely that at least some of the other Apostles were married. Most young Jewish men of that time married early. Keep in mind that the Evangelists weren’t writing biographies, much as I might wish they had.

Bill Richards

Thanks for the elucidation. I too wish there had been at least a glimpse of a wife, perhaps Mrs. Peter correcting the apostle after he denied being a Christian. GK

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Dear Garrison,

How did you arrive at your “it is what it is” stance?

I feared fatherhood until it happened and now, while I know my two daughters (23 and 21) have lives of their own, I’m distraught by the fact that my older daughter has moved from New York to California to be with her boyfriend. I don’t know where my younger daughter will be after graduating from college. I’m 70, my wife is a few years younger. I see and feel time flying away. It is what it is. I can’t get there yet. Solomon would have gotten there. You’ve gotten there. It’s the only reasonable alternative when, in actuality, there are no other alternatives aside from jumping off a bridge, something I have no desire to do.

For me, it just isn’t is what it is.

Help.

P.S. Are you familiar with Debussy’s string quartet? The first time I heard it I felt as if I had entered heaven without the aid of a bridge.

All the best,

Anonymous

I shall find Debussy’s string quartet and listen to it. This is the benefit of saying dumb things such as “I don’t care for Debussy,” it draws intelligence. As for the daughters, you will need to grant them space to enjoy independence and make their mistakes, but you’ll find a time in a year or two to renew fatherhood on a new and friendly basis. This involves visiting — phone and email aren’t enough. Short visits are best, fly in and fly out. No advice unless requested and maybe not even then. Are they curious about family history? That’s something you should offer. And be cheerful with them, even funny if possible. Good luck. GK

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It shouldn’t be news to a former Sanctified Brother that Simon Peter had a mother-in-law and that Paul references Peter taking his wife on missionary journeys. Though I am certainly not privy to the private bedroom activities of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson (Simon, Son of John), making love to one’s wife was (and is) an expected Sabbath activity for Jewish men. That does a lot toward discrediting the notion of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity as well.

Jonathan Altman, Retired United Methodist Pastor

Hattiesburg, Mississippi

You’re right. I need to resume Bible study or sign up my copy editor, who is Jewish, to read the Gospels so she can catch these mistakes. GK

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Garrison,

Thank you for the essay you wrote when you were in Rome when you learned your brother had passed away. I lost my older brother back in 2010 and when I read your essay I felt a shared moment of loss. Every year on the anniversary of my brother’s passing I read that essay again and reflect on how much my brother meant to me and the rest of our family. I have shared that essay with a few close friends and relatives in similar situations and I think they all enjoyed it.

Thanks again,

George Dobrowitsky   

It was a miserable loss and I still feel it and I remember seeing my mother sitting a few rows back at the funeral and trying to imagine the severity of the pain she felt at the loss of her firstborn, the son who held the family together. But I also remember the boldness and beauty of the eulogies, how his son and his sister and his brother-in-law spoke lovingly and humorously about him because he deserved to be remembered that way, and the gospel singer who sat at the piano and ended the service with a rocking spiritual that everyone joined in. But Philip was irreplaceable, and we march ahead aware of that. GK

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Garrison, it was good talking with you at the Avon Spunk Days, and I enjoyed your show (undeterred by the rain). You seemed interested in my recent book, Sovereign of a Free People: Abraham Lincoln, Majority Rule, and Slavery, which examines Lincoln’s defense of majority rule, and of respecting the results of elections. You can find it on Amazon, or through the publisher, University Press of Kansas. We talked once before, in 2008 when I gave an author talk at Common Good Books on Doorstep Democracy: Face to Face Politics in the Heartland. Thank you for visiting Avon again, my hometown, where I live very close to Middle Spunk Lake. So I especially enjoyed your whimsical walleye story. I look forward to talking again sometime.

Jim Read

I treasure the fact that my stemwinder about a 200-pound walleye amused a distinguished historian and political theorist. It’s like trying to sell snake oil to a physician and seeing him reach briefly for his wallet. GK

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Garrison,

Years ago, I checked out your book We're Still Married from my local public library. In it you write about how you as a latecomer discovered the Episcopal church. It was in Copenhagen. I, too, am a latecomer having switched from Methodist. Why did Episcopal appeal to me? For one thing it was similar to what you note in your Copenhagen reminiscences and subsequently in New York at Holy Apostles: “When we stood for prayers, bringing slowly to mind the goodness and the poverty in our lives, the lives of others, the life to come, it brought tears to your eyes, the simple way Episcopalians pray.” Too, the Catholic-like pageantry appealed to me, something the Methodists did not have — the solemn procession down the aisle with the acolyte holding the gospel on high, etc. I loved your response to Mr. Shultz of Lindsborg, Kan. about how you (and we) feel when we go forward to take the elements.

John W.

Rogers, Arkansas

God bless you, sir, and see you on Sunday. GK

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Greetings, Garrison.

We’re coming to your September show in Peekskill and would love a chance to say hi! As a reminder, we’re former Minnesotans who, like you and the Kaplans, were known for putting on piles of fundraisers for our Democratic candidates including the first ones for both Amy and Al Franken. We also were very early volunteers when you requested help cleaning up the old World Theater!! We spent an amazing evening at your home with our friend Alida Messenger when we sat around your table talking politics …

Anyway, we now live in the Catskills and are excited to attend your show and would really love a chance to say hi … if possible, just let me know.

Peace! 
Jim (& Cindie) Smart 

Ah, those days when we were young and idealistic. Al resigned, unfortunately, and I wish he hadn’t, but Amy has shown Democrats how to campaign for office: tirelessly, walking in the county fair parades, speaking at graduations. MPR sold the Fitzgerald (formerly the World) rather cheaply to a local music club chain, which has run it very responsibly. We’ll do some shows there this year and I have fond memories of the place, including the afternoon I sat in the top balcony next to my mother to see the premiere of the Altman movie “A Prairie Home Companion,” and I, who wrote the screenplay, was trying to remember if there were any swear words in it. See you in Peekskill. GK

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In his novel Boom Town, Garrison Keillor returns to his hometown of Lake Wobegon, which is in the midst of a rising economic tide driven by millennial entrepreneurs. Keillor wrote Boom Town during the pandemic lockdown in New York.

CLICK HERE to buy a copy today!