Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 04.18.22

I found your show thirty years ago after escaping the urban grime of Milwaukee and then became nostalgic for a Midwest I never really knew. That’s odd, don’t you think?

I never missed a PHC show. My late husband thought that was weird, but he did agree to join me in a trip to Minnesota where we watched a live PHC, were treated to a surprise visit to your home for brunch and a tour. I was only interested in looking at your library in your office.

My groupie days have waned a bit, but thank you for sharing your talents — it opened a place in my Midwestern heart that I had closed in my angst-filled youth.

Sue Kusch

Good to hear from you, Sue. I’m surprised by the tour and brunch at my house. Did someone charge you money for that? Are you sure it was my house? Was the office a mess? Was there an old Underwood typewriter on a side table? Was there an enormous photograph of an old schoolhouse over the fireplace? A white frame schoolhouse with enormous windows and a belfry? That’s the schoolhouse across the road from James Keillor’s farm where Dora Powell was teaching school around 1904 and he crossed the road and courted her and she could see he was a good man and well-read and she married him and he drove home and left the horses hitched to the wagon all night while he carried her upstairs and my father John was the fourth of their seven kids. Had I been there, I would’ve told you the whole story.

GK

GK,

In 2015, you sang this on the radio:

When all is sad and dark within
And hope seems only born to die,
He steals within the shadows dim
And wipes a tear from every eye.

Googling that gives two results, one from a New Zealand obituary in 1920, and the other from your book. I was often struck by your knowledge of odd corners of music history, but that one takes the cake. Where did you ever encounter it?

Jim Manheim

Google is not doing right by you, Jim. “He Wipes The Tear From Every Eye” is a familiar old hymn and found in all the old evangelical and low-church hymnals. I think that my grandmother Keillor knew that hymn and that my aunt Eleanor played it on a pump organ.

GK

GK,

Over the past few weeks, I have been listening to one of your CDs that I bought. Lake Wobegon Days from 1989 I believe. What a joy! I’ve laughed every time I’ve turned it on. As it is now Easter weekend, I will be listening once again as I care for chickens, rabbits, tropical goldfish, and two Boston terriers in the country, just outside where I live in Victoria, BC, Canada. 

I still miss Prairie Home Companion and will sign up for your newsletters to bring back some laughs and fun in these strange, masked days, which don’t appear to be over anytime soon.

Gail

You’re a busy caretaker, Gail, with that menagerie to take care of, and I’m glad you enjoy that book from back in 1985. I keep thinking I should go back and reread it but I don’t because if I did I’d only want to rewrite it. It’s odd, your compliment, it’s like someone telling me what a fabulous person my child is whom I’ve been disappointed by. The parent doesn’t fully appreciate the child — an old story.

GK

Mr. Keillor,

Quite a few years ago, you brought PHC to Purdue University and I covered it for the city paper. I spent a wonderful afternoon talking with cast and crew and even managed to get a few words from you. During our talk, you said you thought oral tradition was the only true form of storytelling. We were pressed for time so I wasn’t able to ask you to expand upon that, but I wonder if you might do so now. And do you still feel that way now that you’re (primarily) a novelist?

Stan Timmons

Lafayette, Indiana

It was harmless blather from a pretentious English major, Stan. Pay it no mind. I am utterly ignorant about storytelling, oral or digital or rectal or any other kind, and just trying to make my way in the world. Good luck in your writing.

GK

Not to be too picayunish, but I think you meant your Mayo horizontality (4/15/22) was supine, not prone. I’ll blame this kind of word discrimination on my career as an academic librarian.

Take care,

Peter B. Ives

Albuquerque

Peter, you’re right. I’ve never used the word “supine,” it seems soupy to me, and so “prone” came to stand for both. Back where I come from, we’re suspicious of people who use a word like “supine,” one that requires that you parenthetically define it. “Prone” is fairly self-evident. But you’re right.

GK

Dear Garrison,

Have you ever thought about writing a column that would be printed after your time here is finished? Whenever that would be … hopefully not for some time.

God bless and I attended PHC shows in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan Hill Auditorium; loved every minute.

Also what do you think of people that try to force actions on words that can’t do anything — such as Go Blue!! Which I hear a lot around here in Ann Arbor.

Bus driver Larry

A posthumous column — I assume you’re asking if there are things I want to say that I don’t dare say when I’m alive, and the answer is, “I don’t think so.” I can’t even imagine what that might be. As for “Go Blue,” we at the University of Minnesota used to think “Go, Blue” often, in the sense of “Leave town and go back where you came from.”

GK

GK,

As a child I played a card game called Authors. I recall it’s being a bit like Go Fish. My goal, as a ten-year-old, was to someday make the deck. Mark Twain was the closest to contemporary in the eleven-author deck, so, at some point, I realized my life’s goal was not going to happen.

I grew up and published ten novels and wrote a few movies and lived in a tipi in Wyoming and generally had a good time, but my life’s goal as an adult was to be mentioned on Writer’s Almanac. Now, with Writer’s Almanac coming to an end, I’m going to fail on that dream also. I am glad you’ll be posting repeats from long ago. I’m not all that interested in anything that’s happened in the last 20 years anyway.

I once sat next to you at a signing at the Southern Festival of Books. You were on my left and the last of the Von Trapp kids was on my right. After my little line came and went, it was like looking down a block-long tunnel between the lines in front of the two of you. You signed books in a unique way, at least to my limited experience at group signings. You stood up and worked your way up the line instead of sitting behind the table and letting the line come you. I was impressed. 

This is just to let you know that if I can’t start each day with a cup of coffee and poem from Writer’s Almanac, my life will be less rich and ordered. Also, since it’s Easter and you may not know it, I wanted to send you the most famous limerick of all time. It’s not funny.

Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kindom come
Thy will be done.
On earth as it is heaven.

Tim Sandlin

I’m embarrassed that I haven’t read your work, sir; it goes to show my complete ignorance of contemporary fiction. I got too busy about twenty years ago and got out of the reading habit and now I look at a long shelf of Updike and Bellow and Roth that I intend to read before I die and haven’t made much progress. I don’t remember that book signing, but the reason for walking up the line of fans was to get the job done quicker and also to manage the conversation — people feel an obligation to tell you that they’re fans of your work and I want to find out about them and what they do and where they’re from, which is much more interesting. And when I approach them, rather than their bending down over the table, I’m in charge of the conversation. So let’s meet sometime when you’re in New York or I’m in Wyoming.

GK

Anent the post about small things providing joy: years ago, I was in the chair at my dentist’s and the hygienist, after adjusting my head, said, “I want you to stay just as you are.”

“Would you mind repeating that?” I responded.

“Why?” She asked.

“I’ve been waiting fifty years to hear a woman say that to me!”

She laughed for weeks, I’m told.

Robert Winter

This is delicate ground we tread, sir, trying to make women laugh, but I’m glad we’re both still trying.

GK

Greetings,

I understand you are a busy man, Mr. Keillor, however I wanted to take a chance and see if you would have any interest in my story, My American Family: The Space Between Connecticut and Kentucky.

https://www.kfcmyamericanfamily.com

My husband’s aunt Phyllis Gorfain sent me one of your Writer’s Almanacs and I thought, why not send you a note?

Cheers,
CC

It looks like a fine book, from what I can see by the pictures, but I don’t know when I could get around to it. I’m having some work done on my eyes and until things improve, I’m hard put to read road signs or find my way around airports. Good luck with it, and I hope your descendants are enjoying it.

GK

Dear Garrison,

I thought you would like to know about someone you had on you show in 1998. The show was recorded in Spokane, WA, and you did a miraculous thing: you had Pauline Flett tell a story in the Spokane Tribe’s language, Salish.

A new Middle School is being named in her honor:
https://www.spokaneschools.org/Page/3752
I hope you will check it out.

Thank you for keeping the Spokane Tribe’s language alive. It brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it.

Sincerely,
Patty

I remember that show. My family used to visit Spokane every summer to see my aunt Elizabeth and uncle Lawrence Ducommun who lived there and it was good to go back. It was heroic of Pauline to tell the story in Salish about the migration of the salmon and as I recall, I read an English translation. Thanks for the reminder.

GK

Hello, Garrison.

I have just had a glorious weekend in New York City. There are outdoor tables and chairs everywhere, also Citi Bikes are everywhere, making the city seem more livable than before. But one problem: trying to buy a newspaper. I wonder if you have experienced this. We stayed near Bryant Park on 42nd Street, and there used to be many “newsstands” on the sidewalk, the guys who used to sell newspapers. No one seems to sell them anymore. I finally found the last copy of the New York Times in a CVS. I just wondered if you would like to talk about this problem in one of your columns.

Anne Hartmann
Hanover, New Hampshire

Newspapers have gone online, along with everyone else. We have a Times delivered to our front door in New York but mostly we read it off the cellphone or the laptop. What’s more disturbing is what’s happening to newspapers themselves, the death of small-town papers, the decline of journalism and the old-fashioned essay columns, and the disappearance of book reviews. Most of the bright young people I know are going into lines of work they have difficulty explaining to an outsider and I don’t know any of them who have ambitions to write for newspapers. I’m sad about that.

GK

GK,

You are such a good writer. Yes, your voice was beautiful on radio — but your words are more beautiful in print. I enjoy your column every week on jewishworldreview.com. Today’s, about the Mayo Clinic, was another installment of mellifluousness. The part about mental illness caused by a moral flaw — my Arkansas Southern Baptist 84-year-old father embodies this exact belief. Not just Scandinavians, I suppose, but old religious whites (and African Americans, I would wager). Should God treat the brain, or Dr. Smith? I suspect most religious people would say God.

Keep writing so I can keep reading. I’m selfish that way. When you stop writing, I shall have to catch up on words I missed.

Richard Gray

I have a dear friend who is in anguish over his schizophrenic granddaughter and the difficulty of keeping her safe in a time when we’ve made it almost impossible to protect adults from themselves. There used to be a mental health care system in this country, which had its faults, but it’s been destroyed and there’s very little to take its place.

GK

Dear Garrison,

I’m looking forward to seeing you at Red Rocks along with my wife, whom I met sitting in front of me at the sculpture gardens of the St. Paul Arts & Sciences Center during a Prairie Home Companion show in 1980. We’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary with you! Peter Ostroushko sang “Red Dancing Shoes” at our wedding in 1982, along with the rest of the New Prairie Ramblers. I believe it was Peter’s last wedding gig — what a gentleman he was. Prior to that, along with listening to you and “Jim Ed Poole” on morning public radio (awakening to the Mills Bros. singing “Get Up”), I started attending your show religiously in 1975 when it was in the 250-seat theater, half-filled at first, then eventually sitting in the onstage overflow behind you, Dakota Dave Hull, and Sean Blackburn. What a long way we both have come, me following you on the radio or in person while living in Minnesota, West Virginia, Oregon, Alaska, and now Colorado. You were with me during my formative years and I thank you for all the music and good humor. It will be great to see you again, friend.

Warm regards,

Don (and Diane) McIntyre
Fort Collins, CO

I haven’t done PHC for six years now and so it’s a challenge but we have a great cast of characters, Ellie Dehn and Heather Masse, Brad Paisley and Elvin Bishop, and so all I have to do is direct traffic. I’m hoping Pat Donohue and Stuart Duncan might play Peter’s gorgeous “Heart of the Heartland” and maybe Heather and I can do a love song or two. And of course the cowboys Dusty and Lefty will be there.

GK

Dear Garrison:

I was wondering if you could help me remember a joke from a particular show. I recorded YEARS and YEARS of the show and I have looked for this particular show but have yet to come across it. I realize remembering an individual joke might prove difficult, but I think this one was unique in the telling.

Basically you had a musical guest that was either Welsh or Scottish and you invited him up to the stage to perform. In the banter that preceded his musical performance he told a joke in his gravely brogue that basically went something like this. The punchline I remember distinctly, but the joke itself still evades me.

Basically a man has retired to a Scottish castle and one night there is a knock on the door. When he answers, a gentleman stands there and explains in his heavy brogue that he is his neighbor, in the next castle, and he would like to invite the new neighbor to a party he wants to hold in his new neighbor’s honor at his castle.

The new neighbor asks, “What type of party will it be?” and the Scott answers, “There will be massive amounts of Scottish ale and massive amounts of traditional Scottish food, and the evening will involve exciting Scottish music and dancing and that the evening will culminate in hours and hours of wild and sweaty Scottish sex.”

The neighbor is intrigued by this offer and asks, “How many people will be attending this wild soirée?”

The Scott replies, “Oh it’s just you and me.”

If you can guide me, it would be much appreciated. BTW just received my autographed copy of Boom Town — can’t wait to get started. 

Be well,

Jeffrey Schwartz, MD, MPH

I don’t think you heard this on PHC, my good man. I don’t recollect it. And, as you demonstrate, it certainly is memorable. But I do think you dreamed this. Check your dream journal to make sure.

GK

Hello, Garrison.

I’ve often wondered how authors go about writing a novel, and since you’re giving your readers the chance to write to you (and since I’m starting to read your latest, Boom Town), I thought I’d ask. Do you have a process that you regularly follow when you start out to write a novel? How many times do you revise or change it along the way? How do you keep everything straight? It seems like such a complex process.

Just curious,

Bethany

It is a complex process, Bethany, and for me it’s a very pleasant process of revising revisions and adding layers of detail, and every time you return to it, you find gaps to fill and big blocks to remove and adjustments to be made. This novel is fairly loose, as you’ll find out, and that allows me to digress and stick in parodies and jokes that don’t exactly contribute to the story but they’re for the reader’s pleasure. I think it’s the best novel I’ve written and I’m starting to think about writing another.

GK