Dear Mr. Keillor,
In your books, you evoke not only the happy times of your childhood but the sad and bitter ones as well. How does one do this? I would like to start writing about some of my life experiences, but it seems like it will be more painful than helpful. I have listened to your radio show since I was a child growing up in Texas. Now that I am in Minnesota, I have been surprised to find out that although Lake Wobegon is not on the map, St. Cloud IS on the map. With such an ethereal, celestial name, I naturally thought you made it up.

Sincerely,
Valerie W.

Dear Valerie,
You're right, Lake Wobegon is a rather prosaic name next to St. Cloud (which some of us Minnesotans pronounce San-CLOO when speaking to outlanders, to give the place a little topspin, just as we go shopping at Tar-ZHAY). And then there is Thief River Falls and Blue Earth and Embarrass and Nowthen. And Mountain Lake, which has no mountain or lake. And in every town, there are people like you and me who think about setting our life experiences down on paper or on a screen. To what purpose? I hope it is to create something of beauty and nobility, to let the experiences lead us out of the small precincts of daily life and into some discovery of wonders unknown. I was more interested in exploring my childhood miseries until I started to meet people with real grief in their lives and now I'm pretty much focused on comedy. There are people who have suffered horribly, had children snatched from them, endured medical tortures, had real depression and not just the blues, and I'd find it embarrassing if any of them heard me seriously complain about, say, the hardship of growing older. So I do comedy.

Hello Mr. Host:
I've been a fan since trudging through calf-deep snow to see you in Alabama. I have been in Toronto and heard a new colloquialism. It was windy and someone said, "It was blowing hard enough to blow a big dog off a chain."

Dan Moore
Charleston, SC

Dan,
I remember that Birmingham show well. It was balmy March when we arrived on a Friday morning and the snow started falling in the afternoon and it kept on and kept on, and by Saturday morning thirteen inches was on the ground. Downtown was deserted, but our equipment truck had arrived, so we set up for the show at the old theater, and we were astonished to see the audience start trickling in around five, bundled up, snow blown, red-faced, but cheery, most of them having hiked downtown on foot. No snow plows in Birmingham back then. During the intermission, I saw people in the lobby who were offering rides, and others organizing hiking parties. Emmylou Harris and her big tour bus pulled in during the show and climbed off and walked right out onstage and sang and there was a great male gospel group (the Searchlights?) and all in all it wasn't a bad show, but the audience was the amazing part. We could have just passed a microphone around for two hours and let people tell how they got to the theater.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Lately, I've been studying your writing and Lake Wobegon monologues, and I'd like to ask:

1) In your early recordings, you have a very distinct mid-west accent that has since worn away. Was this intentional?

2) The dreams you had in your childhood appear to have all come true: you frequently visit New York, you are a famous writer, you have your own library card. How does that feel? Are there dreams from your childhood you have not yet grasped?

3) Who do you think about when you write? Who do you imagine reading your words? I have a picture of you seated at a table with furrowed brow, hands supporting your chin, folded in the "Here is the church, here is the steeple" manner, looking thoughtfully at your laptop. What is going through your mind at that moment?

Rob

Rob, thanks for the note. I assume that your study of my work means that you have completed the required reading list (Moby Dick, The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, etc.), so let me try to answer your questions.

(1) I tried to change my voice the moment I got into radio, back at the University of Minnesota, and make it sound like Edward R. Murrow's, or Orson Welles's, or Eric Sevareid's, and probably succeeded in sounding like a kid who was imitating a grown-up. (Of course those three gentlemen all developed their styles by imitating someone else.) By the time PHC started, I was pretty much over trying to sound authoritative and was experimenting with folksiness, which is a good tactic for the dishonest salesman. (That's one more reason I admire John Kerry; he refuses to do that. Every time you see him windsurf or go off on a 400-word sentence with sixteen subordinate clauses, you see a man who told his consultants to take a hike.) I think I was trying to do my Uncle Jim and Uncle Lawrence when I started with PHC. They had slightly husky, slightly high-pitched twangy voices and spoke fluent Midwestern. Since then, my voice has eased into some sort of groove that seems natural and flexible to me — good for declaiming Shakespeare or reading recipes or telling jokes — but of course it changes depending on where I am and who I'm with. With old relatives, I go back to the old dialect. And sometimes, after doing Guy Noir, it's hard to get out of him and into myself.

(2) Life is good and I'm awfully lucky and I resolve to work hard and try to justify the good luck. But this has nothing to do with childhood dreams. My big childhood dream was a nightmare: that I was a terrible sinner and going straight to hell. And this is something you carry around for the rest of your life. I had many religious experiences in my younger days and some in my older days, and none of them ever rid me of that fear. Now that I'm much older, I just tell God from time to time that if He wants to send me to hell, then I forgive Him for it. And I pray that the torment will not be so great that I won't be able to converse with the other sinners.

(3) I was looking at my laptop because a photographer told me to and what I was thinking was, "This looks sort of dopey and why am I doing it?"

Dear Mr Keillor
I've noticed references to British newspapers in a couple of your recent responses (Sunday Times and Guardian). Do you read these regularly and if so why? Do you get something from them that you cannot get from US papers? Or am I barking up completely the wrong tree?

Susanne

PS Any chance of you bringing PHC back to the UK — we saw you in Edinburgh a few years ago and loved it.

Susanne,
I should have said the Sunday New York Times. It's our big national Sunday paper and it arrives in a blue plastic bag, about two pounds of newsprint, around 8 a.m. and we read the news and the book reviews before church and the arts section and the Sunday magazine in the afternoon. The Guardian I buy occasionally at Shinder's newsstand here in St. Paul and from it I get reporting on the world, especially the war in the Middle East, that can't be found in American newspapers. Mainly, you get reporters who dare to say what they see and what they think. In this country, newspapers tend to treat news as a perishable item, like celery, so they shovel a bunch of it into print and then shovel in a new batch the next day, assuming that everything is quickly forgotten. But reporting is writing, and a piece of conscientious and thoughtful writing is worth a trainload of celery.

Hej Garrison,
Du kan skriver på danska när som helst eftersom det finns alltid ø och dem andra konstiga danska bokstäver tillgängligt genom tangentbordet. Till exempel, trycka och hålla ALT och sen 0248 och sen släppa ALT och man får ø. Komplett listan är:

ø: ALT + 0248
å: ALT + 0229
æ: ALT + 0230

Ø: ALT + 0216
å: ALT + 0197
Æ: ALT + 0198

Men istället för danska varför inte avända en riktigt vakert språk, dvs. Svenska?

Hälsningar,
Mark

Hi Mark —
Thanks for the good information but I just am not that ambitious to press all those keys every time I want to make a Danish letter. And now I've gone and followed your directions and it doesn't work on my computer. ALT plus 0198 and then ALT does not produce an AE or an a with a halo or an o with a slash through it (DO NOT PRONOUNCE THIS VOWEL). Have I misunderstood your Swedish? Is your letter really some secret terrorist code? Have I pressed those keys and detonated a bomb somewhere? In answer to your question, no, I'm not up to learning Swedish. That trilled R is too showy for me, and the O with the sidewise colon on top is much too fattening. I was an English major. Jeg elske engelsk.

Dear Mr. K.,

I am very curious about what happens at the end of the show every week. After the credits, while the music is playing, there is always a moment when the applause gets suddenly louder. For a long time, I imagined that Sue Scott and Tim Russell and you and the guests were dancing onstage. Recently I realized that maybe the applause gets louder simply because you're all taking your bows. What does happen onstage at the end of the show?

Rina Sanej
Bronx, NY

Rina,
That is the moment when we bring our show animals out onstage, the German shepherd Renee and the python Suzanne and the cats Meow Tse Tung and F. Cat Fitzgerald and Curtis the chicken. We have found that animals are crucial to a show like ours, and that when attention lags and the audience starts to doze off, the mere appearance of a cat or a chicken suddenly gets them ginned up again. As a writer, I’m not proud of this — I, of course, would prefer that the wit and elegance of language and story would be enough to entertain people. But it ain’t happening. So we need a dog. At the end of the show, the five of them come out and that’s when the standing ovation starts. Show business is odd that way. Kids and animals are what people want to see.

Post to the Host:

I've listened for many years and have always enjoyed the show. The fact that it offered something for everyone in the family without any offensive language or inappropriate remarks made it possible for me to listen with my children and grandchildren. I see that as changing — and wish it would stop. Saturday night’s joke about not knowing whether to "scratch your watch or wind your balls" was tasteless and certainly not family material.

Judith Bandieri
Pawtucket, RI

Judith,
I thought about whether to include that joke or not and came down on the side of inclusion, but when I think of you and your grandchildren listening to it and you getting upset, then I start to wonder if it was a good idea. I can imagine someone saying that joke in my parents’ house and they would’ve been a little shocked but they might’ve been secretly amused, too. My dad grew up on a farm and a farmboy’s sense of humor is a little earthier. My mother would’ve been offended, and yet — she might have laughed, despite herself. I admit, however, that I wouldn’t have been the one telling that joke to my parents. I tend to be pretty decorous in person and avoid even common profanity — for some reason it irritates me more now than it used to — but of course among friends I can tell a risqué joke, and maybe that’s why I told that one on the air. But I certainly didn’t want to offend you and I hope you know that.

Dear Garrison,
My family and I have had the privilege of listening to your show from time to time. We often seem to hear it on the radio while we are traveling and it makes a nice change from the typical rock, country or other programs we end up listening to otherwise. That said and hopefully taken to heart, I want to let you know that your Nov. 6th program was very hurtful and offensive to me. You see, I am a "born-again Christian" and also a home school Mom and the wife of a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State University. It saddens me that you feel that I don't have a constitutional right to vote, that I am not a citizen of this country and that the only book I have read is the Bible.

I am sure you can guess who I voted for and I know that you disagree with me on a good many things. But now is not the time to be insulting of each other. We are a country divided and a house divided against itself cannot stand. This is just where our enemies want us. Can we agree on that? Now is the time to put aside our differences and get behind our country, our president and each other. We are not all of the same opinion, religion, race or political persuasion, but we are all Americans and this should be our focus and our point of reference. I know you were only poking fun at others in light of the election results, but please be fair and consider how your remarks affect those who are in earshot of your radio program. We hear diversity and tolerance for all being preached, but it should be extended to those of us who are Christians as well.

I still will listen to your show. It is a humorous part of my Saturday and I wouldn’t miss it. I hope these few words have fallen on understanding ears.

Stephenie Brentner

Stephenie,
I'm sorry my joke didn't amuse you. I think it was a hilarious joke and that I — the child of fundamentalist parents who never voted because they felt their citizenship was in heaven — had the right to make it. It's the sort of joke that the fundamentalists I know even make about themselves. But apparently it fell flat in Pennsylvania. The wonderful thing about radio, though, is that it comes with a dial and anything you don't like is quickly disposed of. And there are many, many Christian stations for you to listen to, and conservative stations, where you would never ever hear such a joke told. — By the way, the Christian references on PHC stimulate, by far, the largest volume of audience criticism. The gospel music that we present is offensive to a good many people. They say, "What right do you have to inflict your beliefs on those who don't agree?" I suppose they have a good point, but in fact, it's so easy to turn off a show that I can't really sympathize with them. And I am in favor of free and vigorous expression. Your suggestion that Christians aren't tolerated in this country I find odd in the extreme. But I don't mind that you say what you think.

Post to the Host:
I can't get the song "You Don't Love God If You Don't Love Your Neighbor" out of my head (and I’m an atheist). Can you give me the words? I want to sing it with my right-wing Republican family members who think I’m a fruitcake.

Diane Powers
Seattle

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I'm always moved by your reading of "The Raven." Is that reading available on tape or on CD?

Frauke Elber
Newport News, VA

Diane & Frauke,
You can hear “You Don’t Love God” and “The Raven” online in the archive, and Diane, if you want to patiently listen to the song over and over and over and write down the words, you go ahead. That’s how I got the words to the old Carter Family songs that I know. That was before there was an Internet, and you had to keep moving the needle back on the LP and listen to those tiny voices and their Southern accents and decipher the words. Now it’s so easy to get Carter Family lyrics that nobody sings their songs much anymore. Is there a lesson here?

Hello Garrison,
Our 16-year-old daughter Ellen finds herself in the Kingdom of Denmark, where she will spend the year as an exchange student. So far, it seems a strange paradise to her, where the kids at school can leave boom boxes and backpacks sitting undisturbed in the common area, the freest spirit in class has yet to wear shoes, and her host family has a seaside summer house with a thatched roof AND a DVD player. She is trying to learn Danish. Any advice for her? Have you written about your Danish experiences in any of your books?

Jennie and Steve Willams

Dear Jennie and Steve,
I am so glad for your daughter to have this experience. She'll remember it forever. And I'm sure she's well along on the road to Danish fluency. Sixteen is a fine age for that — I was 43, which is harder. She's discovered Danes' English fluency which is sort of an obstacle for her and she of course will have to insist that they quit practicing their English on her and let her soak up their Danish. Danes are not as accustomed to hearing badly spoken Danish as we are to hearing mangled English — we have more immigrants than they — so they tend to switch to English whenever the speaker trips on a vowel, but she has to refuse this courtesy and keep marching paa dansk.

She'll get a good accent simply by listening to other people, and she'll make painful progress through the vocabulary-building stage and then get a big burst of confidence and go zooming ahead. It's exhilarating to get into another language — you become a different person — and the Danish Ellen will be sweeter and more positive and polite (there's a dark caustic side to Danish but it takes longer to master). Little kids will be good teachers for her, and if she persists, by Christmas she'll be able to sit around the Julebord and eat the fleskestej and the risengrot and dance around the Juletrae and sing those gorgeous Danish Julesanger like "Det kimer nu til Julefest" and "Et barn er fodt i Bethlehem". She'll sit in church on Christmas Eve with those skeptical Danish Lutherans and her heart will melt and she'll become Danish. She'll pronounce her name in the Danish way — AY-len — and wear Danish clothes and get a Danish boyfriend. By May she will be heartsick at the thought of leaving Queen Margrethe and the Little Mermaid and coming back home. But she will, and she'll be better for it, though she may drive you crazy by criticizing American food, television, politics, mass transit, home decor, social policy, and beer, all of them inferior to Denmark's. It's a lovely land. Sometimes in my mind I go back there and sometimes it's Christmas and other times it's after a dinner party in our apartment on Trondhjemsgade in Copenhagen and I'm defending American foreign policy to my friend Lis in Danish as we wash dishes. A remarkable feat, like running a marathon or climbing an Alp, and you cherish the memory for years.

Dear Garrison,
I started to listen your show from February to June 2003 when I was in Concord, MA, as a visiting researcher. Your show was a Saturday gift and you really changed my mind and my feelings about USA. I made a lot of audiocassettes during that season and I continue to listen to this private archive every Saturday evening — just as a little part of American life. Thank you for your work. Please, continue!

Yevgeny Patarakin
Nizhny Novgod, Russia

Dear Yevgeny,
Please send along your mailing address and we'll send you off a shipment of new tapes of new shows. It's a privilege to have you in the audience. And of course you can hear the show on the Internet, if you so desire. Thank you for the letter. We will be sure to use our Russian character, Dr. Kamarinskaya, in the near future, rhapsodizing about the moon in the birches.

Dear GK —
I listened this week to the post-election show and enjoyed your comment about wanting a Constitutional amendment to prevent born-again Christians from voting but would like to clarify a little. Born-again is a little imprecise, don't you think? I consider myself born again, that is born again of the Spirit (see John 3:5). But even as I laughed, I thought, no, he means post-millenialists. Those are the ones that think the sooner the world goes to hell in a handbasket, the sooner they get to the rapture. However, there are plenty of "born-agains" who care deeply about the world, would like to repair it, are even political activists. I really wasn't offended, because as an evangelical Christian I've gotten used to being lumped in with people whose application of their faith is abhorrent to me — I opine that they haven't read the Scriptures carefully and I venture to
say that Mr. Bush has not really understood many things about Jesus very well at all. If I thought this dreadful situation was permanent, I'd not get out of bed in the morning. But I believe that somehow God wins, wins every battle and rights every wrong and wipes away every tear, and doesn't need the Constitution to do it. And I love you and your show — it's been part of my life for so long I can't remember not hearing your voice.

Caroline Sato
Long Beach

Caroline,
I grew up among post-millenialists and probably that's why I conflated them with born-agains in one big ball of wax and I apologize for my inaccuracy. However, I don't think that the term "post-millenialist" would instantly register with our public radio audience, so one is forced to use shorthand. Thanks for your thoughts. My keenest memory of the fall campaign is of standing in front of audiences at political rallies and getting them to sing the Star-Spangled Banner in the key of G. People clambered to their feet and were thrilled to find, once we launched into it, that this grand old anthem is actually singable by the average person and when we got to the "land of the free" and that big note, people threw their heads back and SANG. According to surveys, almost half of all Americans claim not to know the words, but when you're in a crowd like that, you get all the prompts you need. It's a simple moving experience and it's pretty rare: the anthem, when it's played, is usually done by a showy soprano or pop diva in a key that shows off her voice and the crowd stands mute, but when people see an old English major up there and hear the G chord, they pitch in and sing. I gave a bunch of political speeches this fall and nothing much came of it, but it's enough to have given those people the chance to sing the Star Spangled Banner, I feel. Just as, though one works hard on the Lake Wobegon monologues, when someone writes in to tell me that those tapes are useful for putting small children to sleep, one feels a little deflated and yet — it's always good to be useful.

Post to the Host:
We listen to your program every Sunday morning here in the hinterlands. Is PHC ever going to be shown on PBS again? And if not, are there any videos of the ones you do or we used to see? I enjoyed those so much!

Renee LaPointe
Snohomish, Washington

Renee,
How good of you to ask — the new 30th anniversary PHC DVD is coming out next week, which records an entire show we did at the Fitzgerald back in May. I hear that it's terrific and if you find a copy and look at it, I hope you enjoy it.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I'm a Republican, for better or worse. And I want you to know that your show does not offend, insult, disappoint, or depress me. BTW, my Daddy was a Democrat. Go figure.

Sincerely,
Cathy
Bradenton, FL

Cathy,
Republicans just have more fun, I guess, and good for you. So do you enjoy the show because you're trying to placate your daddy? Or do you derive some perverse pleasure from hearing people whose values are warped? Or might you be —? I don't even dare mention it out loud. Could it be? Have you considered the possibility?

Dear Garrison,
Would you put together a special edition of your parodies of classical literature and authors? A little something for us English teachers? One of the most successful lessons I teach uses your parody of "Casey at the Bat." That really fetches the freshmen.

Nearly every time I listen to your show, I hear something I wish I could use in class. But I'm afraid of the technology it takes to record stuff, and then, there are copyright issues.

Teresa Howell


Teresa,
I am tickled pink that you use my old "Casey" poem and that your kids enjoy it. And parody is a great writing exercise for a youngster. (For me, too.) "Casey" is a staple for parody and "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and the poems of Emily Dickinson and "To be or not to be" from Hamlet and the William Carlos Williams poem about the cold plums in the icebox — so many lovely targets. You can find most of my parodies in the archives on this website, and if you use them in class, just put my name under them in small letters.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I was surprised to read somewhere that you are not Norwegian, or even Swedish or Danish or Icelandic. I am shocked. I could swear you said you were. Am I wrong?

Stephanie Jeppesen
Seattle

Stephanie,
I don't think I ever claimed to be Nordic in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes I say "we" to refer to Lake Wobegonians and maybe you inferred from that some connection to Norwegians, but no, I am not one of the chosen. The Keillors came from Yorkshire, by way of New Brunswick, and the Crandalls from England, and the Powells from Wales and France, and the Denhams from Glasgow, and that pretty well covers my people. I lived in Copenhagen for awhile and picked up some Danish which I occasionally fob off as Norwegian, and every year around Christmastime I sing "Johnny Johnson's Wedding" and "Det Kimer nu til Julefest" but it's a foreign exchange experience for me. I'm just one of the Anglos, and about as WASPy as they come.