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Host Garrison Keillor answers your questions about life, love, writing, authors, and of course, A Prairie Home Companion.

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Mr. Keillor, Enjoy your show,

April 12, 2006 |

Mr. Keillor,
Enjoy your show, mostly, for the small-town ambience and the clean humor, as well some great music hard to find elsewhere. Reading some of your writings here, however, I notice references to reading the New Yorker and writing for New York Review of Books. I also seem to recall your living in New York at one time. Maybe I'm just slow, but the 2 worlds of New York and small-town Minnesota seem to have precious little overlap, other than a common fondness for the Democratic ticket. Do you experience some sort of cognitive dissonance or something, see-sawing between New York and, say, Anoka?

Steve S.
New Braunfels, TX

Nope. In my limited experience, New York is a city of interconnected villages, and I mostly spend time around 90th and Broadway. I walk to the dry cleaner's on 88th, shop at the grocery on 89th, go to the bookstore at 93rd, go to church at 99th, catch the subway at 96th. My daughter likes to play in Riverside park, around 91st. On a warm day I like to sit at the Firemen's Memorial on 100th. It's a small world and one keeps running into acquaintances. No freeways, no enormous mall, just little shops like Murray's delicatessen and H&H Bagels and Altman's hardware. There's a newsstand on Broadway and you can walk down there late and pick up the Times and the Daily News. That's living, in my book. And it's closer to the Anoka I remember than, say, the suburbs of today are. Much closer.

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