Dear Mr. Keillor
What a joy it was to hear your "Icelandic Home Companion" from May, 20th. Your song about the stillness found in that island sanctuary was most apt and conveyed the spirit of that place and people so well.

I thought you'd like to know, given your penchant for the American immigrant experience, that the oldest Icelandic community in the United States is here in Spanish Fork. A group of Mormon converts from the island immigrated to Utah in 1855 and Brigham Young sent them here, about 55 miles south of Salt Lake City, where they settled and have retained their identity and sense of community to this day.

Last year the president of Iceland came to commemorate the sesquicentennial and rededicate a monument that has stood here since 1938 to honor those first Icelandic pioneers. It's a lighthouse with a Viking ship for a weather vane—quite an incongruous sight in our mountain fastness!

We are counting the days until you bring PHC to Salt Lake city in June. We've had our tickets for a month. The people you come from in Minnesota and we here in Utah are much more alike than you might suppose, given the politics of the majority around here. We hope you enjoy your visit with us as much as we undoubtedly will with you.

Peace,
Kenneth P.
Spanish Fork, UT

The president of Iceland, Olafur Grimsson, is very funny on the subject of Icelandic emigrants to the U.S. He says that they left home because it was so poor and then, once in America, passed up the good farmland to find land that reminded them of Iceland, near the sea or near the mountains, and so not much changed for them except that they were forced to learn English. I look forward to Salt Lake City, too, and hope you'll come around afterward and say hello.

Dear Mr. Keillor-
Until it was mentioned in the May 20, 2006 program from Iceland, I was unaware that you were teaching a writing course. Do your students' papers reveal the same general decline in grammar and punctuation seen elsewhere in the country? I hope for their sake you're a tough grader, since a nation that loses the distinction between "lie" and "lay" in its own language is surely headed for trouble. We risk having all those misplaced apostrophes gathered up by some hostile power and fired at us like grapeshot! I had a look at some work from a local college of good reputation, and even there, they're not sure of their homonyms. I fear for our young.

Doric D.
Southhampton, MA

The course was entitled "Composition of Comedy" (University of Minnesota, Creative Writing Program, 3110) and it drew 140 students, so at the moment I am a little light-headed from reading all of their final papers. Some of the writers wrote perfectly punctuated papers, others had problems with, say, putting an apostrophe in a plural (ten apple's, ten orange's) and some had persistent spelling gaffes (They took they're baseballs and went home) and of course there was some lay/lie confusion, but I tried not to beat on them. I wanted them to inhale the gas of comedy and breathe deep and let fly, and many of them did just that. The course was about rewriting: you got two chances to rewrite your paper and each time I critiqued it and tried to mark up the mistakes. And the results were so good, I thought, that I'm going to edit a collection of the students' stuff and you'll hear more about it on this Web site in the early fall.

Dear Garrison,
I was brought up in small towns and baptised a narrow tie Lutheran but have since recovered from the shock of the ice cold font water that January morning and realize the blessings abundant in my life. Thanks for the joy your show has brought into my heart. How can I bring your show to my new hometown? I know nothing of the smoke and mirrors or market schemes necessary to accomplish this, maybe hire some muscle or try bribery, whatever it takes. I talk to locals about your show and they have heard the show far in the past and surprisingly few knew you're back on the air! All approve of the idea but are apathetic to its accomplishment.

Steve H.
Aberdeen, WA

Steve, the people of Aberdeen would be much more excited about getting a TV show to come to Aberdeen, such as the "Today" show or "American Idol". A radio show is always going to be underwhelming. But a TV show would come with enormous vans and a crew of fifty and big stars and your relatives all across America would tune in. All you need to do is organize a mass letter-writing campaign to NBC. This could easily snowball to a million or two million letters, and when it does, NBC will respond. Our old radio show broadcasts from Seattle on July 22 and then from Pullman on Oct. 7. We like the stations there and they asked us to come and so we'll go. It's no big deal.

Garrison,
Long time listener, first time writer. I have read that the seeds for "A Prairie Home Companion" were planted in Nashville when you worked on an assignment here about the Opry. Any truth to that rumor? When will you be coming back to the Ryman, the home of country music?

Ken M.
Madison, TN

In the spring of 1974, Ken, I proposed an article to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, about the Grand Ole Opry leaving its old home in the Ryman Auditorium and moving to the suburbs, and he agreed to it, thanks to the intervention of an editor named Bill Whitworth, who had written an amazing Profile of Roger Miller in the magazine and other stuff. So I went to Nashville for a week, stayed at a cheap hotel, picked up little bits of color — tried to see Chet Atkins but he was busy and didn't know who I was, ran into Roy Acuff in an instrument shop and he was good and crusty, I found an impoverished songwriter who'd written a song called "Goodbye, Dear Old Ryman" and was hoping to have a hit with it and I met an old fiddler named Sid Harkreader who knew some of the original Opry musicians from 1925 — I gathered up some threads of a story, wrote it, and it was published in the magazine in May of that year, I believe. But meanwhile I'd gotten the notion to go back to Minnesota and start up a similar show. I had done a morning show on radio for a few years, 6 to 9 a.m., and was tired of mornings and looking for something new, so that was it. I took the name from the Prairie Home cemetery in Moorhead — you go for those macabre touches when you're young — and did a few test runs at the Walker Art Center in April and then started the weekly show in July.

I remember how down-at-the-heels that lower Broadway section of Nashville was in 1974, the old warehouse district and especially the blocks around the Ryman, and now of course it's come back beautifully, and so has the Opry, which has had a bumpy time in the suburbs and now does about half its shows in the Ryman. Tradition! A beautiful thing. I also remember how surprised some Nashvilleans were that The New Yorker magazine was interested in the Opry. To them, it was something of an embarrassment. As a result of starting the radio show, I got to be friends with Chet Atkins and now when I go to Nashville I can see that terrific statue of Chet sitting and picking guitar. It's down near the Performing Arts Center.

I don't know when we go back to Nashville. Next season, I hope.

Dear Garrison,
Spent the day teaching 7th graders (boys) about the diversity of life. We did a websearch on various organisms, the hagfish being a big hit with the boys due to its sliminess, scavenging lifestyle and baroque mouthparts. Next we looked at the wobbegong shark whereupon I quipped that this creature had first gained wide notice on Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobbegong. Silence, except for the clacking of keys as my students dutifully recorded this in their journals. Could you give me a suitable test question?

Sincerely,
Frank M.
Cleveland Heights, OH

Question: which of the following statements are true and which are false?

• The wobbegong shark is found in shallow temperate and tropical waters around Australia and Indonesia and spends much of its time resting on the sea floor, thus it is often referred to as the "carpet" shark.
• Small vegetation-like flaps of skin around the wobbegong's mouth serve as camouflage.
• Wobbegongs do not eat humans though they have bitten people who accidentally step on them in shallow water and scuba divers or snorkellers who poke them.
• They have many small sharp teeth and have been known to hang on and be difficult to remove.
• The flesh of the wobbegong is called flake and it is often used in fish and chips in Australia.
• The fish was made famous by the radio show, "Wobbegong Home Companion."

Hey Garrison,
What happened to the joke show this Spring? Did I miss it? Did you miss it? I crawl out of my icy cave about this time of year and look for this riotous show to shake my bones.

Jim B.
Sharpsburg, MD

I miss the Joke Show too, Jim, but nobody has told me a new joke in the past six months. These are serious times, I guess. Or maybe I don't know the right people. Or maybe, as the New York Times reported a year ago, the joke is dead.

Mr. Keillor,
You're going to love Iceland. I spent 2 winters in Keflavik during my time in the U.S. Navy, enjoyed every dark, windy, wet, freezing, snowblind minute. Very reminiscent of my childhood in Cadillac, Michigan. I hope while you're there you make mention of all the Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen and Marines serving up there. It's a harsh environment, but they've made it "home".

Jim C.
Alexandria, VA.

I won't be there for the freezing snowblind part, Jim. I hear it's warming up. Though of course wet and dark and windy are still possible. As for the soldiers, perhaps I'll have Guy Noir visit them to find out exactly how they manage to make the place home-like.

Dear Mr. Keilor,
I am listening to your show from Loveland, Colorado and you have just finished singing the opening song related to the train named the Zephyr (actually California Zephyr). At the very beginning of the song you sing the cities and towns through which the Zephyr passes. The second place you name is Las Vegas. I suggest you look at a map. After Oakland, the main stops are Sacramento and Reno. Las Vegas is hundreds of miles to the southeast, unserved by any passenger trains since Amtrak discontinued "The Desert Wind." This is similar to the continuing, neverending report that the completion of the transcontinental railroad came to its finish with the Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah. NO -- it was Promontory Summit, Utah, thirty or so miles to the north. There is no end to the continuation of this mistake. What is wrong with the people who write this B.S.

Thank you.
Gary S.

Mr. S., you're right about Las Vegas and it was a dumb mistake since I rode the train recently and should be able to remember. And of course the train is the California Zephyr ----- I referred to it as the "Zephyr" because in a song lyric you sometimes have a limited number of syllables to work with. As for the Promontory Point error, I guess it's one of those minor mistakes that continues through sheer momentum and will always be with us. Sorry. By the way, my name is spelled K-e-i-l-l-o-r.

Dear Garrison,
I'm 46 years old. My beautiful wife (38) and I are preparing for the birth of our first child. I understand that you became a parent in middle age and was wondering if you'd be kind enough to offer some advice on parenthood at my "advanced" age. I'm just a little...terrified! Thanks.

Tom C.
Kaneohe, Hawaii

I was 55 when my daughter came along, Tom, and it is, of course, a life-changing event, though I can't remember what the life-plan was at that point, nor any discussion of the pros and cons of having a baby. At this age, it's something a woman wants and a man agrees to. No 55-year-old man ever tried to persuade a woman to have a baby with him. Nature has let us know that we are past our prime. As fathers, we tend to be rather sentimental and permissive and paranoid. So we need to let the mother take the lead role and to be supportive and helpful and sympathetic but make no demands as to how the child should be reared. No thundering, no stamping of the paternal foot. We made a wise decision to move back to Minnesota where our daughter has relatives. Very important for the older dad. Your nephews can gallop around with the child and you can sit on the divan and read the newspaper. But you'll probably have to cut back on your extra-familial activities for awhile. And if you smoke, you'll stop. And you might reconsider drinking if you drink. One reappraises all sorts of things. I hope you and your wife get a baby who's a good sleeper, but sometimes God plays jokes and hands out the good sleepers to teenage parents and gives us older parents the insomniac child. God bless you both and may all go well with the little family.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I feel vindicated! Had no idea that other kids had gone through the "we don't need novacaine for this" experience you described so clearly on your show from Rochester. Mine happened when I was 7, near grandma's farm in Tracy, Minnesota. Mom and grandma had promised me it was just a check-up and that there would be no drilling. But the dentist found a small cavity. I panicked as he tried to be convincing: "We just need to do a *litttle* drilling." I refused, and after repeated attempts to bribe me failed, the looming hulk moved in. I bolted from the chair, with the dentist in pursuit. I knocked his model jaw to the floor and it smashed to pieces. As he grabbed for me, I grabbed for him. I got his arm, and bit down. Hard. Drew blood. He capitulated. No drilling that day, though I later went to bed with no supper. Now, as a child psychologist I usually don't feel qualified to offer advice for parents. But there is this one thing: Don't promise your kids there will be no drilling unless you can keep your promise! Thanks for reminding me.

Jan M.
Weston, MA

A feisty kid becomes a psychologist. Of course. Makes perfect sense. As for dentistry, it has come a long way since then and young dentists now specialize in dealing with recalcitrant children, such as my daughter, who for some reason is stricken with terror at the dentist's. We don't push children as far as our parents pushed us, and I suppose they were pushed even farther by their parents. I trust that you and your mother are back on good terms.

Dear Garrison,
I am curious to know what are your favorite reoccuring dreams and nightmares? If I have trouble falling asleep, I have a dozen or so scenarios to help me relax and drift away to slumberland. For some reason, tornados work for me since mine are never dangerous and are quite beautiful in their undulating dance across unpopulated prairies.

John B.
Rohnert Park, CA

John, nobody in Minnesota dreams about tornadoes, at least not willingly. I used to have a nightmare about the radio show in which I stood on stage alone and could not see anyone in the wings and nobody ever walked onstage to help me out and I stood there and talked and the audience slowly drifted away. I also used to have a sleep-inducing meditation: I walked out of a little house in Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, and through tall dune grass to the beach where I spread a towel and lay down, and I usually was asleep in minutes. But I don't seem to need it anymore. Having a small daughter tires you out and when you lie down, that's it, it's all over.

Dear Garrison,
Are you mad at Atlanta? I know with the unpleasantness at Chastain Park last year you may think we are all uncouth rascals, but really there is a large contingency of PHC lovers here. I read your piece on the dreadful fund raiser you attended in Atlanta, and how glad you were to leave there, and it made me wonder----do you hate Atlanta? Have you forever crossed us off your list of tour destinations? Please don't punish the 98% of those of us who love your show because of the 2% who act like goobers. Come back to the Fox. We were all civilized there.

Your fan in Acworth
Nancy

I don't hate Atlanta. I just feel that rudeness should be pointed out and I find the rudeness of wealthy drunken people especially irritating. It's one reason I don't do corporate events. And it makes me livid that the management of Chastain Park sold the stageside tables to their corporate backers, and, when I complained about the loud drunks down front who were yelling at the performers during a live broadcast, said, "Oh, they're just enjoying themselves." A lovely soprano from the Atlanta Opera stood and sang against this rampage of idiots and I stood out there and did the news from Lake Wobegon with a man in a seersucker jacket standing up and yelling, "Hey where'd you get those shoes?" and the Chastain management just stood by and smiled. Like everyone else, I have to accept a lot of loud, stupid behavior ---- it's part of the passing scene, I guess ---- but the evening at Chastain sticks in my craw. An apology would've eased the situation, but none was offered, and that, to me, is an enormous insult. What does it cost management to look you in the eye and say, "I'm sorry about that."? So you couldn't pay me enough to go back to Atlanta, but I'd go back to Columbus, GA, anytime. They have a terrific hall and Carson McCullers's girlhood home is there and a few weeks ago I spent an evening sitting on a screened porch talking about the South with some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. They may have been rich and they might have been drunk but they didn't yell at me. I look forward to going back.