Post to the Host
GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between.

Send your own post to the host.
Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome!

We received an overwhelming response to GK's readings on the January 31st show. The text and books from which the readings were taken are now posted, as is the audio in both MP3 and Real Audio formats. You might also enjoy reading our collection of John Updike's poems on The Writer's Almanac

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Post to the Host:
Hope your show will do a tribute to one of America's greatest writers, John Updike.

Kathleen L.

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I'm working on it, Kathleen. I had invited John Updike to read on the show and he demurred at first and then seemed interested and I thought we were going to be able to get him for Tanglewood this year, but no. I didn't know him but I've admired him since I was in college and he was just getting attention with his stories. I first met him in the 19th floor hallway of The New Yorker in 1989 or so. He'd been such a hero of mine that it was like running into Ted Williams or Cary Grant — what can you say? nothing. You just stand there and make yourself not say things, like "For me, you are the greatest living, you embody what I hope for in American literature" — so we just nodded and smiled at each other. And then a few years ago, we did a promotional interview together for an anthology that included something of his and something of mine, a collegial moment. He was a beaming man in his later years; his eyes glittered, he had a generous smile. When I last saw him, a year ago, we were at a literary function in far uptown Manhattan where he'd read a moving tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. He walked with me and my wife to the subway and I got to compliment him on Gertrude and Claudius which I had just read. We rode downtown together, and a band of seminary students boarded our car and recognized him and said all the things I'd made myself not say years ago. He was very gracious with them, jokey and off-hand. He was a great man, and when he wrote me a note saying he liked a story of mine, I treasured that more than one should. He was an uncomplaining writer, a genius but also a workman, and he seemed to pick up energy in his last decade, which is encouraging to the rest of us. The Centaur is still my favorite of his books, a work of filial devotion, with the Olinger stories a close second. God bless his memory. I'll try to find a few things of his to read, just to put him in mind and maybe some people will go look him up in the library. Thanks to his enormous ambitions and good habits, he left us plenty to read.

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Post to the Host:
How do you maintain your schedule? Where do you get your energy? What keeps you motivated after all the shows and the traveling?

John A.
Indianapolis

Doesn't seem so strenuous to me, John, but my guess is that heredity plays a huge role here as it does in so much else in life. Riding through snowy Ohio to try to catch a plane home today, a man in the car said he was at high risk for heart attacks, though he exercises and lives right, simply because his family has a history of them — he said, "Heredity multiplies your risk by ten, smoking only by three." A man my age feeling the burden of mortality. So maybe I got a different set of genes. My grandmother Dora worked hard right up to the end and most of my uncles and aunts steamed into their eighties at a pretty good clip. It sure isn't strength of character on my part. If anything, it's fear of old age and fear of death. I stand in the wings before a show and think, "I won't get to do this that much longer, so quit screwing around and do it right, Idiot." I never used to think that way — back in my thirties and forties I nursed a whole series of grievances against the world, and now I feel nothing but lucky. I get to do this show, get to write books with some certainty of publication, get to say what I want in a weekly column. And this fabulous laptop permits a person to carry his office on his lap. So why not try to do things right?

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Post to the Host:
Thank you for coming back to Ashland on April 5th! I could not get out
of my house during the ice storm and I have been wanting to see you for years. Again
thank you!

Linda K.
Barboursville, West Virginia

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I flew into Ashland, Kentucky on Tuesday and it looked beautiful in that snowstorm but then a woman named Wendy Wilson called to say she couldn't make it to the Paramount Theater for the show that night on account of bad roads and that the theater couldn't give her a refund. Well, I felt guilty because I had postponed the Ashland show from January 20th so that I could attend the inauguration. So I did the show at the Paramount Tuesday night but told the crowd that I'd come back on Sunday April 5 and do another for the hundreds of people who couldn't make it to town. And the next morning my flight out of Ashland was cancelled and then another flight was cancelled and I had to drive to Columbus OH to get a flight home. But I got to meet some wonderful West Virginians in the course of it all. A mysterious state to me. Its culture, its politics — the corrupt governors, the perpetual senators Byrd and Rockefeller, the absence of leadership, the dreadful poverty, the industry and kindness of the people. So I'll go back and meet some more of them.

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Post to the Host:
When I started listening some years ago, there was a segment on the program called "Department of Folk Song".

I really miss it. Any chance of having it resurrected?

Jeff

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Always a chance, Jeff, though we tried to resurrect the Department a couple years ago and it didn't draw much response from the listenership. People didn't send in the songs they heard as children, that still go around and around in their heads. That was the genius of the Department back in the early 80s — it was entirely created by listeners sending in submissions. But maybe there's another way to do it. Meanwhile, check out The Prairie Home Folk Song Book edited by Jon and Marcia Pankake that came out years ago, the best of the Department's offerings. A real treasure.

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Post to the Host:
First, let me say that I have been a fan and steady listener to PHC since the 1970's. I love the joke shows, the folk music, the regular characters, and the monologues, and I will continue to listen. However, I found the Jan. 24th G. Bush skit to be excessive pandering and downright ugly in its execution. Even if every implicit criticism of Mr. Bush is true, this is no reason for your show to indulge in such a nasty personal assault. It was, in my opinion, needlessly cruel and unbecoming. In short, not consistent with the values your show promotes every week. Thank you.

Frank P.
Lohman, MO

Post to the Host:
I often hear A Prairie Home Companion as I do the dishes from the Saturday night meal...and I heard the Duluth Show and felt very uncomfortable with the spoof on President Bush. I am a Democrat and am excited about President Obama. My feeling is: Enough already! Leave him alone (attacking him only incites those who back him) and we have so much that needs doing. So, let's move on; forget President Bush and deal with the present and future.

Nick R.
Santa Cruz, CA

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Your letters, Nick and Frank, were two of many we received that were offended by the Guy Noir (script | listen) sketch in which Mr. Bush flew to Duluth to straighten out the race for U.S. Senate in Minnesota — which now is in the courts and no winner yet declared. I wrote the sketch because I wanted to hang onto Mr. Bush for at least one more go. Tim Russell does such a great Bush impression — it's just irresistible. I don't suppose we'll do much more with it — but you never know. Our Presidents are huge assets in folk culture and always have been: they become cartoon characters, even the most revered of them. And even though Mr. Bush becomes much less interesting now, as the country is exhausted with him, he will always be the genial bumbler, just as Al Gore will always be the stiff trying too hard to be genial, and Bill Clinton will always be the genial satyr and chowhound, and Jimmy Carter the prickly puritan, and George H.W. the mangler of English whose sentences go in three directions at once, and Reagan — well, how to describe him? All I know is that Tim does the best Reagan I ever heard and we keep looking for opportunities to bring him back.

I'm not attacking Mr. Bush, I'm having fun with him. Quite different. He will be attacked more ferociously in the next ten years than he was the past eight, simply because historians will start to get their hands on the information. Thirty years from now, Mr. Bush will, I think, be pretty well hung out to dry by history who will have peered far enough into his administration to see what he was doing and how he worked. That's the sort of attack a president has to fear, the devastation of history. (Mr. Obama, being only 47, will likely live long enough to read historians sharply critical of his presidency.) What I'm doing is mere play.

The idea that a man leaves office and we close the doors on him is a pleasant idea, but I don't remember it happening in my lifetime. When people wield so much power, they are held accountable, sometimes mercilessly. Putting Mr. Bush in a flight suit and having him bumble around Biwabik and get whacked in the head and become delirious with self-recrimination is cartoon stuff, playing around with cliches. It's the historians who do the real damage.

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Dear Mr. Keillor,
On Tuesday my colleague was fortunate to attend the inauguration of our 44th President of these United States. She believes that as she was departing the area near the Capitol when the ceremony ended, you walked right by her. She swears it was indeed you but forgot to look for your red shoes.

Just wondering...

Fondly,
Debbie E.
WHRV-FM, Norfolk, VA

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It could've been me, Debbie, since I was there, or it could've been some other tall person with glasses. No red shoes: those are for work — I wore black ones. I was not as bundled up as most — just a black wool overcoat and a scarf that I'd bought from a vendor. My wife was with me and, after the ceremony, the mayor of St. Paul Chris Coleman and his wife Connie who we ran into and my friend Sydney Goldstein and her husband Chuck Breyer and their daughter Kate, all from San Francisco. Small world. We were all walking out together, inching along in the crowd, when the Marine helicopter went overhead bearing the Former Occupant and there was the sort of spontaneous roar of jubilation such as I've never heard before. It was so natural and spontaneous that you couldn't call it cruel — a weary people encouraged by the departure of a disastrous man. Chuck is a federal judge in S.F. and in the buoyant mood of the moment he invited us to join them for lunch at the Supreme Court where his older brother works. It was a real lesson in the Art of Negotiation to see this elegant San Franciscan talk us through security at the Court and into its marbly vastness and down the hall to his brother's chambers which — small world — turned out to be the very chambers once occupied by Justice Blackmun whom I had visited there twenty years ago. Chuck built a fire in the fireplace and we sat down and recovered from the chill and then ambled down to the dining room where, years before, Justice Blackmun had held a reception for A Prairie Home Companion, and where now, a hundred relatives of Justices were eating lunch and also Justice Clarence Thomas who was much more amiable than his public image suggests and who recalled me singing the Whiffenpoof Song at Justice Blackmun's funeral. An odd sweet ending to a beautiful day. It began with a 5:30 a.m. train ride and two hours standing in line in the cold and then the thrill of the man taking the oath — when he said, "so help me, God" I got a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye — and then, by sheer chance, a visit to the Inner Sanctum. Amazing city, Washington. From the Court I went to the Chicago Tribune bureau on F Street and wrote my column, and then we caught a train to New York from which I'd fly to Columbus the next day, and Seattle on Thursday, and Duluth on Friday. That was my week, Debbie. Never was another like it.

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Greetings Mr. Keillor,
I remember that you used scoff at people who exercised intensely; you said they were trying to hold off old age or death. I recall you had some sort of physical ailment a few years ago, in light of that has your attitude toward exercise changed?

Kevin K.

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I had open-heart surgery in July 2001 to repair a mitral valve, Kevin, a congenital defect that didn't get in my way at all until then, and recovered nicely from the surgery and seem to be in good shape now, despite leading a sedentary life for the past ten or fifteen years.

But I am changing my attitude toward exercise — mainly because I sense a loss of agility and I don't want to go any faster that way than I need to. So I'm scouting around for something I can do without too much trouble. Maybe tap dance. Maybe hopping and spinning. I had some back problems a couple years ago that cleared up rather nicely after I did minimal stretching exercises for awhile, a quick fix to a nagging problem. Anyway I don't think I scoff at exercise anymore, if I ever did.

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Post to the Host:
I am a retired flight attendant — 41 years with Delta Airlines. Tonight your tribute to the entire crew of the USAirways flight who landed in the Hudson River was wonderful. Thank you for recognizing the ENTIRE crew!! The captain was, of course, a hero, but he was not alone — his first officer had to have been working as hard as he was — You are the first person I have heard mention his name (much less, write a song about it!)

As a flight attendant, I do appreciate the tribute to those ladies, but the real heroism was in the cockpit!

Thanks to the five crew members, and to you for your tribute.

Sarah N.
Williamson, GA

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I wrote the song (lyrics | listen | download mp3) on the plane from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Louisville last Friday because I was taken with the name of the pilot, Chessley B. Sullenberger III, which struck me as a cartoonish name you'd attach to a guy in a top hat and spats. The Third at the end of his name opens the door to lots of rhymes — bird, occurred, onward, and so forth — and so I dashed off the song, which also celebrates his great presence of mind in a pinch, not that it was Heroic but that it was sort of Typical and what pilots are trained for. Right? So I rehearsed the song Friday with the band and noticed that I'd singled out one guy and there were others involved and the first officer Jeffrey Skiles also had a rhymeable name and so did the flight attendants, Donna Dent, Sheila Dail, and Doreen Welsh. So there you are. I was unprepared, though, for the huge reaction of the audience in the Palace Theater in Louisville. They just LOVED that song from the first line. Not a great song but it touched a deep chord, and there's the secret of songwriting, ma'am. Just be in the right place at the right time and any fool can write a song. But it takes years of training and mental discipline to be able to set a powerless Airbus down on the Hudson. And then he was the last to leave the plane. He walked through hip-deep water all the way to the tail to make sure everybody was out. To us passengers, that seems so utterly classy. Wow. I'm flying all week this week, Richmond, Vero Beach, D.C., Ohio, Seattle, Duluth, and I look at you airline people a little differently now.

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Dear Mr. Keillor,
I think Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead is superb, and does a fine job of capturing a small-town Midwest religious life. Have you read the novel? You grew up in some kind of hard-core fundamentalist church, that from what I hear is rather like the Missouri Synod Lutherans with which I grew up. Just what was that church [I've heard different stories about that] and how did you come to drift away from it?

Ervin W.
St. Paul

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Haven't read Gilead, Ervin, but have heard good things about it. Probably a novel capturing small-town Midwest religious life isn't a novel I'm anxious to pick up. You're a better man than I. I'd rather pick up a novel capturing the life of gay sophistication in Vienna in the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire or Mafia life in Las Vegas in the early Fifties.

I grew up in the Plymouth Brethren in Minneapolis. Our meeting hall was at 3701 14th Avenue South and we went every Sunday morning and again in the evening. It was somewhat different from Missouri Synod Lutheran in that the Brethren renounced the idea of church hierarchy and forms of liturgy and any sort of pomp or churchy decor. Men in surplices, sanctuaries with candles and crucifixes — they regarded it as a thin veneer of piety that appealed to the worldly. They were puritans in the original sense, radical reformers. Growing up in it with most of my relatives, it just felt like family to me. I left rather precipitously when I was twenty years old, a college kid, and it was made clear to me that the Brethren did not feel that a Christian could be a journalist or a writer of fiction. So I made a clean break. The Brethren are in steep decline today, due to their schismatic nature. They believed in the inerrancy of Scripture, which made them scholars of the Bible, which brought out a prideful and legalistic side of them, and they neglected the more loving pastoral gifts and let it be a lesson to the rest of us. We all have a judgmental and self-righteous side and the Christian life is more about kindness and mercy. So on we go, by the grace of God, and thanks for the letter.

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Mr. Keillor:
I absolutely love Prairie Home Companion. I will forever remember dancing a jig to the Powdermilk Biscuit theme song and listening with intrigue to the news from Lake Wobegon. Journeying back from a soccer tournament down windy country roads while enjoying the annual joke show is a favorite memory of mine.

I want to know what your views on the future of radio shows such as yours. I am sad to say that I am one of the few people in my high school who are aware of the wonders of NPR. As far as I can tell the future of radio is bleak.

Do you have any thoughts on what will be the destiny for radio?

Sincerely,
Erin L.
Huntsville, AL

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I'm happy you like our show, Erin. The future of public radio is shining bright if only we can wrest it out of the hands of people my age and into the hands of people forty years younger. The problem isn't the medium — the technology is light, portable, easy to use — the problem is the heavy hand of tradition that keeps innovation at bay. There is so much that can be best conveyed through audio, Erin, and that won't change. The music industry is getting flattened by the Internet, but there's a great future for radio. I see reality radio as the next big thing — eavesdropping radio, the microphone picking up things you weren't meant to hear — and then I see radio drama coming back to life, but radio drama that attempts to impersonate reality. And for bands and songwriters who want to reach a broad market, there's nothing like radio, especially as record production goes flat. Do a whole concert on the air, let people tape it for free, and sell copies to people who can't make their own. That's the way to advance your music. Get it out there first and worry about income second. A whole new business plan. And radio is where you can do it. As far as news goes, radio is the province of the Authoritative Voice, and people are always ready for the next one. We are creatures who love to listen to our own kind. We're intrigued by the sound of ourselves. When I see people walking around with little wires running into their ears, I have to think radio has a future.

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Post to the Host:
Any plans to teach your comedy composition course at the University of Minnesota again?

Chris J.
Minneapolis

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No plans to teach again, Chris. I taught some courses and it was high times being around funny twenty-year-olds, but it's hard work, too hard for me, and it eats up a man's self-esteem. Teaching is a religious calling and you do your best and then you walk away feeling utterly inadequate and it's hard on an older person such as myself. And I'm becoming an eccentric recluse who sits in a dim room with three cats and knits scarves and listens to gypsy music and weeps and smokes cigarillos and sips absinthe. Fragile, in other words. But thanks for asking.

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Dear Mr. Keillor,
As a long time admiring fan of PHC and your writing, I was dismayed to read your suggestion to President-Elect Obama that he "might pardon his predecessor and his vice."

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney need to be held accountable for their actions. If the powerful are not subject to the consequences of our laws, then our laws are of no consequence and the American experiment with democracy has failed.

Say it ain't so Mr. K!

John H.
Pittsboro, NC

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The economy is staggering under trillions in debt, we need to rebuild this country after eight years of blind willful indifference and destructive politics — and we are going to start out by conducting a prosecution of the outgoing administration for war crimes? I have no doubt that a determined prosecution could make a case against the Current Occupant and his Vice, but pursuing it would be sheer insanity and would plunge us into yet another ugly hopeless chapter such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The verdict on Mr. Bush was rendered in November and now is the time to go forward and do the essential things. Shore up the economy, fix the tax system, end the bloody war, and save the planet from our own excesses. Retribution is not what we need.

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