| Garrison Keillor | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Gary Edward Keillor |
| Born | August 7, 1942 Anoka, Minnesota |
| Medium | Radio, Print |
| Nationality | American |
| Years active | 1969–present |
| Genres | Observational comedy, Satire |
| Subject(s) | American culture (esp. the Midwest); American politics |
| Spouse | Mary Guntzel (1965–1976) Ulla Skaerved (1985–1990) Jenny Lind Nilsson (1995–present) |
| Notable works and roles | Himself, Guy Noir, Lefty, Bob Burger, and Lake Wobegon narrator in A Prairie Home Companion |
Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on United Kingdom's BBC Radio 4 Extra, as well as on RTÉ in Ireland, Australia's ABC, and Radio New Zealand National in New Zealand).
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Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of Grace Ruth (née Denham) and John Philip Keillor, who was a carpenter and postal worker.[1][2] The family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination Keillor has since left. He is six feet, three inches (1.9 m) tall[3] and has Scots and Norwegian ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.[4] In 2006 he told Christianity Today that he was attending the Episcopal church in Saint Paul, after previously attending a Lutheran church in New York.[5][6] He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.
Keillor has been married three times:[7]
Between his first and second marriages, he was also romantically involved with Margaret Moos, who worked as a producer of A Prairie Home Companion.[9]
The Keillors maintain homes on the Upper West Side of New York City and in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
One of his brothers, the historian Steven Keillor, is also an author.[10]
On September 7, 2009, Keillor was briefly hospitalized after suffering a minor stroke.[11]
In his book Homegrown Democrat (2004), Keillor mentions some of his noteworthy ancestors, including Joseph Crandall,[12] who was an associate of Roger Williams (who founded the first American Baptist church as well as Rhode Island); and Prudence Crandall, who founded the first African-American women's school in America.[13]
Garrison Keillor started his professional radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and distributing programs under the American Public Media (APM) brand. He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time slot of 6 to 9 a.m. on KSJR 90.1 FM at St. John's University in Collegeville, which the station called "A Prairie Home Entertainment." The show's eclectic music was a major divergence from the station's usual classical fare. During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared on September 19, 1970.[14]
Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October.[15]
Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them, and in August 1973 The Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.[15][16]
A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Auto Repair ("All tracks lead to Jack's where the bright shining lights show you the way to complete satisfaction") and Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done."[15] Later imaginary sponsors have included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it"), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Ketchup Advisory Board[17] (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the American Duct Tape Council, and Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations"). The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home submitted by members of the theater audience in exchange for an honorarium.
Also in the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcase a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled The News from Lake Wobegon. The town is based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and in part on Freeport and other towns in Stearns County, where he lived in the early 1970s.[18] Lake Wobegon is a quintessential but fictional Minnesotan small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." A Prairie Home Companion ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, "The American Radio Company of the Air" — which had almost the same format as A Prairie Home Companion's — for several years. In 1993 he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, in a format nearly identical to the original's, and has done so since.[19] On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor receives no billing or credit (except "written by Sarah Bellum," a joking reference to his own brain); his name is not mentioned unless a guest addresses him by his first name or the initials "G. K.," though some sketches feature Keillor as his alter ego, Carson Wyler.
A Prairie Home Companion regularly goes on the road and is broadcast live from popular venues around the United States, often featuring local celebrities and skits incorporating local color. Keillor also sometimes gives broadcast performances of a similar nature that do not carry the "Prairie Home Companion" brand, as in his 2008 appearance at the Oregon Bach Festival.[20] In March 2011, Keillor announced that he would be retiring from "A Prairie Home Companion" in 2013.[21]
Keillor is also the host of The Writer's Almanac which, like A Prairie Home Companion, is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Writer's Almanac is also available online[22] and via daily e-mail installments by subscription.[23]
Keillor has written numerous magazine and newspaper articles and more than a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to writing for The New Yorker, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com.
He also authored an advice column at Salon.com under the name "Mr. Blue." Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001, his last column being titled "Every dog has his day":[24]
Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon. Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying. So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.
In 2004 Keillor published a collection of political essays, Homegrown Democrat, and in June 2005 he began a column called "The Old Scout",[25] which ran at Salon.com and in syndicated newspapers. The column went on hiatus in April 2010 "so that he [could] finish a screenplay and start writing a novel".
Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)
On November 1, 2006, Keillor opened an independent bookstore in the historic Cathedral Hill area of Saint Paul, Minnesota. "Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop."[26] is located at the southwest corner of Selby and N. Western Avenues (in the Blair Arcade Building, Suite 14, in the basement, below Nina's Coffee Cafe). Cathedral Hill is in the Summit-University neighborhood.[27] The bookstore's opening was covered by the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[28]
Probably owing in part to his distinctive North Central accent, Keillor is often used as a voiceover actor. Some notable appearances include:
In 2005, Keillor's attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to MNSpeak.com regarding their production of a T-shirt bearing the inscription "A Prairie Ho Companion."[31]
In 2006, after a visit to a United Methodist Church in Highland Park, Texas, Keillor created a local controversy with his remarks about the event,[32] including the rhetorical suggestion of a connection between event participants and supporters of torture and a statement creating an impression of political intimidation: "I walked in, was met by two burly security men ... and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics." The security detail is purportedly routine for the venue, and according to participants, Keillor did not interact with any audience members between his arrival and his lecture.[33] Supposedly, before Keillor's remarks, participants in the event had considered the visit to have been cordial and warm.[34]
In 2007, Keillor wrote a column that in part criticized "stereotypical" gay parents, who he said were "sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers."[35] In response to the strong reactions of many readers, Keillor said
I live in a small world -- the world of entertainment, musicians, writers -- in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes .... And in that small world, we talk openly and we kid each other a lot. But in the larger world, gayness is controversial ... and so gay people feel besieged to some degree and rightly so .... My column spoke as we would speak in my small world, and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding. And for that, I am sorry. Gay people who set out to be parents can be just as good parents as anybody else, and they know that, and so do I. [36]
In 2008, Keillor created a controversy in St. Paul when he filed a lawsuit against his neighbors' plans to build an addition on their home, citing his need for "light and air" and a view of "open space and beyond". Keillor's home is significantly larger than others in his neighborhood and would still be significantly larger than his neighbors' with its planned addition.[37] Keillor came to an undisclosed settlement with his neighbors shortly after the story became public.[38]
His style, particularly his speaking voice, is often the subject of parody. The Simpsons parodied Keillor in an episode in which Homer is shown watching a Keillor-like monologist on television; Homer hit the set exclaiming "Stupid TV! Be more funny!".[39]
One Boston radio critic likens Keillor and his "down comforter voice" to "a hypnotist intoning, 'You are getting sleepy now'," while noting that Keillor does play to listeners' intelligence.[40] Keillor rarely reads his monologue from a script.
One of the audio bumpers that begin each hour of Dennis Miller's radio talk show features a short clip of Keillor introducing a broadcast of APHC, followed immediately by snoring.
In the bonus DVD material for the album Venue Songs by band They Might Be Giants, John Hodgman delivers a fictitious newscast in which he explains that "The Artist Formerly Known as Public Radio Host Garrison Keillor" and his "legacy of Midwestern pledge-drive funk" inspired the band's first "venue song."[41]
Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Tom Flannery wrote a song in 2003 entitled "I Want a Job Like Garrison Keillor's."[42]
The Cleveland Show once mentioned Keillor as an exemplar of humor so subtle as to be inscrutable. [43]
The Homestar Runner cartoon "Date Nite" features an Easter egg found by clicking on the period in "end." at the end of the cartoon. In it, a Public Radio wrestling event is advertised in which Keillor "...wrestles his own soothing voice in a steel cage." [44]
Keillor's work in print includes:
| Title | Department | Volume/Part | Date | Page(s) | Subject(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notes and Comment | The Talk of the Town | 60/47 | 7 January 1985 | 17-18 | A friend's visit to San Francisco and Stinson Beach, California. |
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