Issue 136, Fall 1995
Garrison Keillor was born in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota. He attended Anoka High School and the University of Minnesota. In 1969, he began writing for The New Yorker. In 1974, while at work on an article about the Grand Ole Opry, he was inspired to create a live variety show for radio. The result was the award-winning A Prairie Home Companion, an inspired program in which Keillor—invariably appearing on stage in the World Theater in downtown St. Paul in a tuxedo, red suspenders, and jogging sneakers—brought his listeners the latest news from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon. The show was “sponsored” by, among others, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (“if you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it”). His chronicling of a Midwest culture and its gentle homespun ways (in the tradition of Booth Tarkington and certainly Mark Twain) have resulted in a number of books, among them We Are Still Married, Happy to Be Here, Lake Wobegon Days, WLT: A Radio Romance, Leaving Home, and The Book of Guys. He left The New Yorker at its last administrative change, and at what he perceived to be a shift in its editorial policy; he now contributes regularly to The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. In addition to A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor also hosts The Writer’s Almanac, a daily poetry program distributed by Public Radio International.
This interview was conducted on the stage of the YMHA at Ninety-second Street and Lexington Avenue in New York as part of a continuing series arranged between that institution and The Paris Review. The auditorium was packed, the balcony as well, many in the audience with his books—well-thumbed copies of Lake Wobegon Days in particular—which they would get him to autograph afterwards.
Keillor is a large man, very tall, built along the lines of professional football’s tight ends. He has a heavy crop of dark hair, which is distinguished by a forelock clump that reaches almost to his right eyebrow. His is a large and expressive face, which with his dark-rimmed glasses gives him a somewhat solemn and owlish appearance: he never appears to laugh, even at his most hilarious. The pace of his replies is slow and measured, giving one the sense that he has applied a good deal of thought to the question, however uninspired.
The introduction on the stage concluded with a listing of some of the more distinguished literary figures who have been interviewed on the craft of fiction for the Review—a pantheon Keillor was now joining.
INTERVIEWER
The Paris Review interviews on the craft of writing started back in 1953, the first interviewee being E. M. Forster. The interviews have appeared in the magazine, which is a quarterly, ever since. We are extremely glad to welcome Garrison Keillor to the pantheon and to their good company.
GARRISON KEILLOR
I’m glad that sales of my books have dropped to where serious literary journals now take an interest in me.
INTERVIEWER
Well, fortunately, we had to wait a long time for that to happen. Could we start by asking if the process of writing is pleasurable?
KEILLOR
Sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be; you still have to do your work. I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o’clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time. That can be pleasurable, but only if the material you write is good. If it’s not, you’re filled with self-loathing. If the material is good and funny, you still loathe yourself, of course, for writing comedy and lighthearted fluff instead of writing serious and loathsome fiction, but . . . What was your question?
INTERVIEWER
No, you were doing fine. During this time from Friday until Saturday a part of your brain must be working on what you are going to put down. What is the genesis of a particular piece? Can you describe what that is like?
KEILLOR
You mean the Lake Wobegon stories? They aim to be truthful, so that’s where they originate, in the search for truth. I told a story a month ago, for Halloween, about the terrible pranks that were played in Lake Wobegon just before I came along that I never got to participate in. Things such as pushing over an outhouse when some sterling citizen was in it, tipping it forwards so it fell on the door and the poor man had to crawl out the hole. I never did this. It existed for me only in my uncle’s stories, but the stories were severely edited. So I had to reconstruct what happened when an outhouse was tipped, how it must have felt to the man inside and what a pleasure it must have been to the tipper.
INTERVIEWER
When does your own imagination take over a story that an uncle told you?
KEILLOR
Well, my uncle was not willing to tell me the whole story, only to acknowledge that he had heard of people doing that sort of thing. He wasn’t willing to put a hand on the outhouse himself. In his version, he was far away at a Bible reading, which diminished the story. I don’t consider it fiction to complete someone else’s story that they for the wrong reasons cut short or revised. Although I never tipped an outhouse over, I could tell about it—any writer could. How many ways are there to tip over an outhouse, after all? And who wouldn’t do it, given the chance to? And you know whose outhouses would be really worth tipping over. And would you tip it over onto its back? No. Of course you’d tip it onto the front.
INTERVIEWER
I would think so.
KEILLOR
Leaving your victim only the one exit, and so it’s uh . . . I don’t consider it fiction, it’s more like working out a theorem. And if you can imagine how to tip over an outhouse, you’re ready to go on and write about homicide.
INTERVIEWER
Well, how about the genesis of something longer? For example, “My North Dakota Railroad Days,” your marvelous story about an imaginary railroad train?
KEILLOR
My father worked on the railroad, for the Railway Mail Service, sorting mail in the mail car, and his run was St. Paul to Jamestown, North Dakota and back. Their trains were very romantic to me as a boy in Minnesota. You could hear the whistles from miles away when I was a teenager. I rode the Burlington Zephyr to Chicago, and the North Coast Limited, and years later I set out to write about a train that was even greater than those trains, a train that those trains were trying to be. The Prairie Queen, which crossed North Dakota, a state in which it was possible to lay straight track for hundreds of miles without hitting anything that couldn’t easily be removed. The passengers stood on the rear of the platform of the parlor car in the trans–Dakota Canal, and trolled for fish, and they played pocket billiards onboard. After I wrote that for The New Yorker, it was republished in North Dakota, in a magazine for railroad old-timers, and it drew some testy letters from old-timers who couldn’t recall any sort of train like that. When people take pure fiction as journalism, there is no greater compliment.
INTERVIEWER
I take it you did not write back to the railroad magazine.
KEILLOR
No. I clipped out those irate letters and framed them.