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News from Lake Wobegon
Keillor will read from his latest novel, in which a 60-year-old car mechanic shakes the town up a bit By Laura Giovanelli
AP Photo/Prairie Home Productions
Garrison Keillor, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion, will read from his novel Liberty on Monday morning at Wake Forest University.
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Published: September 28, 2008
Updated: 09/27/2008 08:25 pm
As William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County as a backdrop for his characters, Garrison Keillor invented Lake Wobegon, a fictional place inhabited by characters, family drama, personal crisis and traditions. It's a town seemingly suspended in time, yet full of Midwesterners who cannot escape the human conundrums of love, death and religion.
To be fair, the hero of Keillor's new comic novel is a modern guy. In Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, Clint Bunsen, a 60-year-old car mechanic, uses online chat rooms, text messaging and e-mail to stay in touch with his (much younger) girlfriend.
Bunsen has been organizing Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July parade for six years and has transformed it into a red-white-and-blue extravaganza that's attracted the attention of CNN. He has outlawed most tractors and pickups and the out-of-tune Ladies Sextette's rendition of "It's a Grand Old Flag." He's added drum-and-bugle corps, Percherons and circus wagons, a marching handbell choir and a fireworks show funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and taken up with the young psychic who dresses up as the parade's Statue of Liberty.
Keillor is the longtime host of American Public Media's A Prairie Home Companion (heard locally on WFDD-FM), but he writes books, too. Liberty is his second in a three-part series of short novels revolving around the town. Pontoon, published last year, will be followed by Pilgrims next year, according to A Prairie Home Companion's Web site. Keillor will read from Liberty Monday morning in an appearance and book-signing at Wake Forest University.
Recently, he answered a few questions by e-mail about Lake Wobegon, writing and reading, his new book, and fair food.
Q. I'm probably not alone when I joke that I listened to A Prairie Home Companion
in utero (the show has been on since 1974 with a hiatus from 1987 to 1989). I grew up rolling my eyes at my parents' public radio addiction, and now I've inherited the habit. I loved stories about Lake Wobegon. For me, it was kind of like another Oz, or Narnia, except with Lutherans and hotdish (a kind of casserole made with canned soup, a vegetable, meat and a starch), of course. How was Lake Wobegon born? Did you intend on creating a town from scratch? Was it inspired by your native Anoka?
A. The town was created as a site for advertisers on A Prairie Home Companion, which is on public radio, which has no advertising and so I had to invent some -- Jack's Auto Repair, Bertha's Kitty Boutique, Powdermilk Biscuits, and so forth. It sort of gradually got transmogrified into a town with residents and a history and a town dump and sewage system.
Anoka, where I was born and went to school, was bigger -- around 11,000 in my day -- and in the process of being eaten up by Minneapolis, so I put Lake Wobegon a hundred miles or so north of there, so it would be beyond the sprawl of shopping centers and such and be more like the classic small town of literature. Whose usefulness to the writer, clearly, is its manageability and the interconnectedness of lives. You tell a story about one person, and pretty soon all the rest of them get involved.
Q. Most people probably know you best as the host of A Prairie Home Companion, yet you've actually been writing for about as long as you've been in radio. I've read that you had a story published in The New Yorker in 1970, not long after you started your career with Minnesota Public Radio. Can you talk about the relationship between your radio work and writing? Do they drive and/or feed off each other? Do you use Lake Wobegon material from shows in your novels, or vice versa, or are they independent?
A. I always thought of radio as low-rent and aspired to write fiction, which I considered more dignified and durable, but now I'm completely confused. Radio is sociable and it comes with absolute deadlines and it gets you into spoken American English, which is a beautiful place to be.
The writer in me wants to write the show, and the performer wants to walk out and gab, and each week the two struggle for supremacy. The writer wants control, and yet control can be so deadening. I am always stealing from myself when I write novels, of course, but the adventure of fiction is discovering new sides and alleyways that one never suspected were there. This novel is about Clint Bunsen, a character I've talked about for 30 years, but I never knew him at all until I wrote this book.
Q. Your new novel's title is Liberty, and I think it's an interesting one because it's such a subjective word. First, the novel revolves around controversy over Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July parade. Then, you have the parade committee's chairman, Clint Bunsen, who is going through a third-quarter life crisis at age 60 and who seems to be gaining some liberty of his own. And then you have the release of the book less than two months before the presidential elections. You have not exactly been shy in railing against the Bush administration. Why Liberty? Are all three of those threads related? Am I completely off base?
A. The administration is a problem unto itself and I wouldn't know how to make fiction out of it -- I'm a comic writer and it is a complete moral disgrace, starting with its mismanagement of the war in Iraq, its acceptance of torture as American policy, and on from there.
Clint is a good Republican who wakes up one day feeling terribly dissatisfied with his life and beset by jealousy and petty rivalry and he has a romantic encounter with the (woman dressed up as the) Statue of Liberty whom he meets at the same time he is discovering that he isn't Norwegian but Hispanic. You're right about "liberty," it is a gorgeous idea, both in Scripture and in the founding of America, and we in the Midwest don't explore it very often. But he did and that's the story.
Q. I didn't know until I started research for this story that about two years ago you opened an independent bookstore, Common Good Books, in St. Paul, Minn. So now you are a writer, a radio personality, a satirist, an actor and a bookstore owner? What made you want to open the store?
A. I live in a neighborhood of good readers who were very sad when an independent store closed a few years ago, so I opened my own. It's a little store that carries a great many titles, all the new trade books, plenty of fiction and poetry, not much in the way of self-help or thrillers or cookbooks, and I walk over there every week and buy books for myself. Always a pleasure.
Q. You recently did a show from the Minnesota State Fair. We have a fair coming up in a few weeks, the Dixie Classic. Do you have a favorite food on a stick? I heard that this year the Minnesota's offerings included hotdish-on-a-stick, blackened Cajun steak-on-a-stick, cheese-on-a-stick, spaghetti and meatballs-on-a-stick, bacon-on-a-stick and other various impaled foods. I wish I could have been there.
A. I didn't try the exotic new impaled foods, just a corn dog, a pork chop on a stick, cheese curds, a taco, corn on the cob, the classics.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
If you go
Garrison Keillor will read from his newest novel, Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, at 10 a.m. Monday in Brendle Recital Hall at Wake Forest University. A book-signing will follow.
Tickets are $25. Students and seniors pay $15. There will be a free shuttle from the First Assembly parking lot.
For $95, you can eat breakfast with Keillor at 8 a.m. The price includes a copy of the new book.
Keillor's appearance is presented through the Bookmarks festival.
For tickets, call the Wake Forest University College Book Store (open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. today) at 336-758-5145. Tickets may also be available at the door. For more information, go to www.bookmarksbookfestival.com.
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