Radio
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 music format. 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.
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.
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.
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." 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 (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. 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. 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.
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 The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor | Analysis of Baseball by May Swenson and via daily e-mail installments by subscription.
Writing
Keillor has written numerous magazine and newspaper articles, and over a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to
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 titled "Every dog has his day":
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 syndicated newspaper column called "The Old Scout", which often addresses political issues. The column ran at Salon.com until April 2010 and as of July 2010 is on hiatus "so that he can 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.)
Bookselling
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." 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. The bookstore's opening was covered by the
St. Paul Pioneer Press.
