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The author was clueless about his rising fame, oodles of money he was making for Minnesota Public Radio and gives ample credit to others who helped make Prairie Home Companion, his novels, and New Yorker pieces such successes. His self-deprecation and occasional moments of arrogance are on display. The memoir has funny material but also a lot of shocks and sadness.

The author also laments how Minnesota Public Radio evolved from a jerry-rigged little station into a corporate culture. I have never listened to even an excerpt of his Prairie Home Companion radio program. I enjoyed it very much and have read several of his other fictional works. Some I liked and others not so much. All his works have made me laugh often.

There are a handful of dry-reading pages. Good for him. Jeff Zell. I have listened to Prairie Home Companion off and on over the years. I particularly enjoyed the News from Lake Wobegon and the creative commercials.

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The Catchup Advisory Board are a favorite. So, are the Guy Noir episodes. I was saddened to learn that Keillor was accused of bad things in the MeToo controversies of and that MPR dropped him and the show completely. I really didn't know what to expect in his autobiography. Would he white wash his life and make himself smell like a rose or would there be an honest assessment and statements of the good and the bad?

At first, as he was going on and on about the immediate and extended family he grew up with in Anoka, MN, I thought this was going to be a big old Lake Wobegon like fairy tale. I am glad I persisted because there is indeed honest assessment and confession and redemption. And, because he is so good at telling stories, whether painful or not, I couldn't hardly put the book down.

Jenny is his third and final wife. He talks about his failure with the first two. He owns his mistakes. But rejoices in his relationships with the children that grew out of those relationships. He is candid about the struggles he and Jenny have with their own daughter. In one way or another, we are all products of our childhood experiences and products of our own cultural settings.

Keillor is acutely aware of his history and he is amazed and thankful that he was able to become a writer and make a living at it. By his own account, he is successful, but because he of his upbringing, he easily falls into regret and remorse. He tells us about that too. For those of us who only know him as the voice on the radio, he provides an image of a man who is not perfect.

He is good enough, but not great. For a long time he put work before family. He made other mistakes. He has learned to live and love and enjoy life. One thing did truly surprise me. I know that he regularly sings gospel music on the show but that can be to create the nostalgic mood that is Lake Wobegon. I did not expect the clear confession of faith in Jesus Christ that rings throughout the book.

He may have left the fundamentalist Brethren faith of his youth but Scripture, faith, and an eventual entrance into the Episcopal Church are very much a part of his life. His parents and church were direct and confrontational in their witness of their faith. I have to wonder if they caused more harm than good. But, the way Keillor presents his Christian faith, it is a testimony of grace and forgiveness that has made his life better, fuller.

He is telling his story, not trying to convince or confront anyone else about their faith. If you want to learn more about the man who created Prairie Home Companion and Lake Wobegon, this is a garrison keillor biography radio show listen place to start. A little over 50 years ago, a Minnesotan who was working as a morning radio show at a local public radio station pitched the idea to his boss that he wanted to do a show that revived the weekly variety program, with music and comedy celebrating the people and the spirit of the people of Minnesota and the heartland of the country in general.

The show became a modest hit for Minnesota Public Radio, and his boss began offering it to public radio stations nationwide, making the program a success and opening the door for that former radio show to become a successful author. From his childhood, we follow Garrison as he learns about literature and radio at the University of Minnesota, then begins a career in public radio to support a wife and young son.

We learn how he was inspired to create his show by attending a performance of The Grand Old Opry, about the early days of his radio show, where the singers and musicians were more likely to be musicians he knew who might or might not be professionals, and about the hours he would spend over the years of the show writing the scripts all by himself- which honed his skills as a writer but cost him as far as his relationship with his first wife and his son.

In his late seventies when he wrote this book, Garrison reflects on his life, the impact of losing the people you cared for, and his own mortality. Gerald Matzke. I have been a fan of Garrison Keillor for many years. I listened to Prairie Home Companion whenever I could. I own a copy of Prairie Home Companion, the movie. I am a fan.

This autobiography gives the reader a real inside look at what made him the creative humorist that so many people have enjoyed for so many years.

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He likes to point out how his success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time and even sometimes at the wrong time. The whole concept of PHC is out of a different time and yet it worked. It was fun to find out how he came up with some his characters, often based on people in his own family. Not everything about his life was successful.

Two marriages ended in divorce. The end of PHC came before he would have wanted. He was then ostracized after claims of sexual harassment. The concluding chapters got a bit philosophical and tended toward a sour grapes summary of what he had accomplished in his life. He mourns the fact that he is getting old but he still feels the need to work.

He keeps his unique sense of humor and that makes it all worth reading. Thomas Kelley. I wanted to read this as when I was growing up I remember Garrison Keillor and his shows, Prairie Home Companion and of course Lake Wobegon on the radio and figured this would be an interesting read and it was. Can you imagine having 18 Aunts.

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Garrison came from a poor family to the extent that he wore girls jeans growing up. Garrison Did you know that is not his real name? Do to this he gets a start in radio and came to fame on Minnesota public radio. Do to a need for filling time for his program he grabbed stories from various sources. I thought one story that was pretty funny he got from the local police blotter about a black lab who swam under the ice caught a walleye and breaks through the ice and comes up in a drunk fisherman's ice fishing hut.

It is a good thing that he did take the advice of a friend who told that radio was great but he needed to give it up and get back to writing. With the show being live and the fact the held them anywhere they never let the venue or the weather hold them back and imagine doing the show on the fly yes they may have had a walk through but they had no scripts.

You may have not realized that he was accused of some sexual harassment or improprieties and I am not hear to say he did or did not do these actions but i was curious if they would be addressed in this book and yes they were. This was a good read and there maybe a part or two in this book that might bring a tear to your eye. It was an easy read.

As I said before, reading this book isn't like reading a book but more like listening to an audiobook. I hear Garrison talking to me like an old friend reliving his life to me in an easy one-sided conversation. I very much recommend it. As for Minnesota Public Radio, I think their public donations must and should dry up and disappear.

Garrison Keillor was there before MPR was even invented. His program earned them thousands if not millions of dollars every year. But "A Prairie Home Companion" was an embarrassment to them. They dreamed of being relevant and classy. But here was this hick and his old fashioned variety show showing them up on a weekly basis. I then shared a story credit with Garrison for the PHC movie, and I wrote again for the radio show the fall he was getting back to full steam following his stroke.

Thing One: GK is a singular genius, a writing machine that I have never seen duplicated. I wrote five minutes of a two-hour show; Garrison wrote the rest. My usual writing consisted of short sketches, and then narrative pieces about the city we were touring to. The rest was Garrison. Our process was for me to turn in four or five short pieces on Thursday.

Garrison would show up with reams of sketches. After the read through, Garrison and I would repair to his office and he would select the pieces that he thought worked, and which garrisons keillor biography radio show listen needed revision. The first week, I remember he took one of his ten-page scripts, and methodically crossed out page after page, until he finally circled one paragraph.

Let it go, the good things will come back to you. Pick and choose good things and put the blocks back together in a new arrangement. Thing Three: Come at a story from the side. One horrible misconception of Garrison is that he spins homespun stories from the heartland. Nothing is further from the truth. Perelman and E. One writing technique he guided me toward was coming at things from the side.

Start way off to the side and come to things indirectly. He employs this technique in the monologues most famously. From doing hours of live early morning radio he realized that part of the excitement of a live show is to not overprepare. Or, rather, to bake the cake right in front of the audience. The audience delighted in seeing the flow of the show — in seeing Garrison do the high-wire act of creating a two-hour entertainment that held together, but was created right before their eyes.

This was both true and not true. Garrison always pushed the deadlines for preparing for the show to the final moments — I remember one week in New York when, at about half hour before air, he nonchalantly said he was going back home to get a belt not such an easy trip in the city, to go from midtown to the Upper West Side and back!

After a more than 40 year association with Garrison Keillor and his radio show A Prairie Home Companionpeople often ask me how that relationship began. The answer is short and simple. My parents…Bob and Shirley. Dad had owned the World Theater and the attached Schubert Apartments since A Prairie Home Companion was looking for a permanent home and, infound it at the World Theater later renamed the Fitzgerald Theater.

Mom had been impressed by a talented Russian and Yiddish singer, Sima Shumilovsky, who had recently arrived in St. Paul from the Soviet Union. Mom thought that Sima would make wonderful guest on A Prairie Home Companion and dragged Margaret to a little a cappella performance Sima gave in a basement room at the St. Paul Jewish Community Center.

Margaret was sold on the idea. Mom then came to me with the plan for my approval. Sima and I performed on the radio show in February ofand it went so well that we were invited back several more times. After a few shows, I was given an opportunity to do a solo tune. Garrison took notice and invited me back as a solo performer and to accompany him and various other guests.

The moral of the story? Listen to your mother! Every once in a while, she just might be right…and in a way that can change your life. After his service, Bob graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in and began his law practice in St. Beginning inhe performed legal services for his old college friend, Billy Weitzman. Weitzman and Associates, a firm which designed and built apartments in the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St.

But he was granted sole ownership of the Shubert Building apartments and the adjacent World Theater later renamed The Fitzgerald in St. InMPR had approached Bob about renting the theater during broadcast weekends. Bob passed away that same year, but Shirley never raised the rent. MPR eventually purchased the theater from Shirley. The show was a bit of a nomad those first couple of seasons.

At seats, it was a much better fit for a show that was just getting started at building an audience than the cavernous BAM Opera House was. Garrison had connected with Rob Fisher to put together a wonderful piece band they called The Coffee Club Orchestra with a smaller group called the Demitasse orch. There was also a terrific garrison keillor biography radio show listen arranger, Russell Warner, who would compose theme music for the sketches and commercials.

I think the guest list may have included The Gregg Smith singers they made a few appearances on shows in that period and perhaps Victor Borge was on? I do distinctly remember leading him up a circular staircase offstage right to a dressing room area that we had designated for him, brushing cobwebs out of the way as we went. He was a very good sport about it.

Prior to that show, I got my first stopwatch. Saturday we ran through musical numbers, which I timed, waited for Garrison to arrive with revised, and new and different scripts, and went through all of that material. Who figures out how it all comes together to be a show? The fear that he had recommended a complete idiot to be the producer.

My favorite tour story, though, was the Birmingham, Alabama, Blizzard story, where the city shut down, and the company was stranded for an entire extra day because nothing was garrison keillor biography radio show listen. Of course, the show went on — despite being told repeatedly on Friday afternoon and evening that we should cancel it.

It was nerve-racking as we went through it, but so much fun to think about now. We used to have scripts come in paper form that we would feed into a xerox copier that we carried with us to every theater we performed in or rented on-site. Revisions were done by hand sometimes, sometimes even mid broadcast, as the script was being performed.

I remember that technical director Scott Rivard had one that was roughly the size of a shoebox. We had to have phone cables installed in each theater in order to be able to transmit the show for uplink for broadcast. There was a season when we had two back-to-back weekend broadcasts in Ohio Cincinnati and then Columbus, I thinkand we had sent out plane tickets to the musicians and guests in advance.

Meanwhile the rest of the band was somewhere down another concourse boarding their correct flight, wondering if Joe was late, or just not booked on the show that weekend. My husband used to drive me to the airport and pick me up, and could come right to the gate with us. One week when I had left my stopwatch in my desk at MPR, he dropped me off, drove back to MPR to pick it up, and delivered it to the door of the aircraft for the stewardess to bring to me.

In spring ofthe show was still based in New York, but Ivy had moved to Los Angeles and was flying back and forth each weekend to perform with us. Later that fall, we did a broadcast from Madison, Wisconsin, and Tim Russell was in a script where he played a genial, but befuddled Ronald Reagan. Those who heard the show live were appalled by our insensitivity, thinking it was deliberate.

But the audience in the theater who laughed and the staff and crew knew nothing of this announcement. It was only when I ran into a somber-faced Tim Russell in the lobby of the hotel who gave me the news and saw the blinking red light on my hotel phone indicating an urgent message from Bill Kling that I realized we were going to catch some hell.

I think we were able to do a quick edit for the tape delayed broadcasts, and certainly for the Sunday repeats, but, nonetheless, it was uncomfortable. I worked two years as an elementary music teacher when the state of Minnesota suffered a budget crisis, which meant the laying off of art and music teachers. Typing only 46 words a minute, I got the Minnesota Public Radio job, which entailed answering the phone and responding to the mail.

I remained in Minnesota but became the business manager, responsible for payrolls, unions, and contracts. Over the next 23 years, we produced 34 broadcasts per year, chartered cruise ships, did crazy summer tours 30 shows in 40 daysopened a bookstore, produced TV shows, theater events, and of course, the A Prairie Home Companion movie. One example happened the season of our 35th Anniversary.

For months, we asked Garrison if he wanted to do anything special for the 35th July Nine weeks from the anniversary, he called and said that he would like to do a show with these guidelines: a live broadcast from an open field in Avon, Minnesota, including a brass band, Senator Klobuchar, local mayor, priest, restaurant owners, WW II veterans, as well as our regular guests.

The event needed to be free with food and beverage vendors. Against all odds, we pulled off a very memorable event. On July 4,at 5 p. CT, it was a perfect 80 degrees. An estimated 10, attended the show sitting on picnic blankets and lawn chairs. There were only two ways in to Avon and the traffic was backed up for miles. Senator Klobuchar was stuck in traffic on the freeway well past the start of the show.

It was all about giving the listener and the venue attendee something worthwhile. They were always the first priority. It was up to the staff to get it done, and we always gave it our best shot. Ostroushko and Nunneley. Fred Helf and E. We are not accepting new poetry at this time. For questions, please contact twa garrisonkeillor.

For questions related to items you have ordered from our storeplease contact orders garrisonkeillor. If you are hosting an event with Garrison Keillor, please feel free to use the press photos below for marketing, as well as the short biography. Promo video for the purpose of booking is available here. BoxMinneapolis, MN P Whether performing solo, joined by Richard Dworsky, or other musical collaborators, Garrison Keillor delivers an extraordinary, crowd-pleasing performance.

Trained as a jazz singer at the New England Conservatory of Music, Heather Masse is equally versed in a variety of traditions — folk, pop, bluegrass, and more. The St. She has released more than a dozen recordings, including albums dedicated to the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Greg Brown, and a collection of international lullabies. Dan Chouinard is a St.

Paul-based honky-tonk pianist, concert soloist and accompanist, street accordionist, sing-along enabler, Italian and French teacher, and bicycling vagabond. For more than forty years, he hosted the radio show A Prairie Home Companio n, heard on public radio coast to coast and beyond. Fair is fair. In St. I am still a working writer and arise at 4 most mornings and sit down at my desk, which is a great blessing.

I still do shows thanks to my producer Sam Hudson and managing director Kate Gustafson. Paul was full of reminders of dreadful mistakes I made, grand houses I bought on impulse, impulsive romances, a wretched decision in to quit the show I loved and move to Denmark, and the disappointment of my Brethren family that I strayed into the field of fiction and entertainment.

I love to go to the Public Library on 42 nd Street and sit in the Rose Reading Room at a long library table with lamps with green shades and work on stuff, surrounded by men and women one-fourth my age, half of them Asian, probably children of immigrants, all of us anonymous but feeling encouraged by the industry of the others. I can write for four or five hours and then take the C train home or maybe walk over to Grand Central Station, which makes me think of my father.

He brought me here in when I was He was stationed here during WW2, an Army mail handler. It was the only trip I took with just the two of us and so it shines clearly in my mind. He even went to Broadway shows. My father, a Brethren man, going to the theater to see singing and dancing. Or not, as the case may be. My mother, the tenth in a family of thirteen, children of Scottish immigrants in south Minneapolis.

I wish I had asked them more questions. The University of Minnesota, which I entered inthe stately buildings overlooking the Mississippi. You get old, the world passes you by, and you watch with interest. In the eighth grade, I read The New Yorker and longed to be published there. I went to see the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and set out to start a show something like it.

A great old American magazine and live radio, two classic platforms, but now there are a hundred thousand platforms, any ambitious teenager can find his or her own, and I feel gratitude to have come up in the Sixties and Seventies.

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My in-laws Marge and Gene who housed us when I was in-between jobs. The move to a farm in Stearns County, the friends there. The mistakes fade away; the lucky turns remain clear: the lunch at Docks with Jenny inthe shakedown scam of that cut me loose to be a freelance. The world gets smaller as you become ancient. You awaken at 4, ease out of bed so as not to disturb the sleeping beauty beside you, go to the kitchen, turn on the coffee.

So you do. O beautiful for cornfields, for little towns and lakes, For people who speak slowly so they will not make mistakes. The Midwest, O the Midwest, the middle of the nation, And many never see it for they go by aviation. That being done, the coffee ready, you pour a cup, black, and go to work. Mayo Clinic and Jenny Nilsson have done well by me.

The day awaits. Comfortable is his specialty. Now I write: There was an old man from the prairie Determined to laugh and be merry, And write light verse And never curse Not even when necessary. Garrison's weekly columns For full list, click here To receive each week's column in your email inbox, click here. Recent Posts. May 3, Saturday p.

April 19, Saturday p. April 18, Friday p. April 17, Thursday p. April 16, Wednesday p. Ridgefield Playhouse, Ridgefield, CT. See Full Schedule. January 31, Friday p. More Information. February 1, Saturday p. Jefferson Center, Roanoke, VA. February 7, Friday p. February 8, Monday p. Kenan Auditorium, Wilmington, NC. February 10, Wednesday p. February 11, Tuesday pm Huntsville, AL.

February 13, Thursday p. For more than thirty-five years, as the host of A Prairie Home Companion, he has captivated millions of listeners with his weekly News from Lake Wobegon monologues. He lives in Wisconsin and New York City. Duration: 4 h 32 min. Or 1 credit. By Garrison Keillor. Duration: 7 h 19 min Stories: An Audio Collection.

Duration: 2 h 56 min. A Christmas Blizzard. Hosting a three-hour morning show, Keillor's program stood out for its eclectic soundtrack. In FebruaryKeillor briefly left the station due to disagreements over music preferences, but he was persuaded to return in October. It was then that the show was renamed "A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor's show gained traction, but it was not until that it hit its stride.

On a whim, Keillor began hosting a live Saturday night version of his program, featuring guest musicians and occasional celebrity appearances.