As a kid, Garrison Keillor fell in love with writing, with the art of telling a story.
He grew up in a small Minnesota town that was crazy about football and basketball, but Keillor wasn’t athletic. And writing was something he could do by himself.
“I was bookish,” he recalled. “Kind of a loner.”
Today, Keillor said, he’d be considered on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. Back then, he said, he was just considered odd.
“It’s one thing that nudges you toward becoming a writer. You don’t mind being by yourself,” he said.
Keillor’s still shy at 72, which makes the one-man show he is doing tonight in Jacksonville a little counter-intuitive.
“It’s one tall lonely guy with glasses standing up with one microphone,” said Keillor, who will perform at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts.
The show is different than “A Prairie Home Companion,” the popular weekly public radio show he’s done for four decades.
With that, Keillor shares news from the fictional Lake Wobegon and performs skits about a slew of characters with a group of actors.
In the one-man show, he usually gets audience members to sing a song with him. If they sound good a cappella, he’ll get them to sing two or three.
Other than that, for 90 minutes, he said, “I stand down with my toes on the edge of the stage and look out into the dark and talk to people.”
Keillor is easing toward slowing down after a successful career as an author and radio show host.
“A Prairie Home Companion” is 40 years old, though Keillor doesn’t think it will go on much longer. Probably one more full season after this one.
“If I can get through that one, I think maybe I would gently fade into the twilight,” he said last week.
He also thinks the novel he’s working on will be his last, saying he doesn’t see any reason to write more.
It’s been a nice career for a man who grew up thinking he’d end up sorting mail or spending time in prison.
Learning to tell a story
Keillor said his family was evangelical, setting it apart from the neighbors in Minnesota.
The family didn’t go to movies, didn’t dance and didn’t drink.
He was brought up by a generation who were children of the Depression. A generation where much fewer entertainment options were available to them.
Telling stories was how they entertained themselves.
As someone washed dishes, the rest sat around the kitchen table and shared their lives. They were not a preachy bunch, not particularly gossipy, he said.
Instead, “They talked about the weather, they talked about crops, they reminisced about disasters, house fires or a relative who was a terrible driver.”
He had an aunt and an uncle who were particularly good stor-ytellers who knew a lot of family history. “They doled that out to us,” he said.
Keillor’s parents, though, were not good at sharing stories. His mother was particularly sensitive to anything that could be perceived as gossip, he said.
She and his father had eloped when they learned she was pregnant with Keillor’s oldest brother. That brought a lot of gossip about her at a young age and a sensitivity to such conversation to her as an adult.
Keillor’s father claimed he couldn’t remember the past. “He just didn’t go there,” he said.
After his parents died, Keillor found tucked away in a shoebox several beautiful letters his father had written to his mother while courting her.
He was astounded by how long the letters were and the interesting narratives his father shared with his mother.
One letter dramatically recounted how his father held on for dear life after a team of horses bolted after one of them clipped its heel on the tongue of the wagon.
“My taciturn father described this very close call to my mother when he was out to win her hand,” Keillor said. “Once he married my mother, I guess he had no motive to tell those stories.”
Finding his voice
Keillor’s own writing process begins early in the morning, while his wife is still sleeping.
If he gets three or four hours of writing in, it’s a wonderful day. “If I get more, fantastic,” he said.
As for his pace, completing four to five pages a day is just fine with him.
The novel he is working on is about a standup comic who reunites with an old classmate suffering from depression and who is suicidal.
“He wants to save her from killing herself, but finds comedy is of very little usefulness,” Keillor said.
He writes all the sketches for his Saturday radio show, which he procrastinates doing until Friday. “It’s a bad habit, but it’s just what I do,” he said.
He writes the show Friday morning and afternoon, then does rewrites after rehearsals that day.
“I wouldn’t describe that as fun,” he said. “But Saturday is a lot of fun.”
Especially, he said, if he gets to sing a duet with a woman. “That’s always fun.”
The screenplay Keillor is working on is set in Lake Wobegon about a man who comes home for his father’s funeral and meets his old girlfriend again.
Keillor isn’t sure yet if they’ll get together. They probably will, he said, but he’s not sure.
Keillor has written a screenplay before, for the 2006 movie “A Prairie Home Companion,” which starred Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin.
He enjoyed the experience, saying movie people are friendly but dignified, especially when compared to people in television.
“It’s embarrassing. They’re all over you. They’re kind of grabby and backslappy,” he said of people who work in television. “I don’t spend much time around them.”
Meeting famous people was a part of his career that his parents enjoyed. His father liked meeting musician Chet Akins and his mother was excited to meet Tomlin.
They were not thrilled when Keillor, the third of their six children, decided to pursue a career as a writer.
“They felt writers were drunks,” he said. “They were right to an extent.”
But they eventually came around to accept Keillor’s choice.
Despite his international popularity, Keillor said his career is not a topic of conversation when he and siblings get together. (Their parents have both passed away, as has their oldest brother.)
They talk about their families and their childhood. He’s not even sure if they all listen to his radio show.
He knows at least one sister pays attention, though. Keillor sometimes tells stories about her when he performs.
“She takes exception to that,” he said. “I try not to but every so often I do.”
Keillor’s weekly radio show draws 4 million listeners, a success by any means, especially for someone who grew up with no self-confidence and was pessimistic about his future.
He saw himself going down a couple of paths.
He assumed he would eventually find a job sorting mail at the U.S. Post Office, “tossing letters in big canvas bags” in a backroom.
Sometimes, he said, he imagined he’d wind up in prison, not because he’d done something wrong.
But through a case of mistaken identity, he’d be picked out of a lineup because he looked guilty.
“I’ve always looked guilty,” Keillor said.
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