The Plowboy Interview GARRISON KEILLOR

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No better statement could be made concerning Garrison Keillor's own work. So come with us now to meet the funny and human creator of Lake Wobegon, "the town that time forgot and the decades cannot I'm prove . . . where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average. "

The following interview is based on a discussion MOTHER staffer Peter Hemingson had with Keillor after a Saturday night show and oil a satellite press conference Garrison gave—and Peter panic participated in— prior to "A Prairie Home Companion" 's tenth anniversary broadcast last summer.

PLOWBOY: I was wondering if you could start off by giving us little information about your background. The only hints I have all come from one of my favorite of your "Prairie Home" monologues You started out talking about what liars storytellers are and—before I noticed what you were doing—ended up telling how your mother gave birth to you while she was walking a high wire over the Missis sippi River! You were so totally convincing that I almost believed it

KEILLOR: Well, you should have believed it, because it was true Of course it was true. My mother was an extraordinary woman. She was the only fat lady in the circus who also did the high wire act. It was quite a combination.

PLOWBOY: Umm, Garrison, you're doing it again.

KEILLOR And being heavy—I didn't mean to say she was fat, she was heavy—she was not aware that she was pregnant. She thought it was stomach trouble. So my birth just happened . . . kind of like an afterthought.

PLOWBOY: Maybe we'd better not try talking about your early childhood. What about college? That's when you started working in radio, right?

KEILLOR I put myself through school working for the University of Minnesota radio station. I got the job, I think, because I was able to imitate the voice that they were looking for. I could broaden a few vowels and get a kind of cultivated, funereal tone with a very slight British sound to it.

Radio announcing is easy indoor work. You sit in the studio and you say, "We have just heard Appalachian Spring, by Aaron Copland, and we now turn to the music of Beethoven." Announcing is much easier than parking cars or washing dishes, and yet it has a kind of status attached to it that I've never understood.

PLOWBOY: Wasn't radio important to you when you were young?

KEILLOR Yes, and the shows I liked the most were the ones that brought our family together. I really believe that if you sit in a room with people and listen to something, you feel closer to them than if you sit and look at television. Television isolates people even when they're sitting cheek by jowl. Listening to radio, though, is a communal experience.

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