The Plowboy Interview GARRISON KEILLOR

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PLOWBOY: What are your feelings about the Brethren now?

KEILLOR I still believe what I was brought up to believe. I don't go to a Brethren assembly anymore, but I think that's more my fault than theirs. I doubt I'll ever go back, but you never know. People make some unusual turns in their forties, and so could I.

I'm certainly very uncomfortable with churches that I consider a great deal more liberal than the one I was brought up in. I have a very hard time sitting still when a preacher's talking about the value of being a good listener or something like that. When I hear that sort of sermon, I really feel like I ought to get up and walk out.

PLOWBOY: So you feel religion should be rigorous and significant?

KEILLOR Religion is rigorous and significant. Whether a lot of people see it that way or not, it just is. That's not to excuse at all the cruelties that have been done in the name of rigor and doctrinal purity. If those people had really been rigorous themselves, they wouldn't have been intolerant.

Too many people have misconceptions about fundamentalists. Most people think of fundamentalists as very narrow-minded, unhappy, sexually frustrated, embittered people who are intolerant of anything and everything that's different . . . and are hypocrites, to boot. That's a novelist's point of view, though. It's not based on the kind of church I grew up in.

PLOWBOY: You certainly portray fundamentalists—and, indeed, everybody—sympathetically in your "Prairie Home Companion" monologues.

By the way, I understand the American Automobile Association lists Lake Wobegon in its "Traveler's Guide to the Midwest." How did that happen?

KEILLOR I certainly didn't ask AAA to list Lake Wobegon. I guess they just got a lot of questions about it from association members around the country. I can tell you, too, that the people in Lake Wobegon didn't ask AAA to list it. People in Lake Wobegon do not rank strangers who wander into town very highly at all—probably because Lake Wobegon is so difficult to find that if you do see a stranger, you can safely assume that person is lost.

Is it really in the AAA guide?

PLOWBOY: There's simply a note describing Lake Wobegon as a mythical town.

"I grew up in a great tradition of oral fiction, starting with the Sons of Knute, who go out fishing every May and are out until September. "

KEILLOR As a what?

PLOWBOY: They use the word mythical. It's never been on the map, right?

KEILLOR Well, it was left off the Rand McNally map, but for very good reasons. I mean, maps are not the last authority on the world. I don't need to tell you that. We're all grown up. We all know that.

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