The Plowboy Interview GARRISON KEILLOR

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That is storytelling. It is, in a ways a defense against all the things that would make us too similar.

PLOWBOY: Some of your most touching monologues have very clear religious content. Very often a story has, not a doctrinal theme, perhaps, but clearly a moral, religious one.

KEILLOR Yes, but if you're telling stories, I'm afraid you cannot ever really get to the point in dealing with a matter of faith. That's just in the nature of telling stories, I think you can't finish them. And I know I can't get into specific and very difficult doctrines such as the question of abortion. That problem is so agonizing and awful that there's no way to treat it humorously on an entertainment show.

That's frustrating to me, because I like to believe that there's nothing that humor cannot touch. I have talked on the show about people dying—maybe not as often as I should have, but sometimes. But there's no way I can talk about abortion, and that seems to me to be either a personal failure or a failure of the form that I work in.

PLOWBOY: Do you read from a script when you tell your stories about Lake Wobegon?

KEILLOR No I don't, and I'll tell you why. I never have used a script in radio except when I did newscasts. It's distracting, because if you make a mistake when you're reading a script—as most everybody would—then you notice it because you've got the words right there in front of you, and you panic a little bit. Whereas if you make a mistake when you're standing up there without a script, you don't notice it as much, and neither does anybody else. You just pretend that it was what you meant to say all along and go on from there.

Besides that, I don't write very well for the voice, my own or anybody else's. If I were to read off a script, I think it would sound very stilted and literary. However, if I leave the script behind and just tell a story as best I can remember it, I can sometimes accomplish a kind of natural process of editing where—by most of the literariness is dropped out and just the story remains. And that's what people really want, right?

PLOWBOY: So when you give your "News From Lake Wobegon" monologues, you have the whole thing in your mind. How do you do that?

KEILLOR When I go down to the theater on Saturday, I have about four or five single-spaced pages—sometimes legal-size pages—of material. That really is much more material than I need for a 15- or 25-minute monologue. Plus, a lot of what I do in the monologue you wouldn't find on that thing.

"Frankly, we just don't talk about it very often .... It's just one of those ugly little family secrets that we have to live with. "

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