GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between. Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome! Send your own post to the host.

Chris Kreski

Chris, We refer to ourselves as Wobegonians. "Wobegoner" is what outsiders call us. And yes, Wobegon has produced some great travelers, as has the Midwest generally. The open prairie seems to invite large thoughts about the world and curiosity about distant lands, and once people overcome the initial reluctance and shyness about language, they keep going and going. As for foreign exchange students, yes, there was a very sweet Danish exchange student in Lake Wobegon when I was in high school, and I'm not sure how much I should say about that since I wound up marrying her. She taught me to cook, though, and she left me with some very useful Danish sayings, such as 'Ost vest hjemme bedst" (East, west, home is best). And "Gaa ikke over aaen efter vand" (Don't cross the river to get water). And thinking about those sayings, we became unmarried.

Garrison,
Are there any Born Again Christians in Lake Wobegon and if so how do they get along with the Lutherans and Catholics? The born agains that I know don't believe Lutherans or Catholics are Christians....evidently the Born Again Christians invented Jesus.

Juliette Becker

Dear Juliette, Yes, indeed, the Sanctified Brethren are there in Lake Wobegon. My people. People who take Scripture seriously and defend their revelations with fervor and thus are not always the easiest neighbors to get along with. But surely worth paying attention to. And some of them have a sense of humor. I do suspect that my liberal pals have an easier time about Born Agains if they are black than if they're white, but maybe that's just a suspicion on my part.

Dear Garrison Keillor:
I want to ask you about your name, "Garrison". Where did you get it? What is the origin of this name? is it a family name or something? I never heard of anyone else with this name before I got interested in Prairie Home Companion and your books. Thank you,

Janelle Stolen

Dear Janelle, My given name was Gary and when I was in the 8th grade and writing poems for the school literary magazine, I got it in my head that I needed a pen name. A radio guy I liked a lot back then was Garry Moore (who later went to TV as host of various shows, including "The Garry Moore Show," where Carol Burnett got her start) and when I saw that his real name was Thomas Garrison Morfit, it gave me the idea. I looked up 'garrison' in the dictionary and found that it meant a place where troops are quartered, so that settled it for me. I called myself "Garrison Edwards" for awhile, and then when I went off to the University, I became Garrison Keillor. I like the idea of pen names, but now I wish I had given myself a new last name too. It's a burden for other Keillors to bear, being associated with me. And one of the beauties of a pen name is to make the useful distinction between the person you are in writing and the person you really are. Two very different guys. And then the person you are on the radio is a third guy.

Have you ever done a NFLW involving the telling of ghost stories? There was one Post to the Host where you sketched the outlines of a ghost story, and even that simple sketch conjured up a very nice mood that this listener would like to hear more fully developed.

John O'Leary

Dear John, I have often told ghost stories around Halloween and found that people didn't particularly like them. I'd like to think it was because the stories were too scary, but I'm afraid they failed because I didn't have the knack for it.

Mr. Keillor,
I see where you will have a new book out in September: Lake Wobegon, Summer, 1956. Will it be more like Lake Wobegon Days or Wobegon Boy or something completely new?

Clay Robertson

Dear Clay, It seems completely new to me but perhaps readers will feel otherwise. It's not like Lake Wobegon Days in that it's a novel, a single story line running through it, and it's not like Wobegon Boy in that it takes place entirely in the town. The protagonist is a 14-year-old boy named Gary, who gets the gift of an Underwood typewriter and lands a job covering Whippets games. The story had its genesis in a monologue I did on a tour with the Hopeful Gospel Quartet back in 1998, I believe. The tour started in Salt Lake City and I sat down one whole day in a hotel room and wrote the story and then told it that night to an audience in an outdoor amphitheatre that sat under ponchos in a driving rain and didn't make a move to go home. I was in awe of that audience. It was one of the greatest audiences ever. They sat under SHEETS of rain and didn't move ---- I think they were proud of themselves for doing it, too ---- and they seemed to like the story. Those folks will recognize parts of this book, but I changed the ending, so my cousin doesn't go to the Home for Unwed Mothers.

Dear Garrison,
Other than ice fishing, we don't hear much about the "Lake" part of Lake Wobegon. Do the locals use it as a swimming hole? Or is it one of those bodies of water which has seen better days, and no one with any sense would even think of swimming in it? Are there old rusty oil drums over there in
the cove, standing in two feet of water? Has it become weed-choked from the fertilizer run-off?

Peter Cantamessa

Dear Peter, It's a pretty good lake. It gets a little green toward July, especially in the shallower southern end, but you won't find oil drums in it, and from time to time someone pulls a good-sized fish out. The beach is nice, with a floating dock to dive off. Ever so often one of the summer people zooms by in a motor boat towing a girl in a red bikini on water skis and we all take a gander. And of course during the winter it supports that whole ice fishing community.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I was in the audience at [a recent performance]. I wondered why the headphones are necessary during the radio drama segments.

Roxanne Webster

Dear Roxanne, The actors wear them, I don't. I assume the actors like headphones because they give you a clearer sense of what you're doing and how you're working the mike. I just assume my position, learned many years ago from the Boy's Broadcasting Handbook, and murmur away and let the engineers worry about how it sounds. And Sam Hudson, the sound man, pumps up my stage monitor so the whole thing sounds pretty good.

Dear Garrison,
Does performing gospel music on NPR ever seem to you to be a violation of the separation of church and state?
Charles Merrifield

Dear Charles, I don't consider public radio to be a state-operated radio service. It's certainly subsidized by the government, both in the form of CPB grants to stations and program producers, and in the form of tax deductions for individuals and corporations who donate money to public radio, and yet the state exercises no control over public radio. And I'm quite certain that public radio would continue if the state subsidies were eliminated. But if I were to make gospel music and overt gospel messages the main thrust of "A Prairie Home Companion," then I think it would be an abuse of the audience. Our public radio audience is the most diverse audience in all of radio. While commercial stations go off in pursuit of narrow demographic quantities, public radio is left as the only broadcast service with ambitions to reach everybody and their cousin. The only news operations you find in radio are in public radio these days. And in music, commercial radio exists only to push current commercial product, while all of the vast continents of folk and jazz and classical and world music are left to public radio. We'll do three big outdoor broadcasts this season ---- in Seattle, Tanglewood, and Wolf Trap outside Washington ---- and when you look at those crowds, you see the age range and you sense the diversity of the audience. Not so diverse racially, but I think they're of various political and religious and cultural stripes. And I don't want to abuse them and try to use public radio to disseminate my beliefs. On the other hand, a show has to come from the heart, and when I sing "This World Is Not My Home" or "How Great Thou Art" or "Earnestly, Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling," it's from the heart.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I've have noticed over the past few years you have been slipping in comments about Unitarians more frequently. As one who is in touch with the "Unitarian side of life" myself,
I've wondered could the Minnesota Lake Wobegonian Lutheran have widened his horizons? Other UU's have picked up on this too...

Wendy Laurel

Dear Wendy, I know nothing about Unitarians other than what UU people tell me, and the ones I know have a sense of humor, and so there you are. I go to a dinner party, sit next to a Unitarian, and the next Saturday there are six Unitarian jokes.

Mr. Keillor:
Allow me to second the request in April's Post to the
Host to bring back Bob, the young artist. The story of Bob was one of my favorite recurring skits that you did. It struck the perfect balance of misery and comedy.

Maybe I appreciated it more since I'm an under-employed
artist myself; putting on misplaced pretension around others, but consumed with self-criticism in private, never really finishing anything that I start.

John R. Meuser

Dear John, Our series, "Bob The Story of A Young Artist," was roundly disliked by staff and listeners alike. I churned out about twelve episodes and the most positive response they got was a sort of pained politeness. When I killed off the series, nobody protested. Nobody! Bob was a loser. And yet, somewhere deep down, I'd love to bring him back, him and Pops and Rex and Berneice. I don't know what to do. You've got me in a big tizzy now.