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Post to the Host Send your own post to the host. Dear Mr. Keillor, I'm an English teacher in a kindergarten in Po-hang, South Korea. I got the biggest laugh from your comments about life not being that bad compared to being on a roadtrip in a car full of small children! I'm a writer too and I want to ask you, How do you manage to take the time each day to write and overcome the laziness, the self-doubt, and the many distractions of life? —
Nebraska Boy
Dear Nebraska,
Laziness is a gift and part of any civilized life and one should enjoy it to the hilt especially as you get older. A writer spends a good deal of his time in lazing around and thinking and contemplating things in an unregulated way and any writer who doesn't is wound a little too tight. In the end, what drives a person is some sense of duty to one's own gift such as it is (and a guy my age has a lot of shame for having wasted his gift so flagrantly) and also the dread of boredom. I used to watch TV and don't anymore. Lost interest in pro football. Don't do any business entertaining. Don't read books that don't interest me. You throw a lot of this junk overboard and it opens up large lovely expanses of time in which you can do what truly interests you—in my case, writing prose fiction and doing radio. Simple. Dear Mr. Keillor, My two pet ducks and I have listened to your show for years. I bring the radio outside while I am working in the yard and we all listen in. Often the ducks will come stand right next to the radio while you are talking. This past summer I acquired two baby chickens and when I bring out the radio they get all excited. Last weekend we were, as usual, listening to A Prairie Home Companion when little chicken Scratch went into her nest and laid her very first egg! A very special moment for all of us at home and something I thought you would like to know about. —
Donna
Donna,
It's good to know we have some fowl in the audience. Most ducks and chickens are locked up in penitentiaries and only allowed to listen to Clear Channel, and I'm glad if yours might be stimulated by our show to be productive. That's a good reason to be in the show business, is to encourage production. Dear Mr. Keillor, In your online diary, you described your most unfortunate experience with your show's Oklahoma City audience. You mentioned that the show does not play well in Oklahoma or Texas—that it favors a more Northern audience. I am a former resident of that Oklahoma metropolis, and an even unhappier current resident of its fellow Diamond on the Trophy Buckle of the Bible Belt: Dallas. And, as a resident who DOES screech with pleasure as I listen to your show every week—I plead with you—please tell me the locations of these happy places where your show does play well! I am thinking, that if we were armed with a list of your Top 10 audience cities, my husband and I might be able to relocate to where Our People are. They are certainly not here in Dallas. —
Ears pricked in anticipation,
Shannon & Joe
Dear S&J,
The show plays well in many places, including the Northwest, New England, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Nashville, Colorado, Chicago, Ohio—I could go on. But probably if you feel out of place in Texas, it’s because you need to become a Republican. Dear Mr. Keillor, What are the key signs it is time to move on from a marriage? There are small children involved, so the stakes are high. But I can't think that staying in an unhappy, frustrating relationship provides such a sparkling model either. There are no drop-down-screaming-I-hate-you sort of fights. Not yet. Rather, just a lot of tense discussions, sudden silences, and a couple of lonely feeling hearts, not connected to each other. So can you give me a list, or some questions to reflect on, or even a verse or two? I'm sure you have some slice of insight on the subject. —Past The Ten Year Mark
Dear Past,
I should be an authority in this realm, having gone through two divorces, but I can’t offer useful advice based on your letter. The problem you describe—tense discussions, sudden silences, loneliness—is universal in marriage, probably universal in human life. It's as if you asked, "What can I do about mortality?" Every marriage in human history has gone through its bumpy periods and some friends of mine who are in flaming beautiful symphonic marriages of 20+ years will admit to having gone through stretches when the whole contraption seemed to have crashed. The advice I'd offer you may sound like the dumbest thing you've ever heard but it's this: find some way to have fun together. Be entertaining, however you can. Do something that makes the two of you laugh. Have a light-hearted evening. Make love. Take dance lessons. Do something to break the jam and lessen the tension. If you can manage to have a good time together and put your silence/loneliness/tension into temporary storage, you will learn something from this. Repeat the experience. Dear Mr. Keillor, I'm a college student wasting all my time by trying to write a novel instead of studying. Which do you prefer—a word processor, or the laborious process of hand-writing everything? Typing can keep up with my scattered thinking, but handwriting seems much more personal and creative. —Laurel
Dear Laurel,
You use both means, if you're smart. A computer is a fabulous tool for pouring your thoughts onto the page, moving stuff around, wrestling a first draft into shape, and then you print it out in triple-spaced typescript form, which lets you take up the stuff line by line and word for word, and apply your ear to the writing. You will see all sorts of things on paper that you couldn't see on the screen. Then you type your pencil corrections onto the screen file and this will stimulate further revisions. And you work on-screen for awhile and then you print it out again. You go back and forth. Seeing your novel in these two modes, going back and forth, is stimulating to the rewriting process, and that's where the good things happen, my dear. Some of those dear old Beat poets believed in the "First thought, best thought" theory and you only need to read their Collected Works to see what a dopy idea it is 95% of the time. Enjoy your novel writing and good luck to you. Dear Mr. Keillor, My wife has been your #1 fan for 20 years so when we heard you're coming to our hometown, Charlottesville, VA, I thought I'd get tickets for my wife's birthday, which is next week, and when the tickets went on sale, I was ready with a computer keyboard in front of me and a phone in each hand. At two minutes before noon, when tickets went on sale, I began furiously punching the phone buttons, whacking away at the keyboard. I'm an Army vet and I've been fired on before and not had this kind of pressure! But it was all to no avail. The phone lines stayed busy, and I could never get access to the website. The 3 tickets I needed went to someone with faster fingers than mine. What pointers could you give for success at this point? —Matt
Dear Matt,
I know nothing about how to get tickets to shows and my feeling is that any show that is this hard to get into is bound to be a big disappointment. That's my philosophy. If you have to scheme your way in and fight a crush of other ticket-seekers, then chances are you and your wife will turn to each other, sitting in row 85, at intermission and say, "Why didn't we stay home?" Home is comfortable and you can fix yourself something nice to eat, like a plate of ribs and a glass of iced tea and a salad with Roquefort cheese and slices of pear and arugula and maybe tomatoes, and you can adjust the volume on the radio, depending on your mood. You can slip away to the toilet. You can doze off and even drool and not worry what anybody thinks. And best of all, you're able to preserve your illusions about the show and about the host and think of him as elegant and beautifully coiffed and not the lumbering galoot you see all too plainly on stage. That's my advice. If you really want to be there, I'll get you in, Matt—we have a Veterans Whose Wives Have Birthdays program at PHC, which is funded by the Patriot Act, and probably you'd qualify, but think it over, pal. I'm older than you and I know more. Dear Mr. Keillor, I teach writing and reading skills to underachieving ninth graders, a job I find rewarding and challenging, and love every second I'm with the kids though I also feel frustration sometimes when they are unwilling to put forth the work necessary. I was the same way until something happened to me in the ninth grade, something flipped the switch, and I'll be a peanut walking up to a hot dog stand if I know what did it. Any ideas or advice? —Brian O.
Dear Brian,
When you are rescuing the underachiever so late in the game, you have to deal with the crumpled self-esteem of the poor student. It's a painful thing to be labeled a dummy, no matter how many euphemisms educators use, and somehow you have to connect with that kid on some basic decent respectful level. You will probably fail in most cases, and those kids will find their own course in life, but you can rescue a few poor drowning souls from the indifference of their education and give them a second chance to become literate adults able to operate in the literate world, which is where power resides. In my very slight teaching experience, I've found that kids enjoy writing comedy and trying to be funny and that this can be a doorway to the literate world. Comedy is precise. Word usage is crucial. Economy is everything. And when people laugh at what you've written, it's a great balm to your self-esteem, especially when most comedy is about one's own failings and misfortunes. English teaching took a wrong turn when it decided that all kids must keep journals and write transcendental poems about nature. Comedy is closer to a kid's heart. | | | |
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