A Fourth of July invitation from Garrison Keillor:

Post to the Host:
My dad came from St Rosa, MN so I know some of 'Lake Wobegon' country. I have often wondered why the strong German Catholic culture of that area was not featured/storified in your work, as opposed to the Norwegian Lutheran culture.

Jim H.
Minneapolis

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I lived in St. Cloud and Freeport for about four years, Jim, and I found the German Catholics closed off to outsiders. I lived in a farmhouse (cheap rent, beautiful landscape, no interruptions, you could write all day and all night) in a predominantly German Catholic area — New Munich just to the south — and found it hard to engage people even in ordinary conversation. I could understand reticence, of course, and even suspicion, but I simply came to think of it as an alien culture, hostile to people like me. I had a few Catholic friends, and a friend who was a priest and who had literary interests and a fine sense of humor, but I had no sense of confidence telling stories about Catholics. And the great novellist and short-story writer J.F. Powers had preempted the field with his "Prince of Darkness" and "Morte D'Urban" which I studied in college. He was a favorite writer of mine, and last Monday I visited his grave at St. John's cemetery. Telling stories about German Catholics with Powers listening to the show would've scared me to death. He did not tolerate fools gladly and I had no wish to be one of them.

Post to the Host:
How on earth did you get into writing what you do and A Prairie Home Companion? I am a writer (young-ish and unproduced). Recently, I left New York City for the farm. In the city I wrote of lofty themes to please myself. But on the farm, my aim is to entertain my fellow farmhands or be scorned. While at grad school I learned writing, on the farm I learned the more difficult and humble art of story telling. I was curious as to how you started out and do you think of yourself as a story teller?

Stella Ragsdale
Edgartown MA

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I'm not a storyteller, Stella, but I impersonate one and that is almost as good. Storytelling is an intimate art, practiced between people who know each other well, and I've known some great ones, a sculptor named Joe O'Connell and my great-uncle Lew Powell and the late Chet Atkins. Chet was a true storyteller. He blanched at the thought of doing it onstage, but when he drove you around in his pickup truck, he'd tell a whole string of stories, some of them ribald, about Nashville stars and he'd imitated their voices beautifully and he embroidered the stories beautifully and, listening to him, I just sat and laughed and wished we'd drive forever. I don't have that gift. What I do have is chutzpah, to stand up in front of an audience and take them into my confidence and try to tell a story, which often as not turns into an essay instead. But sometimes it hits on all two cylinders. I started out, as you did, writing lofty things and then, out of curiosity, got started as a performer, and that, as you know, is a whole other game. The difference between high lit and performance is that high-lit writers can imagine that their readers are as fascinated as they are. In performance, you can see the audience and that is a sobering sight. There is nothing so scary as seeing an audience look off toward the wings, hoping that someone else comes out soon and does something interesting.

Post to the Host:
I just wanted to send a message out to you about the strange way I heard parts of your show recently. I am stationed with the Illinois National Guard in Afghanistan. While on duty I noticed my radio picking up some strange interference. Then I heard the unquestionable sound of your voice. It was then I realized that somehow my communication system was picking up a broadcast of your show. Though I am not sure how this happened, it was nice to be able to listen to the parts that cut in.

Thank you for your show. It is a real treat when I get to hear it (which I guess means when my superiors are trying to contact me).

SGT Patrick J. DeGeorge
Camp Eggers, Afghanistan

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This sounds like a scene from a comedy, Sergeant. An American platoon is pinned down by enemy fire on a rocky hillside and the sergeant calls for help and he gets a guy talking about eating rhubarb pie at a church picnic. When we do the show — this week in LA, next week in Cincinnati — we try to imagine the listening audience, and I often think of a trucker crossing Nebraska and picking the show up from three different FM stations in the course of two hours, or I think of people sitting on a back porch in Columbus, Georgia, or an old man in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, but I haven't yet imagined troops in Afghanistan. I will now include you in my imagined pantheon of listeners.

Good luck to you and thank you for your service to our country.