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.

I've never heard you do a piece on competitive lawn growing and maintenance which must be as common in Lake Wobegon as the rest of the state.

Larry Johnson

Larry, The folks of Lake Wobegon do believe in good lawn upkeep and mowing weekly and checking the advance of dandelions and crabgrass but their competitive energies go more toward raising vegetables and flowers. The annual unofficial tomato sweepstakes can be pretty ferocious in an understated, back-handed way ---- the competition to grow the first and biggest and best ---- and there's a lot of sweet corn snobbery around. The lot size in town is quite deep and this allows for a modest expanse of grass out front and a good-sized garden in back, plus birdbath, clotheslines, and garage. What you saw from your father's luxury cruiser was the phenomenon of the hobby farm, on which the hobby is raising grass. The rider-mower brigade. That's a suburban thing, not a small town thing. When it comes to lawns, we believe passionately in mediocrity. Lawn care is like hair care, not the sort of thing you want to spend too much time on. A man approaches you with brilliantined hair, every strand in place, a perfect helmet of hair gleaming like cat manure in the moonlight, you think, "I don't want to be like that at all," and we feel the same way about great lawns.

Garrison,
Have you ever taken your audience to Lake Wobegon on Memorial Day? If you have not, I wish you would consider it. I am sure the Lake Wobegon Cemetery would provide a lot of material for your program: the veterans who stormed the beaches on D Day, the women who flew the B-17's and B-24's to England during WWII, the conscientious objector who refused to fight but not to serve; the members of the VFW Post and The American Legion and their activities on this day.

John A. Miller

Dear Mr. Miller, I've often spoken of Memorial Day, which is an important holiday in Lake Wobegon, when all the folks troop up to the cemetery for the hymns, the recitations, the speech, the rifle salute, and Taps. This poor old holiday is falling on hard times, I'm afraid, as the World War II generation fades away. It may need emergency help from us civilians.

Dear Garrison,
Have any of the giant franchise operations - Wal Mart, McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. - ever tried to move into Lake Wobegon? We've often heard stories of how they move into a small town and put the Mom-and-Pop stores out of business. How would the Wobegonians deal with them?

Peter Cantamessa

Mr. Cantamessa, None of the big chains have moved into Lake Wobegon ---- it's too small ---- but they're all in St. Cloud, which is not so far away, and they lure plenty of customers from the little towns, and of course the small shopkeepers are hurting badly. It's rare to go to a little town and find anyone selling clothing these days, and even the hardware store is rare. And I don't know when I last saw a dime store. Pretty soon, there'll just be the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Café and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery. A pity, if you ask me. But I'm an older guy with an antipathy to malls and that's one reason I love New York. You walk down a street and pass one little enterprise after another, each one representing someone's dream, some mom and pop who saved for years to open this little news stand or deli or stationery store, and it feels more real to me than a huge mall surrounded by a hundred acres of parking. Maybe it's because so many movies have been set on those streets of little shops and so few in malls.

Hello Garrison,
I was compelled by my daughter to buy some of the new green ketchup with the special squirt/drawing tip. However, I was wondering whether the green ketchup contains the same mellowing agents as the classic red type. Could you take this up with the Ketchup Advisory Board?

Valerie Bang-Jensen

Valerie, I have a feeling that the new green ketchup contains the seeds of discontent but I can't prove it. I am staying away from it. It's for children, it's not for mature people. Ketchup is not supposed to be green and that's all there is to it.

Garrison
I'm a 21 year old student at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and a Neuroscience major. But I really love playing music. And writing... So I ask: Is it worth living and working for your art or passion in life, or is having your passion as a diversion from the norm something more precious? Are passions even better when you are not dependent upon your success with them, or vice versa?

John Rino

Dear Mr. Rino, Nobody can advise another person on what he should find worthwhile. There is great misery in the music business and also considerable joy and satisfaction and one simply must be wise about one's choices. Much depends on the branch of music, of course. Classical musicians live in a highly structured and codified world, so that every cellist, for example, has a pretty clear notion of where he or she stands in the greater cello scheme of things ---- and has had since he/she was just getting underway. It's like baseball, that way. Violinists don't have many illusions. (Singers do because their voices mature later and develop in such different ways.) But when it comes to the realm of pop and folk and the singer-songwriter and the garage bands, self-deception is rampant. Maybe it's necessary to get people through the slough of beginnerhood. You have to feel that you're king of the hill, otherwise you'd collapse in a heap. The same is true in the writing bidness. I think that an artist begins with a private passion and must guard it against the buffeting of the indifferent and the cynical. You don't want to exploit it before you are at ease with it and in control of it. I think that an artist of true talent will be called to commit a lifetime to it, and that in the absence of a clear calling, you find other work and enjoy playing with your talent like a kid with a ball. No pressure, no promotion, no big ideas, no deadlines. Some great work has been created by artists purely for their own pleasure.

Hi Mr. Keillor,
I was just wondering if Lake Wobegon had any residents of Asian descent living there, if it does, could you please include them in a future News from Lake Wobegon?

Kevin

Kevin, There is Corinne, the Korean child adopted by Daryl and Marilyn Tollerud lo these many years ago, and now a high school student. I am not sure if she considers herself Asian. She is a true Wobegonian, having lived there since infancy, and culturally she is one of us. Of course, she's been to Korean culture camps when she was little, but that's only to find out about where she came from. Mr. Halvorson, the principal, wanted to count her as a minority student, for paperwork reasons, and she was furious. And then she was amused.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Do you have a favorite poem of all time. It doesn't matter, I'm just curious.

Becky

Dear Becky, There are a number of poems I'm fond of, partly because I know them by heart and can say them whenever I like, but I don't think of poetry in this way ----- I look forward to the next new poem that knocks my socks off, that really pierces me. That's what's exciting. I sat down and read a collection of poems by Philip Booth, an old poet up in Maine, that knocked my socks off recently, and before that was a book by Thomas Lax, and Robert Bly's "Morning Poems". Am looking forward to the next.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I absolutely loved that line in your essay How I Write that goes, "Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement...". Honestly, though, you must read something. Whom do you spend your discretionary time reading?

Thanks!
John R. Fielding Jr.

Mr. Fielding: Just finished Jeffrey Toobin's excellent "A Vast Conspiracy" and Alison Lurie's memoir of the poet James Merrill and a tome on Berlin and a terrific collection of essays by Edward Hoaglund. So I work around the edges. But you'd be amazed at my ignorance of contemporary American fiction. Or maybe you wouldn't. It is considerable, nevertheless.

Dear Mr. Keillor:
Some years back I read that your father was a mail clerk onboard a Railway Post Office car on the Great Northern Railway. Did he ever share any of his work experiences with you?

Kurt Bell

My father worked for the Railway Mail Service for about twenty years, making the run from St. Paul to Jamestown, North Dakota, standing at a mail rack in a swaying car and sorting mail and tossing out a sackful in each town as it passed. He packed a snub-nosed revolver to foil train robbers, of which there were none, due perhaps to the revolver or perhaps to the fact that the train made only a few stops. Every few years he had to take a test on his knowledge of small towns in Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana, and how mail should be routed to them, and his children enjoyed giving him practice quizzes. It was exciting to send him off to work and exciting to get him back a couple days later. Once when I was eighteen or so, I drove him to work at the Union Depot in St. Paul. I walked with him to his mail car and he introduced me to the other men on the crew as his son at the University, but standing there next to train that was getting ready to roll, seeing the mail clerks load the sacks aboard, the passengers boarding, I really envied him the railroad life.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I have been listening to your show for a couple years now. When I first started you had a skit called "Jim the Young Artist" that I liked a lot and have not heard in a while. What happened to Jim?

Andrew Forlines

Andrew---- Actually it was "Bob, The Story of a Young Artist," and I cancelled the series because not many people seemed to like it. I liked it, liked the characters, Pops and Berniece in particular, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Of course it could be revived if I had the heart to.