![]() With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. If I were teaching Creative Writing today, I’d teach my students the importance of marrying the right person. It’s a happy phenomenon, an author still ambitious at 80, and I give credit to my wife Jenny. The revision led to SERENITY AT 70, GAIETY AT 80 and a new book in progress, CHEERFULNESS. I did this for readers who missed the hardcover edition, to give them a lift, and also myself. I wrote a new preface and a cheerier first chapter, which came (literally) from the heart I having undergone heart surgery at Mayo to replace a leaky mitral valve and I felt good. It was us and strings of barges came up to St.Paul to haul our corn and beans to a hungry world. or even our football rivals, but we were proud of our North Star State, the flatness, the fertile fields, the culture of kindness and modesty, our ferocious winters, when white people become even whiter, and to top it all off, we were the origin of the Mighty Miss. ![]() We sang it with a sense of irony, knowing we weren’t winners in the eyes of New York or L.A. I am a Minnesotan, born, bred, well-fed, self-repressed, bombast averse, sprung from the middle of North America, raised along the Mississippi River, which we spelled in rhythm, M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i, a sweet incantation along with the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 and our school fight song about v-i-c-t-o-r-y. But I did and so I sat down to cheer it up a little and wrote a new first paragraph. That’s why a writer shouldn’t read his own work. I sat down and looked at my memoir THAT TIME OF YEAR when it came out and was put off by the sadness, the opening chapter about how much I missed doing “A Prairie Home Companion,” so I sat down to fix it. It is available for pre-order in our shop now. ![]() The "revised" softcover version of Garrison Keillor's memoir, That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life will be available wherever you get your books on March 7, 2023.
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