Lecture: Garrison Keillor
RELATED:
Everyday, National Public Radio's Garrison Keillor makes himself coffee, sits down at a typewriter or computer, and writes.
"I'm here with one thing in mind, and that is to encourage young people to be writers," he recently told a group of journalism students and professors at New York University.
Keillor, 62, is famous for his variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, which has been on the air since 1974.
"I have earned my living writing things of my own devising," said Keillor, who does all the writing for his show. "This was my goal when I was your age: not to ever work for a living. When this show started, it was just a bunch of eccentrics sitting around in shabby surroundings, and since there was nothing at stake, you were allowed to do things that you believed in. It's sometimes a little more difficult now."
"This was my goal when I was your age: not to ever work for a living."
Keillor strongly encouraged students to maintain their independence from major organizations and corporations as they begin looking for jobs in journalism.
"I'm trying to convince you to walk on the edge of large organizations that may be holding out a job to you and inviting you into their web," he said. "I'd advise you to keep your own counsel and to think about freelancing. Don't subsume yourself into the profession. That part of you that thinks independently is the part that, in the long term, you probably will come back to."
Keillor, who lives in St. Paul, Minn., said his local newspaper doesn't inform readers as it should, and similarly, he suggested that papers across the country are also failing to do their job.
"Newspapers everywhere are dying," he said.
But Keillor praised John McPhee for a recent piece he wrote for The New Yorker about the intricate details of a UPS facility at Louisville International Airport in Kentucky.
"To be able to do that," Keillor said, "to be able to discover the world and put it into words for people who live narrow lives, as we all do ... makes the world larger for people."
Keillor also criticized the deregulation of radio, which allows firms to own an unlimited number of stations nationwide and inhibits people from receiving important information quickly enough. He cited the 2003 disaster in Minot, N. D., where a freight train carrying ammonia derailed, and residents could not be warned by radio because Clear Channel controls the local radio station from its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.
"If you need to communicate quickly, you can't do it through radio," he said.
Apparently, that's not the only thing you can't do on air. After complaints about Keillor using the phrase "son of a bitch" on his show, he said he might concede to clean up his language.
"I hate to give up the words 'son of a bitch' in broadcasting, I really do," he said. "There's a place for it. That's why public radio is booming. People want to turn on their radios, and they want to hear you tell them what they need to know."
Keillor, who just finished a screenplay about his radio show, also joked about his plans for A Prairie Home Companion.
He said there is a disgruntled liberal element to his demographic, and he might have someone impersonate President Bush on his show.
"I would like to do something political," he said. "I haven't done anything political in a long time."
A schedule for Keillor's upcoming shows, as well as ticket information, can be found at: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/schedule/#tickets.