Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9412270031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Stuck in the confining medium of non-fiction, though, we lose the opportunity - usually - for the exaggerated flourish, the mythic grandeur, the potent melding of characters that makes a story immortal.
Those embellishments are the job of people who are considered entertainers, rather than journalists, though they may tell the stories of their times better than any newspaper.
It's too early to know yet, for certain, whether Garrison Keillor will join the ranks of Hawthorne and Twain and Hemingway among American authors whose stories will serve generation after generation with truths more powerful than any history text.
I'd guess he's got a good shot at it, though, particularly through his oral and written accounts of life in Lake Wobegon, Minn., and its very human, if fictional, cast of characters.
Like most great writers, Keillor has a firm grasp on the grandparent of all Western storybooks - the Bible. And he is intimately acquainted with the foibles and fortes of the book's keeper - the Church.
Religious references, stories and songs pervade performances of Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" public radio show and his books. His characters live in a world where religious faith is a vital, critical part of everyday life.
Keillor has an understanding of the broad sweep of American Christianity that is unusual in popular entertainment. Though some television drama is now following his lead, Keillor has been incorporating religion into his radio show since it began 20 years ago.
On Keillor's recent trip to Roanoke for a live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion," I had an opportunity to ask him about religion and the art of storytelling.
He answers questions much like he tells his Lake Wobegon stories, taking a single thread and weaving it into a larger tapestry:
"Well, I suppose to some extent [his use of religious themes and references] is due to growing up in a family that had very regular religious habits, and that regarded itself and other Christians as being isolated in the world - not really belonging in the world. ... We had experienced powerful revelation that separated us from others.
"They also believed in the memorization of Bible verses, so a great deal of the Bible was put into our heads, you know. We read it regularly and studied it. So, even though I have fallen away from the sect that I grew up in and many of its doctrines, these stories to me are my most basic stories. ... We didn't go to movies and we didn't have a television when I was a child and so these stories are very real to me. Adam and Eve, Noah, Cain and Abel.
"The Prodigal Son is one of my favorite stories and I think about it often. The story of Job, I think, is such a profound story you could think about it all your life and never exactly understand it. But I think it's the presence of those stories in my life that keeps bringing me back to it.
"I have slipped in and out of the church since [his youth], and I was in for a while and out for a while and now I'm sort of heading back in."
The inclusion of religion in his books and radio show "has nothing to do with wanting to preach to people, which I would have no excuse to do ... I think that telling a story properly is much harder than preaching. I mean, preaching is one of the easiest things you can do. Not do well, but to sort of strike the pose and take that tone in your voice is absolutely easy to do. It's not really very becoming for someone who is in my line of work, which has a different ethic.
"So I don't do it in order to preach. I simply do it because it's real to me.
"I think comedy is about the most important things. Comedy is not fundamentally about minor irritations - difficulties with airlines, and problems with home appliances and this sort of thing. It really is about good and evil, which, you know, are hard to recognize - are genuinely hard to recognize and tell apart."
by CNB