3 months after stroke, Keillor spinning tales about it
Three months after suffering a stroke, Prairie Home Companion writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor is more than ready to poke fun at the experience.
"I'm feeling fine," he said in an interview aired Wednesday on CBC's Q cultural affairs show. "If you're going to have a stroke, a minor one is the way to go."
Keillor, speaking from his studio in St. Paul, Minn., described why he drove himself to the hospital in Minneapolis after suffering a stroke this September.
"I didn't want to be any trouble to anybody, so, I got behind the wheel of my car," he said. "I felt a little odd, but I drove very carefully, very slowly, in the right-hand lane.
"And I got to the emergency room, and I stood in line as other people came up to the triage desk and talked about minor skin irritations and a mole that needed to be looked at and a possible ankle sprain. I stayed in line as I was brought up to do."
Keillor, author of Lake Wobegon Days and Life Among the Lutherans, has made a career out of satirizing his Calvinist upbringing, including its emphasis on never making a fuss.
"I parked in a no-parking space at the hospital — and got away with it somehow — and made my way into the little curtained alcove of the emergency room," Keillor said. "A lovely doctor admitted me, and she was writing on her clipboard '67-year-old man, awake, alert, appropriate, showing flat affect.'
"I was brought up to show flat affect and also to be appropriate, so that was what I was focusing on rather than my terror."
Flat affect is a medical term for showing no discernible emotion.
"I think if you were unconscious, yes, you should call an ambulance," Keillor added.
Keillor missed an appearance at Toronto's International Festival of Authors in October after the stroke but has since returned to broadcasting, launching the 36th season of his Prairie Home Companion radio show this fall.
The immensely popular show is syndicated on local radio stations throughout the U.S. and is also available on satellite radio and online.
Perpetual sense of falling short
Beloved for his understated humour, Keillor said he has never considered himself a success but merely lucky that he can do a job he enjoys.
"I do a live show every week, and … I've never finished the show with any sense of accomplishment. This is what keeps you going," he said.
"I grew up with Calvinist people ... and they pretty much did away with self-esteem. I have this perpetual sense of having fallen short, seriously short. And this is a sort of engine that you carry around in your back pocket, and it keeps motivating you."
Keillor has just published a new book, Pilgrims, which again chronicles the lives of the residents of Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town populated with repressed Lutherans such as himself .
He says he waited until he was in his 60s before his satire turned to political targets, including Republicans.
His support of Democrat Barack Obama in his run for president and his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Republicans should be denied health care might have lost him readers, but he still has wide populist appeal, he said.
"A lot of readers and radio listeners are mightily irked by me, and some of them I never will win back, but it's my project to try and win them back and win them back through silliness or stories that appeal to their better angels," Keillor said.
"If you're in this line of work and you don't make anybody angry — by this line of work I mean comedy — then you're taking too easy a path, and you've sunk into the deep carpet of sentimentality, and I don't want to go there. "