August 31, 2007 - On this special Midday program, MPR’s Gary Eichten talks with Garrison Keillor on the Carousel Park stage at the Minnesota State Fair.
December 25, 2006 - "A Christmas Memory" and other stories. To keep you company this Christmas, Midday presents stories of the season from a host of top-flight story tellers, including Truman Capote, Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris. Hour 1: "A Christmas Memory," by Truman Capote. Read by the author at the University of North Dakota's 1976 Writer's Conference. "Mr. Bergy's Christmas," by Garrison Keillor. Performed in 1991 on Keillor's radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." "Is There a Santa Claus?" This letter first appeared on the editorial page of the New York Sun newspaper in 1897. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson reads the letter in only slightly altered form.
November 21, 2006 -
September 14, 2006 -
September 23, 2005 - Garrison Keillor is a busy man these days. On top of his wildly popular public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," he recently finished filming a movie based on the show, started writing a syndicated newspaper column, and now he's out with a new book. Keillor spoke about the poetry anthology he edited, "Good Poems for Hard Times," in Edina (Barnes & Noble - Galleria).
June 14, 2005 - Michael Cunningham is the author of four novels, including "The Hours," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was made into a film starring Meryl Streep. His upcoming novel, "Specimen Days," is a journey into the past and future that centers around the American poet Walt Whitman. Howe is a Guggenheim-award-winning poet whose first book, "The Good Thief," was selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the National Poetry Series. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She is author most recently of "What the Living Do" and was co-editor of "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic." Cunningham and Howe met through a mutual friend in Provincetown when both were just starting out in their careers. Together, they cared for that friend, who was diagnosed with and later died of AIDS. Cunningham and Howe consider one another "ideal readers;" they live in New York City and show each other everything they write.
March 4, 2005 - Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, worked as a business executive for many years-eventually becoming Vice President of General Foods-before turning to literature full time. He is author of three books of poetry, the controversial best seller "Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture" and most recently "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture." Kay Ryan is author of five collections of poetry. After years of being ignored by the poetry establishment, she recently won one of its most prestigious prizes: the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is "Say Uncle." Gioia published the first essay on Ryan's poetry; when he and his family moved to California, he sent her a postcard saying he hoped they'd cross paths. Both California poets with working-class origins, they became good friends.
February 16, 2005 - Dsicussion held Wednesday, February 16th, 2005. Married writers with ten novels and four children. Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and most recently, the novella "The Final Solution: A Story of Detection." He is at work on a thriller set in an imaginary world inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's short-lived plan during WWII to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska. Ayelet Waldman is a public defender-turned-novelist and has published five detective thrillers in the "Mommy-Track" mystery series. She is also author of the novel "Daughter's Keeper. "Chabon and Waldman met on a blind date eleven years ago and were engaged to be married three weeks later. He writes at night; she writes during the day. They live in California with their four young children.
January 18, 2005 - First of five Literary Friendships with Garrison Keillor. Robert Bly and Donald Hall. 2 poets, 50 years, 3,000 letters; Robert Bly and Donald Hall are two of the leading figures in American letters.
May 3, 2004 - As a shy, self-conscious boy growing up in St. Paul, Charles Schulz experienced the kinds of cruelty that belong uniquely to kids. And after attending a U of M extension class in cartooning and landing a job at the Pioneer Press, he experienced adult-style cruelty as well. He would go on to use those experiences -- and the hope and perseverance that accompanied them -- as inspiration for his new comic strip, "peanuts." A new collection of the very earliest Peanuts cartoons comes out today. They were drawn between 1950 and 1952. In the book's forward, Garrison Keillor calls Schulz "an innovative genius of American comics." Jean Schulz -- who called her husband "sparky" -- says she's amazed at what the early work reveals of a different side of her husband's creativity.