Publicity materials for Garrison Keillor identify him as "Master Storyteller, Host & Producer."
The host and producer comes from his long-running (more than 40 years) public radio program A Prairie Home Companion. He retired from the show in 2016, turning it over to mandolinist and frequent guest Chris Thile.
An Evening with Garrison Keillor
• 7 p.m. Tuesday, Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway, Little Rock. With pianist Rich Dworsky and singer Heather Masse.
Tickets: $49-$75 (plus fees)
(800) 745-3000
Keillor says he doesn't listen to the show and provides no advice to his successor. "I want him to have complete freedom, as I had, to make the show what he wants it to be," he says, "and if I listened to it, then he'd wonder what I thought -- and I don't want him to wonder."
He continues to be a "master storyteller" for a public radio show called The Writers Almanac (Texarkana station KTXK-FM, 91.5, carries at 12:30 p.m. weekdays; it's also available as a podcast).
And in front of live audiences, including the one Tuesday at Little Rock's Robinson Center Music Hall.
What makes Keillor a master storyteller rather than a raconteur, or, since many of his stories have a humorous turn, a humorist?
"I don't know who wrote the publicity [material]," Keillor says. "Master storyteller is not my phrase. As for raconteur or humorist, it's all in the minds of the people in the seats.
"I enjoy being the guy on stage holding the microphone. Every audience is different, and there are discernible individuals in it whom you get to know in the course of two hours. And of course they laugh, but there's all different sorts of laughter.
"You're like a geologist up there, chipping away at a 10,000-year-old cliff, except nobody'd pay to sit and watch a geologist."
"An Evening With Garrison
Keillor" is the title for his solo performances in theatrical venues and university programs. This was originally billed as a one-man show, but now Keillor will be bringing along two Prairie Home Companion companions: pianist Rich Dworsky and singer Heather Masse. According to tour officials, they'll provide, "a fun and nostalgic musical element to the evening of hilarious anecdotes about growing up in the Midwest, Lake Wobegon and late-life fatherhood."
"Hilarious" is another word you're unlikely to hear out of Keillor's own mouth or see from his pen. Notably modest, at least officially, he wants no fancy introductions. Tour documents tell local promoters, "House announcements are acceptable, but Keillor prefers no introduction at all and asks that if he has one, it be brief and nonlaudatory such as: 'Ladies and gentleman, Mr. Garrison Keillor.'"
Keillor is also a best-selling author, having published more than two dozen books of fiction and poetry. Along the way, he has garnered Grammy, ACE and Peabody awards, as well as the National Humanities Medal, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He says through the "evening with" format, "I get around to places that invite me to come but I don't get to see much," he says, in particular to places he might not otherwise have ever visited when the radio show traveled.
(The show broadcast live from Hot Springs in 2004 and 2008, and "A Prairie Home Companion -- The Rhubarb Tour With Garrison Keillor" -- essentially the same show, but not aired live and without the members of the so-called Radio Acting Company -- paid a visit there in 2005. But it never made it to Little Rock.)
The storytelling show represents a respite from his many other tasks. "I'm locked up with a screenplay, a book of limericks, a memoir and a weekly column to write," he says. "I'm an indentured slave in a hotel room, bent over my loom.
"Someday I'll travel and go to cafes and take guided tours of historic sites. For now, I just keep writing and crossing stuff out."
That weekly column, which Keillor says is somewhat of a diversion from the strains of the day, sometimes verges on subjects, like politics, into which he had previously been reluctant to delve -- and which he eschews in his stage show.
"What's to take into account?" he says. "Politics today is all about the White House and the man is about as subtle as a ball-peen hammer. Any 10-year-old child can figure him out.
"I grew up among good evangelical people who never talked about politics, so it's not the center of my life; far from it. I get to write a weekly 750-word column for the Washington Post and I can say whatever I want about politics in it, and usually what I know about politics is a lot less than 750 words.
"I am a diversion. The column you can read for nothing, and if you don't like it, you can stop after 15 words." But, "a theater seat is expensive, and if you're sitting in the middle of the row it's a big deal to climb over everybody and walk out."
Style on 11/05/2017