Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Garrison Keillor's Podcast episodes:

• 04.13.2024

  O what a beautiful evening

  I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn...

  
• 04.06.2024

  The art of writing, lesson one

  Silence is a basic necessity. I’m an early riser and as I make coffee and take my meds, my dreams evaporate and my waking mind is open to inspiration and sometimes finds it — I suddenly know what’s next in...

  
• 03.30.2024

  I open the fridge and life beckons

  From the marmalade to the long table with green lampshades, I’ve chosen one pleasure after another, and when noon approaches, I have a lunch wagon in mind in Bryant Park, which offers an Italian sausage in a bun. Walking around...

  
• 03.23.2024

  Last Wednesday, stuck in a traffic jam

  New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for...

  
• 03.16.2024

  The winter blues has got me bad, mama

  We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock...

  
• 03.09.2024

  Me and Maurizio, ships in the night

  He asked about North Dakota, so I told him. Yes, the winters are long and the land is flat, but the people are the salt of the earth. Decency and humor.  No pretense. Nobody lives here to show off. The...

  
• 03.02.2024

  Crossing the flats, looking for mountains

  In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I’m riding a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a...

  
• 02.24.2024

  Sunday morning, back in the fourth pew

  A man stopped at my table who recognized me from my radio days. “Have a seat,” I said. He’s from Ohio, retired high school English teacher. Like everyone my age, he’s worried about young people. “They’re so busy with sports...

  
• 02.17.2024

  As I keep telling myself, life is good

  The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness...

  
• 02.10.2024

  What endures is decency, believe me

  I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and...

  
• 02.03.2024

  The gift of Miss Helen Story, remembered

  But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and...

  
• 01.27.2024

  Sing on, dance on, good eye, ain't you happy

  At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball...

  
• 01.20.2024

  Flying around America, looking at crowds

  I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In...

  
• 01.13.2024

  The memory is alive with old roots

  The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her...

  
• 01.06.2024

  “Stand up for yourself,” I keep thinking to myself

  So my friend’s fussiness about the coffee was, in fact, a tribute to the excellence of the restaurant. (Did I mention that this was in Northern California, in a town where a small bungalow goes for $1.8 million and you...

  
• 12.30.2023

  Finding harmony in the midst of chaos

  I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked...

  
• 12.23.2023

  Life without jokes isn't worth the trouble

  I went to see The Magic Flute at the Met last week and dozed through the sleepy parts of it, woke up for the Queen of the Night aria, and again when the Papageno dashed into the audience carrying a...

  
• 12.16.2023

  It was a good time, there was none better

  I’m at the age when you see the insides of more than your share of health clinics and some are like walking into a meat warehouse but when I walked into New York Presbyterian the other day and then the...

  
• 12.09.2023

  A happy summer clears the air

  Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion...

  
• 12.02.2023

  A lovely lunch last week in New Haven

  At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics...

  
• 11.25.2023

  A few minutes on a hilltop in Concord

  Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence....

  
• 11.18.2023

  A private word from me to Joe

  Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but...

  
• 11.11.2023

  Canada is burning but we're doing okay

  I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who...

  
• 11.04.2023

  Why I love the Shenandoah Valley

  I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew...

  
• 10.28.2023

  The art of leaving home

  The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy,...

  
• 10.25.2023

  Enough about them, this is about me

  When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this...

  
• 10.14.2023

  The beauty of a bitterly cold Sunday, 8 a.m.

  What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and...

  
• 10.07.2023

  Marriage is a game and two can play it

  She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says,...

  
• 09.30.2023

  Manhattan man living in the past

  I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.They...

  
• 09.23.2023

  Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl

  Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish...

  
• 09.16.2023

  Thinking about that woman in Kentucky

  The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but...

  
• 09.09.2023

  So this guy in New York walks into a grocery store

  There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell...

  
• 09.02.2023

  The daily pursuit of happiness

  Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express...

  
• 08.26.2023

  A week in Kansas and Missouri

  Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with...

  
• 08.19.2023

  We get around correctness by means of comedy

  I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper...

  
• 08.12.2023

  The author disembarks almost

  I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His...

  
• 08.05.2023

  I missed out on the big storm regretfully

  In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight...

  
• 07.29.2023

  There's money in dystopia but so what?

  One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using...

  
• 07.22.2023

  I am giving up anger, so should you

  If you’re considering larceny, my dear reader, stop and think this through. Cellphone towers can track your whereabouts and the country is full of surveillance cameras. Twenty-eight grand is poor compensation for three years in prison. You can do much...

  
• 07.15.2023

  Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

  I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath,...

  
• 07.08.2023

  The old man's lecture about manners

  Six a.m. at the MSP airport, a February morning, long lines of sleepy travelers snaking their way toward Security, and I approach the scanner and a TSA lady sees that I haven’t removed my shoes and says, “You’re not over...

  
• 07.01.2023

  Music as a means of detecting a Heart

  It’s not often a person gets to experience euphoria. For years I imagined alcohol could do the job if I could just find the right brand but eventually I gave up on that. Sometimes in church I’ve felt it. When...

  
• 06.24.2023

  A pound and a half? Really? Why?

  Welcome to Garrison Keillor’s Podcast. We plan to release one podcast per week (sometimes more). Feel free to comment and share with friends.“I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid,...

  
• 06.21.2023

  That cold day I was naked in Utah

  We are going to produce a weekly Garrison Keillor’s Podcast soon, kicking off in short order. At the start, the majority of these will be audio recordings of columns previously published in the newsletter, but we are giving Garrison the...

  
• 05.29.2022

  The Writers Almanac for Sunday, May 29, 2022

  Today is the birthday of President John F. Kennedy, born in 1917. He said to his fellow Americans “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."This show is part of...

  
• 05.28.2022

  The Writer's Almanac for Saturday, May 28, 2022

  Today is the birthday of the man who created James Bond, novelist Ian Fleming, born in London, England in 1908.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at...

  
• 05.27.2022

  The Writer's Almanac for Friday, May 27, 2022

  It’s the birthday of the American poet who once said, “The public needs poetry; I need poetry, to help celebrate and console.” Linda Pastan, born in 1932.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in...

  
• 05.26.2022

  The Writer's Almanac for Thursday, May 26, 2022

  Today is the birthday of photographer Dorothea Lange, 1895, whose photo “Migrant Mother” is one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this...

  
• 05.25.2022

  The Writer's Almanac for Wednesday, May 25, 2022

  “People tend to blame a writer for writing something they’re too stupid to understand.” – Jamaica Kincaid, celebrating her 73rd birthday today.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact...

  
• 05.24.2022

  The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, May 24, 2022

  “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky, poet, born on this day in 1940.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this...