Garrison Keillor

Writing Habits: Get up early, make coffee, write. Advice to Writers: Writing is a sacred calling -- but so are gardening, dentistry and plumbing, so don't put on airs. Writers are journalists before they're anything else. You keep coming back to journalism, which is continually hard work, to describe action, to narrate a sequence of events and somehow keep your own fine sensibility out of it, to simply say how the game progressed. In all the best poems you find precise reporting, and this has very little to do with the mood of the writer. You can write comedy when you're sick, when you're lonely as a barn owl and your head hurts and your friends are mad at you. It's just work, that's all, and you go do it if you need to. It's a good life being a writer. Be grateful for it. And don't give advice to writers, no matter who asks you to.

Public radio is absolutely necessary in this country, given that commercial radio over the past decade has abandoned any sense of public service. Commercial stations are chasing after particular segments of the market -- the eighteen to twenty-five year-old male who is into hearing loss, the fifty-plus male who is into conspiracy theories -- and it's left to public radio to fulfill the great dream of radio as a medium that brings people together and disseminates information accurately and swiftly and creates national bonds of understanding and brings great music and poetry and drama to the far corners of the land. That's what the inventors had in mind. They didn't intend it to be used to sell headache remedies. At the moment public radio is full of interesting shows -- such as Fresh Air with Terry Gross, out of Philadelphia, which is so far above and beyond any television interview show that ever was, bar none. Or The Splendid Table. Or Selected Shorts. But public radio is also maddening for the way it tolerates windy pretense and preciousness of the sort that now fills All Things Considered, formerly our flagship program and now a dreary melange of personal essays and whimsy and liberal piety and sheer tedium. The way this once- proud show has been turned into liverwurst is a tragedy, but the arrogance around National Public Radio is about hip-high and there's the reason for it. The problem is that although more people listen to public radio than go to the theater, there is absolutely no criticism in public radio. None. Every year they give out awards to people on the basis of the same old logrolling and backscratching politics, and there is no radio journal, or radio show, where someone reviews the current work and crowns the saints and flogs the sinners.

-Garrison Keillor, The Atlantic Online October 8,1997
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