Hamlet is what people’ll be reading in school centuries from now.”
To write or not to write: that is the question. Shakespeare says, “I was sort of thinking of writing a comedy.” She says, “Will, I love you but you’re not that funny. He gets in a fight with the girlfriend’s brother, he gets stabbed, he makes a speech, he dies. His dad was killed by the guy who marries his mom and then his girlfriend goes nuts and drowns herself? What is he going to do? Find a therapist? Of course he dies. You’re stuck on Act 2 because you like him and you don’t want him to die, but he has to, darling. It’d be a tragedy if you didn’t finish it. If they’re really love sonnets, why don’t I have grandchildren? Put away the How do I love you? Let me count the ways and finish Hamlet, sweetheart.
Or Shakespeare’s Mom in which she tells him, “Enough with the love sonnets.
I’m opening a “Garrison Keillor and Friends” account on Substack and you’re invited to sign up for free to receive regular emails that include my weekly columns and frequent notes and letters, a trove of original limericks, most of them pure as drifted snow, and various revised Lake Wobegon monologues and some videos of me performing when I was young and good-looking, and, if you choose, you can venture beyond the paywall to obtain One Last Time Back Home about millennial entrepreneurs invading Lake Wobegon and getting rich by manufacturing artisanal firewood and organic sun-dried manure and a dance video that teaches math called “Let’s All Go Rithm” and Dorothy at the Chatterbox offers a gluten-free menu. You bet” and “Bye now.” And the only reason to publish hardcover is to win awards and I’d rather have readers. My weekly column already comes out that way: I write it on Saturday, you can read it on Wednesday.īesides, New York editors are Wellesley and Barnard graduates in their mid-twenties and they’re not interested in a small town in the Midwest where people say, “Okay then. With digital publishing, I could have a bookin your hands on Tuesday. If a New York editor accepted my new novel, One Last Time Back Home, or the two in progress, Frankie & Johnny At The Insurrection or Shakespeare’s Mom, they wouldn’t come out until 2023 at the earliest. I’ve already published twenty-seven books the old way, deforesting large tracts of northern Wisconsin, and it’s exciting to think of going digital. When you lead a monastic life to avoid viral infection, there is plenty of available time. I wrote a novel and a memoir and then another novel and now I’m working on two more. I don’t need another career, but once a writer, always a writer, and I’ve been busy during the pandemic. I had a long lovely magical career, doing a two-hour live radio variety show every Saturday night made up of the sort of stuff I loved as a kid sitting in front of a big Zenith radio - music, comedy, commercials for coffee and biscuits and the Fearmonger’s Shop, cowboys and a private eye, news from a small town, more music - how many people get to make a career out of their own childhood? It went on for forty years and ended when I was a month shy of 75. For one whole year, March to March, I’ve sat in this apartment with my wife who is reading the paper off her cellphone and reading e-books from the library on her Kindle, and gradually it dawns on me that this is the future of publishing and if I want my wife and other smart people to read my work, online is the way to go.
In addition, we will soon add a paid subscription option - The Back Room - that will offer a sneak peek at unpublished works in progress (“to read when the ink is still wet, and be able to comment, correct, chastise, or sheer”), poet interviews, a podcast, plus many other buried treasures. The emailed content you’ll receive from Garrison Keillor and Friends is free of charge. For more than forty years, he hosted the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, heard on some 700 public radio stations coast to coast and beyond. Born in Anoka, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor is a novelist, essayist, columnist, blogger, poet, and author of dozens of books, including his recent memoir, That Time of Year.