Garrison Keillor's Podcast

The one-armed man at the concert

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two

Gearing up to go on the road

Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivaci

An old man's winter night

A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does b

Remembering you but not the rest

I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of c

What we learn from air travel

This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to ge

My weekly walk to church and back

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMy weekly walk to church and backThe Column: 04.04.25Garrison KeillorApr 4READ IN APPShareWe seem to be in a war against scie

The sweet day draws near

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they fi

The perils of pedestrianism

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to t

My plan for the next four years

Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them

Mother the queen of my heart

I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was on

Living in the present, a day at a time

I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager

It's never too late to be normal

The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by cr

A wonderful night in Lubbock

I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m

A tale about close neighbors

I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate

A man on the porch by the river

When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I

A primer for my friends of middle-age

There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction

It's never too late for a revelation

My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like ea

Happiness and the price of groceries

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I liste

A good weekend in Georgia

I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quie

Thank you for reading this

Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average d