Garrison Keillor Videos

Friday’s Poem: “The Surgeon” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from The Book of Seventy. Friday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1978 that San Francisco mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by Dan White, a former supervisor who’d resigned but then wanted his job back. White snuck into the San Francisco City Hall through a window in order to bypass metal detectors, then he walked to the mayor’s office and shot him. Then he found Milk in a hallway and shot him,…

Wednesday’s Poem: “Two Girls” by Jim Harrison, from Saving Daylight. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Leonard Woolf, born in London (1880). He was an incredibly prolific writer, though his literary achievements were overshadowed by his famous wife, novelist Virginia Woolf, for whom he was first reader, major editor, and great encourager…

Thursday’s Poem: “In Sickness and Health” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from The Book of Seventy. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1922 that archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon became the first people in more than 3,000 years to enter the tomb of Egypt’s child pharaoh, Tutankhamun…

Monday’s Poem: “Where They Were and What They Were Doing” by Matt Cook, from In the Small of My Backyard. Monday’s Literary Notes: Today, the winner of the 2005 National Spelling Bee turns 18. Anurag Kashyap, who was born in India and grew up in San Diego County, California, was in eighth grade when he correctly spelled “appoggiatura” (a musical term that means, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “an embellishing note or tone preceding an essential melodic note or tone and usually…

Tuesday’s Poem: “What the Dark-Eyed Angel Knows” by Eleanor Lerman, from The Mystery of Meteors. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the publisher and editor of The Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson, born in Indianapolis (1886), who never fit in when she was growing up in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. She said, “I saw no reason why I should continue to live in Columbus, Indiana, and not breathe.” So she moved to Chicago and founded a magazine called The Little Review,…

Clint Bunsen restores his primitive senses by hunting alone this year.

Sunday’s Poem: “Head Cheerleader” by Jack Ridl, from Losing Season. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It was about 12:30 p.m. on this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was the first successful assassination of an American president since 1901, and the only presidential assassination ever caught on film. Almost every American alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard the news…

Saturday’s Poem: “XI.” by Wendell Berry, from Leavings. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Christopher Reuel Tolkien (1924) born in Leeds, England. He’s the youngest son of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, and he drew the original maps that appeared in his father’s epic fantasy novel. In addition to synthesizing all that complicated information about the imaginary Middle Earth to draw up the illuminating maps, he was also his famous father’s test audience. Since his…

Friday’s Poem: “Farley, Iowa” by Christopher Wiseman, from the longer poem “Standing by Stones” from Crossing the Salt Flats. Friday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923). She’s the author of more than a dozen short-story collections and more than a dozen novels, most of which explore the issue of race in her homeland of South Africa. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, and has served as a member of…

Thursday’s Poem: “Diagnosis” by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, pulled his speech from his coat pocket and delivered the Gettysburg Address. It consisted of 10 sentences, a total of 272 words and lasted just over two minutes…

Tuesday’s Poem: “Alexandria, 1953” by Gregory Djanikian, from Falling Deeply into America. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the man who created Saturday Night Live — Lorne Michaels, born in Toronto, Canada (1944). He majored in English at the University of Toronto, and then moved to Britain in the 1960s to pursue a career selling cars. His friends and acquaintances in England, who loved his sense of humor and recognized his leadership potential, quickly realized it’d be a huge waste of talent for him to sell cars all of his life. Michaels recruited talent from all sorts of places. Dan Aykroyd was a fellow Canadian, and Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner had worked on the National Lampoon show. Muppet creator Jim Henson created sketches for the show, and recent Harvard grad Al Franken was signed on as a writer. Michaels put together the first season, 1975–1976, and won an Emmy for it…

Wednesday’s Poem: “My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing” by William Kloefkorn, from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from spring to fall studying insects at a forestry research station in northern Quebec. Atwood said, “At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this…

Sunday’s Poem: “Manners” by Howard Nemerov, from The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). In 1923, she said, “One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself — I can’t live where I want to — I can’t go where I want to go — I can’t do what I want to — I can’t even say what I want to … I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”..

Monday’s Poem: “Middle School Band Concert” by Christine Rhein, from Wild Flight. Monday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the novelist Andrea Barrett, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1954). She is known for writing fiction about botanists, oceanographers, and geologists. In order to finish her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), about a group of British scientists exploring the Arctic, Barrett traveled to the Arctic herself. Andrea Barrett said: “I think science and writing are utterly…

A cautionary tale about the time Irene Bunsen decided to break from the traditional holiday menu.

Saturday’s Poem: “Cranberry-Orange Relish” by John Engels, from Sinking Creek. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1851 that Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick was published, and it was a total flop. He had pored his heart and soul into the novel and he thought it was his masterpiece, but neither the critics nor readers agreed with him. His readers wanted a swashbuckling adventure story, like Melville’s earlier novels, so Moby-Dick was too heavy and allegorical for most people. Only…

Friday’s Poem: “Grapefruit” by Ted McMahon, from The Uses of Imperfection. Friday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the man who wrote the first memoir in Western literature: St. Augustine, born in 354 in Thagaste, which is now in Algeria. He is best known for his Confessions, a 13-book autobiography of his life and conversion. He wrote, “Wisdom and folly both are like meats that are wholesome and unwholesome, and courtly or simple words are like town-made or rustic vessels — both kinds of…

Thursday’s Poem: “My Father’s Football Game” by David Wagoner, from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of writer Tracy Kidder, born in New York in 1945. He served as a lieutenant in the Vietnam War, and when he came home, all he wanted to do was write. So he started writing nonfiction, and he’s the author of The Soul of a New Machine (1981), Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003), and many more books. His most recent is Strength in What Remains,…