I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge Garrison Keillor's birthday today. He has been a source of inspiration for me for many blog entries. He is also an ardent supporter of public libraries, as evidenced in a wonderful speech he made at the American Library Association annual conference this year. (It was broadcast on C-SPAN a couple of weeks ago and is still available online for viewing.) Snippets of his speech were repeated in his June 27 article on Salon.com, "The Library Fix," in which he referred to the public library as "one of the nobler expressions of democracy."

Keillor is best known for his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which is broadcast on National Public Radio. The show features live music, plus skits such as Guy Noir, Private Eye (and, of course, the adventures of Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian). One of the mainstays of the show is the news from Lake Wobegon, a fictional Minnesota town. Keillor has written a number of books based on his Lake Wobegon radio characters. Among these are:

Lake Wobegon Summer 1956
Wobegon Boy
Mother, father, uncle, aunt: stories from Lake Wobegon (audiocassette)

A new Lake Wobegon title, Pontoon, is due out in September.

Keillor is also behind a little project called the Writer's Almanac. The Writer's Almanac is a short daily broadcast on National Public Radio. It usually follows the format of discussing the major literary landmarks of the day--authors' birthdays, anniversaries of publications, and so on--followed by a reading of a poem. Many's the commute that was made more pleasant by a few minutes of the Writer's Almanac. Archives of the program are available online at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org. Along those lines, Keillor has published a couple of poetry anthologies, consisting of poems that he selected: Good Poems for Hard Times (large print) and Good Poems.

You can read more about Garrison Keillor in the Literature Resource Center database, found on our web site at http://www.nashua.lib.nh.us/IbrowseAdultAlpha.htm.