With the warmth and humor we've come to know and love, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio.

Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a move with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation.

He says, "I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That's the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I'm heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day."

Since writing this memoir, Mr. Keillor has added another five years on to his age (he's 83 as of this posting), and is still writing and still performing. It is also worth noting that though I do not fancy our hometown to be anything like Lake Wobegon, still, there are some parallels to be drawn, and it is safe to say that Garrison Keillor has been an influence on our own literary email newsletter, the Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth.

"Keillor's laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength.... His true subject is how daily life is shot with grace." ––San Francisco Chronicle

Hardcover, 360 pages. 2020.