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A few days ago, I picked up a copy of Garrison Keillor's Leaving Home, an anthology of transcripts of tales from Lake Woebegone that had been presented during older episodes of A Prairie Home Companion. I had been introduced to the show while I was paying my way through undergraduate work by delivering pizza; I spent a lot of time in my car on Saturday afternoons and evenings, and radio offerings in my hometown were and are somewhat limited. (That is, of course, unless a listener likes country music and red-tinted talk radio a lot more than I do. But I don't.) As such, I heard a lot of upper Midwestern shenanigans as I shuttled pizza from store to door, much of the Minnesota State Fair and horrible puns and wry, dry humor, and I heard echoes of parts of my own family in them--for while my people are not from the upper Midwest, they are Midwestern, and some of what Keillor narrates happens quite a way downstream of Minneapolis / St. Paul.

As I read through the book, I began to recognize not only the characters and their situations, but a sound that echoes in my own writing. I do not claim Keillor's narrative skill, of course; I have not the set of stories that he does, the cast of characters so authentic that they must be taken from the lives of those he has known. I do not know people that well, as should be obvious (and likely is to those who know me). The way he digresses on things, however, and waxes poetic at what would be odd moments if not delivered in his soothing voice or in writing meant to suit it, is something I ineptly emulate in my own work. It had not been a conscious thing before, although now that I write it, I will not be able to escape the memory of it. But I do not think I mind it much; there are far worse models to follow than his.

I think he follows, and thus I follow at greater remove, the model of Addison and Steele in The Tatler and The Spectator. Seventeenth-century British newssheets, they offer more in the way of editorial commentary than what those who live now or who claim to remember halcyon days when all was right with the world, when people knew their places and had a sense of decorum, would call "reporting," but they were the more influential for that. "The facts" can be had by looking out the window or listening to the sounds carried by the wind; "the facts" can be had by being in the place where what is "worthy" of becoming "fact" happens. Knowing what to say about "the facts" to help them make sense, though, and to encapsulate the experience such that others can look at it and say "I get it; I understand; I would have acted thus" is a different thing altogether. Addison and Steele did much in that line; Keillor still does much, for a different set of people. I stumble behind the lot of them, for the path is rocky and my feet unsure, groping along until I find at last a grip to fit my hand.