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Of your work, William Lee Miller once said that "one of [your] most striking themes is what one might call a positive or benign irony: getting more than, other than, better than, you deserve." Often in your stories something really good comes out of something that seems bad. Is that a recurring theme for you?

Keillor: I don't know as I would use the term "recurring theme," but I certainly would feel good about being able to do it and being able to do it in a plausible way. I feel that among writers of fiction there is a great deal of pretentious gloominess. Gloominess is nothing that an older person has a right to impose on young people. Young people can be very pessimistic and dark all on their own without us adding baggage to what they already have. And I like the idea of being 63 and trying to get people in their 20s to lighten up.

I think comedy is truthful in that respect. I think this is so much more the truth of ordinary life than the sudden catastrophic worst moment of death coming around the corner. I'm just finishing up a semester at the University of Minnesota teaching composition of comedy, and my students have a problem with comedy. It's because of this pretentious gloominess, which they've picked up from movies and wherever. I enjoyed the same sorts of things when I was their age, but they insist that they can't write comedy and I have to convince them that comedy is another way of telling the truth.

Keillor, Meryl Streep, and Lohan

When I read your stories and I see this positive irony, my mind is so primed for Christian imagery that I think of Joseph saying to his brothers "What you meant for harm God meant for good." Is it going too far to say that you're in some way writing about grace?

Keillor: I believe in the invisible presence of Grace. I don't necessarily literally believe in angels, which would be a sort of metaphor for the presence of grace, but yes, I see that. I guess I'm reluctant to … I would resist making them parables.

I'm just trying to pick up story elements. But some of them are sort of like parables. Last week I told a story about an enormous 16-foot long snake that lived for 30 years under someone's house without their being aware of it, and there were certainly elements of parable there. But also it was a funny story.

What is your intention when you tell a story?

Keillor: I believe absolutely in entertainment. I believe in it more and more as I get older. When I was younger, I believed in using this medium to accomplish good, but I now see this as really, really arrogant, at least in my case. I believe in entertainment as a way of keeping things in the air and you're not just sure where they land. There are wonderful moments in a script—you're kind of plodding 1, 2, 3 joke, joke, joke, and then there's a turn and it's amazing when it happens because you yourself don't know where this is going to go. I love that.

I think the audience reads intention, and the idea that I can make them think something by manipulating them, I think is arrogance on my part. If I express myself on the show I do it for my own good, and also I believe in forthright speech as much as possible. So if I want to say something, I just come out and say it. 

I read a few interviews with you in Christian publications, spanning about 20 years, and in each one the interviewer has a fascination with whether and where you are going to church. Is it prying to ask if you are attending a church now?

Keillor: That's not prying at all. Yes, I go to St. John the Evangelist Episcopal church in St. Paul. My wife is Episcopalian. I went to a Lutheran church in New York, which I really loved; being Lutheran in New York City is an experience. But I like [St. John]—it's low church, it's in the neighborhood, it's a walk away. They're very friendly. My daughter loves it there; she sings in the choir and it's really lovely and low key.

Having grown up in the Evangelical, sort of free-form fundamentalist church, I love the liturgical church where we say words together that are not my words and not your words. That really means a lot to me. I grew up listening to men stand up and invent prayers and the idea was that the Spirit was leading them, but in fact they were composing them in their heads and they were writing in a kind of faux King James style—big prayers and they were impressive, and they were seeking to impress, there is just is no other way around it.

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