Spinning yarns like yesteryear

He picks up the phone and you hear it -- that voice. Smooth and sonorous as a cello, tinged with the singsong melancholy of the upper Middle West, the voice of Garrison Keillor has been beaming out via his “A Prairie Home Companion” live radio show now for 30 years.

Though he is hardly the stuff of stalkerazzi and cable-channel gossip hounds, Keillor, 62, has been making the media rounds with more gusto than usual in honor of the show’s anniversary. Broadcasting from a theater in St. Paul, Minn., the show’s mix of music, skits, readings and meditations has gained Keillor an extremely faithful following, making him something of a folksy oracle. Many have noted his recent shift toward occasionally more overt political discourse, including the publication of his most recent book, “Homegrown Democrat,” though even that has been tempered by his famously laconic, wry style.

“A Prairie Home Companion” conjures such a specific sense of place, and yet seems to exist somehow out of time. What is it that draws you toward an aesthetic that is, and please pardon the expression, “old-timey”?

I grew up listening to radio, and you could call it old-timey. It certainly was. It was commercial radio in Minneapolis, talked a lot about the weather, because that’s important here, and gave you the farm prices, the livestock report, and it was kind of chatty, determinedly apolitical, determinedly uncontroversial and really sought for a low-key kind of small talk that was humorous about the ordinary things, ordinary life. And if that’s old-timey, well, then I really believe in that. Especially in public radio, which has this powerful tendency to go dry and to reach for the academic and to sort of hold itself aloof. If the choice is between old-time and aloof, then I choose old-time, of course, thank you very much. I was an English major and I got over it. I don’t have any need to display erudition.

The way in which the show celebrates small-town American life, and the eccentricities and oddball ways of living that go with it, was perhaps once nostalgic and a little quaint. Now, however, in the face of the chain-store anonymity and ubiquity that reaches to every nook and cranny of the country, that small-town ideal seems downright radical. Is it important to you to plant a flag, as it were, for that vanishing idea of America?

Well, we aren’t flag carriers, we’re an entertainment show. We really truly are, and our preachy moments are our worst moments, really, and our best moments are when we make people laugh and be happy. So I don’t hold out a sense of mission about small towns or eccentricities. Small towns are dying, there seem to be enormous economic forces working against them, and the small towns that manage to survive, Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering them just as we once killed the buffalo. So I don’t exactly hold out hope for them, except that there is something really stubborn in the human spirit.

I think there are all sorts of people out there who are living lives that are really under the radar of the media, including public radio, beyond the type of people sitting in a room someplace writing about America and what it’s like to be alive in 2005. If you fly in a plane at low altitude over just about any part of the country, you see a lot of people living back there, and there’s no indication of what they’re doing. But they are out there, just living their own lives. I think the life of the country is all spread out, in all these little places, and the fact we may not be aware of it does not diminish their vitality.

One of the highlights of each broadcast is “The News From Lake Wobegon,” a 20-minute monologue you improvise each week. Do you ever find it difficult to find something to say? Do you ever step to the microphone and draw a complete blank?

It’s really not that hard. For one thing, one thinks about it, one makes notes, one sits and ponders about it on Saturday morning. If you think about it not too far in advance, then you get these cloud formations in your mind and you seed them and when it comes time, it will rain. It’s just a little seance, it’s not particularly complicated. You start out talking a little about the weather, and in the winter it’s easy, because it’s cold and that’s interesting. Summer you have to scratch a little bit to find something.

You have characters who reappear from time to time -- they seem to sort of develop on their own -- and then ideas simply jump out at you, as they do for any writer. There’s a woman walking down the sidewalk and you look at her and you suddenly see a story like an aura around her and that’s all you need, that little start. And under the pressure of improvising it, all sorts of details come to you. Sometimes the wrong ones, but you forge ahead.