A hard truth I’ve learned is that you have to leave the places you love in order to write about them.
Not until I’d grown up and left northern Minnesota could I make any sense of the place. My tiny hometown was all I’d ever known, and just like how you don’t really understand how your own family functions until you spend time with someone else’s, living in a far-flung college town and then coastal cities brought my origins into true focus. One evening when I was 24 and living in Brooklyn, I turned on the radio and
Prairie Home Companion drifted out.
Prairie Home Companion! Bane of my youth, loathsome folksy soundtrack of many a Saturday evening drive down a snowy rural highway while my brothers and I drowned Garrison Keillor’s baritone drone in our complaints...