Keillor To Talk About Everything

Simon Winchester hopes that you’ll bring your tough #MeToo questions to his onstage chat with Garrison Keillor. 

That talk will be on Saturday, Oct. 5, at 4:30 p.m. at the historic meeting house in New Marlborough, one of the five small villages on the outskirts of Great Barrington. 

Winchester is one of several well-known literary types who live in the area. He is the author of numerous best-selling nonfiction books, of which the most famous is probably “The Professor and the Madman,” about the Oxford English Dictionary and the convicted murderer (a Connecticut native) who contributed so much to it, from his jail cell in England. That book was recently made into a movie with Sean Penn and Mel Gibson. 

Another well-known “SoCo” (Southern Berkshire County) author is Roy Blount, who is friends with Garrison Keillor, and introduced him to Winchester. Winchester was in Minnesota last January (apparently because no one warned the English author not to go to Minnesota in winter) and looked up Keillor, who had time on his hands after having severed his relationship with Minnesota Public Radio following accusations of misconduct with some of the female employees there. 

Far from wanting to tiptoe around the topic, Winchester said he hopes that Keillor will want to talk about what he’s doing now (he’s written a play and a memoir and has a busy website full of essays and poetry reading, www.garrisonkeillor.com) but also about what happened in 2017.

“There should be questions about it,” Winchester said. “When I first spoke to him about coming here, I said, ‘If you were to do it, would you talk about everything?’”

Keillor said yes. And while the author/poet/radio host will have ample time in the hour-long chat to talk about his new work, Winchester said he expects that talk about the accusations and the aftermath will be “a fairly substantial part and one of the reasons why people might want to come along, to talk about the MeToo movement generally, where it’s gone, where it’s going. I imagine that he has views.”

Questions from the audience will be more than welcome. 

“Bring them on,” Winchester said.

He can handle it. Winchester took over the literary portion of the annual Music and More summer festival six years ago. Legendary New York Times book editor Michael Levitas had been curating the author/editor talks but he handed the responsibility over to Winchester in the later years of his life. 

Last year Winchester’s guest was New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma, who had just been let go after publishing an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, who had been accused of sexual abuse and misconduct by numerous women (although he’d been found not guilty in court). 

That was a fairly frank and open conversation, Winchester said. 

“Ian is a very old friend of mine, so we already had a decent rapport. But there were some legal constraints on him at the time so he couldn’t be perfectly frank.”

A staff member from the New York Review of Books also showed up and was in the audience, which had a chilling effect. 

No such constraints are expected for the Keillor talk. Tickets are on sale now; the meeting house holds about 300 people but the organizers expect a large turnout, so it might be worth ordering ahead of time. The cost is $25 per person for non-members. A wine and cheese reception will follow the talk. Keillor is expected to have some of his books for sale at the event, but Winchester said he will not have his own books for sale.

Winchester’s latest, called “The Perfectionists” in America and “Exactly” in the United Kingdom, was released in paperback this year.

The website for the talk is www.newmarlborough.org.