Garrison Keillor, creator and host of the nationally syndicated A Prairie Home Companion, and Maplewood would seem to be a perfect fit.

First of all, you can't swing a book prospectus without smacking a published author and Keillor acolyte in this town. Yes, the town is lousy with the literate, postively bursting with the bookish, and one person I know even goes running in a P.O.E.M. — Professional Organization of English Majors — t-shirt (see here for an explanation). Kissing up to Keillor would be well advised for those eager to publish. He's a well-connected man of letters and has been editor of that Mount Olympus for aspiring fiction writers — the Best American Short Stories annual anthology (1998, a very good year).

Secondly, Maplewood seems strangely akin to Keillor's fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

I'm not sure how good looking the men are, but I can assure you, after covering Maplewood and local education issues for more than two years, we are all convinced that are children are more than above average. And, if you've been to a Pilates, yoga or kickboxing studio in town lately, you will know that the women are, indeed, quite strong.

Anyhoo, it behooves all the local literati to gather 'round Monday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Words Bookstore to hear Keillor hawk his new short comic novel A Christmas Blizzard — about a Hawaii-bound holiday traveler who ends up stranded in his hometown during a blizzard. For my part, Keillor could be reading the OED in that homespun and sonorous voice of his and it would be worth my babysitter's weight in gold.