Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a storyteller. He was brought up in Minnesota in a Protestant fundamentalist family where alcohol, television and parties were all forbidden.

But telling stories wasn't.

And in his 30s he began to enchant the American public with a radio program in which he delivered

folksy accounts of life in a small Midwestern community.

Since then the stories have become the subject of best-selling books on both sides of the Atlantic,

but their author still keeps himself apart. I grew up, he says, with a powerful wish to be invisible.

He is the author of Lake Wobegonday's Garrison Kila.

It's difficult to be invisible once you become a celebrity, Garrison. Haven't you

effectively cramped your own style? No, and that's why I'm looking forward to this desert island.

I need to be sent there, but once there I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

But surely you can't walk down the main street of your hometown anymore or anywhere near it and be the invisible witness which you want to be?

I can be. In my hometown they don't look at you. They look away from you. So it's like the parting of of the waves

But do they come up to you and pat you on the back and say hey you've really done well Gary I do not

come from back patters these people do not bring up their children on heavy doses of praise. They believe that it would corrupt us,

that it would turn our heads, that we'd get too large an idea of ourselves.

We'd become foolish and that would be the worst thing that would happen to us.

That must make it very difficult for you ever to accept a compliment with any grace.

Can't ever, with any grace at all.

So you shouldn't even think of offering me one.

Well I will because of course the stories are brilliantly written which is why

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