I watched the film about Garrison Keillor on American Masters the other night.

Very enjoyable. I think GK is a talented, intelligent and funny guy. A bit sentimental and cornball perhaps, but I think he sincerely believes in the values. He made a couple of interesting remarks in the course of the film (a lot of it was him talking over footage following him around in the course of preparing and presenting APHC). One was that in order to make a show like APHC work, it had to be pretty light-hearted entertainment, and in order for light-hearted entertainment to work, it had to be heartfelt and had to be seen to be heartfelt, therefore the main production value driving the show (I'm paraphrasing he didn't use the term production value or heartfelt) was for the participants to be having fun themselves, ergo the goal is always to be entertaining themselves.

Another interesting thing he said was that writing (he is primarily a writer, in his own and in my opinion) is discovery. "We write in order to find out what we think." "Writing what you know is a starting point."

Mulling that in conjunction with words from Michael Chabon and Stephen King, who say that writing is to entertain, and to tell a story (different aspects of the same coin), respectively.

So writing is to entertain by telling a story, in order to find out what we think.