Garrison Keillor shares his stories at Santa Rosa show (w/video)

He is America’s storyteller, a man whose greatest gift is standing before a microphone or a crowd and talking. And talking. Garrison Keillor deftly thought-hops like a hobo hops trains, pulling into the station only when he decides to end the ride.

But in everyday social situations, the author of more than 100 written or recorded works and for decades the droll host of the live radio broadcast “A Prairie Home Companion,” admits that he is usually at a loss for words.

“I have very little to say at a party. I tend to go off in a corner. My wife has tried to pull me out of the corner and she can walk up to me and say ‘Mingle. MINGLE. I try,” he conceded, a bit sheepishly. “But I’m not good at it.”

Could it be that the 72-year-old humorist, who has been mining his own life and Minnesota roots for more than 40 years, saves all his musings for the audience? At dinner parties he cedes the table to his wife, professional violist Jenny Lind Nilsson.

“I don’t pull my own weight conversationally,” Keillor said. “It’s hard for me to do. Other people talk about their children, their jobs, when they were younger. I don’t ever feel like pulling it back to myself. It really is a lifelong shyness. Silence is a fairly secure default choice. My wife loves to talk and she’s very witty and she has a lot to say.”

Keillor, nonetheless, has no trouble talking to reporters he has never met and cannot see. On a recent afternoon he was stationed by his own phone, fielding back-to-back-to-back interviews in advance of an upcoming tour of his one man show, “An Evening With Garrison Keillor.”

The unscripted show is basically Keillor doing what he has been doing best for some 40 years, talking extemporaneously, telling stories and engaging the audience in group singing. He comes to The Wells Fargo Center on Dec. 3 for a single performance.

Keillor routinely squeezes in a week of these one-man shows in-between airings of “The Prairie Home Companion,” around the country. The meandering homage to the Minnesota world of his youth as seen through the lens of the fictional Lake Wobegon, is heard by 4 million listeners each week on more than 600 public radio stations and abroad on America One and the Armed Forces Network. It makes a stop in San Francisco at the Nourse Theater on Jan. 10.

“Talking over the radio or in a crowded theater is much easier than talking to people at the dinner table because you have the floor and you have the microphone,” Keillor explained. “If you don’t talk, then who is going to?”

He speaks in impassive tones, without laughter, thoughtfully pondering each question. But restraint doesn’t mean he isn’t having fun.

“I’ve had a wonderful time doing these shows,” he said. “They’re so utterly different than anything else I do. It’s kind of stand-up but it’s not like anybody else’s that I’m aware of. I don’t go out with any clear idea of where I’m going. I know something about the breadth of the material I have to choose from. I just leap in and try to go as quickly as possible, changing the subject. I keep moving and stay low to the ground and go 90 minutes and not much more than that.”

If you go, expect to sing. And if you’re of a certain age, you’re likely to know the lyrics, so no worries.

“I like to sing with an audience songs we all know. And people are surprised sometimes how beautiful this is, a large audience singing, a capella, ‘America the Beautiful’ or ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ By the second or third verse you hear the basses and tenors coming forward and it is really moving,” he said. “People rarely get a chance to do this.”

This thought leads to a musing about church organists and ballpark versions of The National Anthem sung in impossibly high keys, followed by a segue into weather and Midwest blizzards and how it has to be a part of any December talk, even in Santa Rosa.

“I’m happy to jump from one twig to the next and I don’t have an agenda,” he said. “Most of the stories take place back in my youth but not all of them. And I’m happy to talk about the radio show and how we’ve just gotten past the 40th anniversary. I talk about great mishaps and times when I came very close to getting fired.”

For instance, there was that Valentine’s Day sonnet that didn’t go over well.

“I thought it was very subtle but it wasn’t too subtle for the audience and they quickly caught on that what I was describing was an act of sex and so I heard from people who were horrified,” he said. “There have been a number of occasions like that. I try to avoid them but not always. Comedy has to come close to the line. It can’t get too comfortable. And I get excited doing a live show. Talking into a microphone you feel obligated to all those people out there who are listening as they drive their cars or who are sitting and having a peaceful moment in their kitchen or while they’re on the treadmill. You feel an obligation to give them something memorable. You don’t want to just be a murmuring voice.”

The old culture of his youth may be vanishing in the digital age, but Keillor still finds, within it, a full well of material. In July he celebrated the 40th anniversary of “A Prairie Home Companion” with a major festival in his hometown of St. Paul. And in October his play “Radio Man,” featuring beloved Lake Wobegon characters, premiered at The Twin City’s History Theatre.

“I think that young people are growing up in Lake Wobegon with a very different sense of their life than the one I grew up with,” he said, as if the fictional town were a metaphor for Middle America. “They’re growing up with the idea that they will have to be improvisers. They are not going to catch on to a career in the way that I was ambitious to. The career that I wanted to catch on to was to be a writer and in the end I sort of succeeded, but I had to take a detour into radio just to earn a living. And I was against the odds successful at catching on so I made my goal never to have to work for a living at something I didn’t want to do.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.