Garrison Keillor on writer's rights

This from the March 11, 2009 issue of Salon


excerpt from Garrison Keillor's essay: "Where's my disability check?"

"The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has done zilch to secure disability protection for writers. In my line of work, disability comes down to two things: memory loss and something else, I forget what. You lose the vocabulary retrieval skills you had when you were 30 and interesting words such as "parietal lobe" and "sedimentary rocks" flocked to your brain, and now you sit inert at the laptop for a number of horrendous minutes trying to remember the word for the thing that if you picked it up and dropped it on your foot it would be very, very bad -- anvil! This is a disability, and a writer should be able to receive payments, and also for the other thing, whatever it is."