I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio
by Jean Feraca
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007 Paper: 978-0-299-28574-6 | Cloth: 978-0-299-22390-8 | eISBN: 978-0-299-28573-9 Library of Congress Classification PN1991.4.F39A3 2007 Dewey Decimal Classification 384.54092
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Jean Feraca’s road to self-fulfillment has been as quirky and demanding as the characters in her incredible memoir. A veteran of several decades of public radio broadcasting, Feraca is also a writer and a poet. She is a talk show host beloved for her unique mixture of the humanities, poetry, and journalism, and is the creator of the pioneering international cultural affairs radio program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.
In this searing memoir, Feraca traces her own emergence. She pulls back the curtain on her private life, revealing unforgettable portraits of the characters in her brawling Italian-American family: Jenny, the grandmother, the devil woman who threw Casey Stengel down an excavation pit; Dolly, the mother, a cross between Long John Silver and the Wife of Bath, who in battling mental illness becomes the scourge of a Lutheran nursing home; and Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist adopted by a Sioux tribe. In a new chapter that reinforces and ties together the book’s exploration of the multiple forms of love, Jean introduces us to Roger, a Wildman and her husband’s best friend with whom she, too, develops an extraordinary intimacy. A selection of fifteen of Feraca’s poems add counterpoint to her engaging prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jean Feraca, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Distinguished Senior Broadcaster, is host and executive producer of Here on Earth: Radio without Borders. She won an Ohio State and Gabriel Award for her Women of Spirit radio series on female leaders in the early Christian Church, and the National Telemedia Council’s Distinguished Media Award for her radio advocacy of people with mental illness, and the 2011 Gabriel Award for Inside Islam, “Muslims, Mosques, and American Identity.” A resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she is author of three collections of poetry: South from Rome: Il Mezzogiorno, Crossing the Great Divide, and Rendered into Paradise. Jean was the recipient of the Nation’s Discovery Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a two-time finalist for the Pushcart Prize and a National Poetry Foundation Prize. I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio, was selected as the 2011 winner of the Kingery/Derleth Book-Length Nonfiction Award, sponsored by the Council for Wisconsin Writers. It was also named an Outstanding Book by the American Association of School Librarians, and one of the year's Best Books for General Audiences by the Public Library Association.
REVIEWS
“Public radio provocateur Jean Feraca has written that rarest of documents, a memoir of love and hate and grief as large and generous as the night sky, in which she is only one of the brilliant characters no fiction writer could ever have made up. Read it rejoicing.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer
“A completely captivating memoir: the Voices of the title come from séances with dead family members, past marriages and beaux, listeners to Feraca’s radio programs, a plurality of selves (including the current crew and some outgrown or castaway), among many others. Beautifully written, and wise, this book manages to be both tragic and funny, a combination hard to wrangle.”—Diane Ackerman, author of An Alchemy of Mind
“If the great poet Federico Garcia Lorca had heard Jean Feraca on the radio, he might have said her voice had duende, a dark mysterious bravura power. Now Jean Feraca infuses her brave magic into a series of remarkable, unpredictableand wickedly funnyessays about life, loss, family, marriage, and the radio. Always intense, always startlingly perceptive . . . Feraca explores the essential attachments of a life with a passionate courage that tears off defenses and leaves the woman as she is: the naked teller of tales desperately true.”—Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1 My Brother/The Other
the mystery at the beginning
2 "Dolly"
the mystery at the end
3 Get Thee to a Winery
the mystery of love
4 Why I Wore Aunt Tootsie's Nightgown
everything most precious
5 Caves
art . . . if it be noble
6 A North American in the Amazon
labor . . . if it be worthy
7 A Big Enough God
thought . . . if it be inspired
8 Roger and Me, Too
9 Selected Poems, 1970–2002
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio
by Jean Feraca
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007 Paper: 978-0-299-28574-6 Cloth: 978-0-299-22390-8 eISBN: 978-0-299-28573-9
Jean Feraca’s road to self-fulfillment has been as quirky and demanding as the characters in her incredible memoir. A veteran of several decades of public radio broadcasting, Feraca is also a writer and a poet. She is a talk show host beloved for her unique mixture of the humanities, poetry, and journalism, and is the creator of the pioneering international cultural affairs radio program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.
In this searing memoir, Feraca traces her own emergence. She pulls back the curtain on her private life, revealing unforgettable portraits of the characters in her brawling Italian-American family: Jenny, the grandmother, the devil woman who threw Casey Stengel down an excavation pit; Dolly, the mother, a cross between Long John Silver and the Wife of Bath, who in battling mental illness becomes the scourge of a Lutheran nursing home; and Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist adopted by a Sioux tribe. In a new chapter that reinforces and ties together the book’s exploration of the multiple forms of love, Jean introduces us to Roger, a Wildman and her husband’s best friend with whom she, too, develops an extraordinary intimacy. A selection of fifteen of Feraca’s poems add counterpoint to her engaging prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jean Feraca, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Distinguished Senior Broadcaster, is host and executive producer of Here on Earth: Radio without Borders. She won an Ohio State and Gabriel Award for her Women of Spirit radio series on female leaders in the early Christian Church, and the National Telemedia Council’s Distinguished Media Award for her radio advocacy of people with mental illness, and the 2011 Gabriel Award for Inside Islam, “Muslims, Mosques, and American Identity.” A resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she is author of three collections of poetry: South from Rome: Il Mezzogiorno, Crossing the Great Divide, and Rendered into Paradise. Jean was the recipient of the Nation’s Discovery Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a two-time finalist for the Pushcart Prize and a National Poetry Foundation Prize. I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio, was selected as the 2011 winner of the Kingery/Derleth Book-Length Nonfiction Award, sponsored by the Council for Wisconsin Writers. It was also named an Outstanding Book by the American Association of School Librarians, and one of the year's Best Books for General Audiences by the Public Library Association.
REVIEWS
“Public radio provocateur Jean Feraca has written that rarest of documents, a memoir of love and hate and grief as large and generous as the night sky, in which she is only one of the brilliant characters no fiction writer could ever have made up. Read it rejoicing.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer
“A completely captivating memoir: the Voices of the title come from séances with dead family members, past marriages and beaux, listeners to Feraca’s radio programs, a plurality of selves (including the current crew and some outgrown or castaway), among many others. Beautifully written, and wise, this book manages to be both tragic and funny, a combination hard to wrangle.”—Diane Ackerman, author of An Alchemy of Mind
“If the great poet Federico Garcia Lorca had heard Jean Feraca on the radio, he might have said her voice had duende, a dark mysterious bravura power. Now Jean Feraca infuses her brave magic into a series of remarkable, unpredictableand wickedly funnyessays about life, loss, family, marriage, and the radio. Always intense, always startlingly perceptive . . . Feraca explores the essential attachments of a life with a passionate courage that tears off defenses and leaves the woman as she is: the naked teller of tales desperately true.”—Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1 My Brother/The Other
the mystery at the beginning
2 "Dolly"
the mystery at the end
3 Get Thee to a Winery
the mystery of love
4 Why I Wore Aunt Tootsie's Nightgown
everything most precious
5 Caves
art . . . if it be noble
6 A North American in the Amazon
labor . . . if it be worthy
7 A Big Enough God
thought . . . if it be inspired
8 Roger and Me, Too
9 Selected Poems, 1970–2002
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE