Press kit for I Hear Voices
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I Hear Voices
"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 and Cultivating Delight Publishers
Weekly | ForeWord I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death,
and the Radio "As a poet and Wisconsin Public Radio's "Distinguished Senior Broadcaster," Feraca knows the power of the well-chosen word. Feraca (South from Rome ) grew up attuned to language, with her flamboyant, "Old World Italian patriarch" father defiantly reciting poetry to her mother's cold criticism. Feraca's traditionally Catholic upbringing was full of stories of "saints and virgin martyrs," which gave her "an enduring template of courage and heroism," even if they imparted a taste for suffering that left her "vulnerable to abuse." Feraca tells stories of her dearly eccentric brother, her demented mother, her wretched first and second marriages, her attempt to live the monastic life, her passion for her third husband and his taste in wine. Most remarkable, however, is her account of that pivotal moment when she took Donald Hall's creative writing seminar. Ignoring her disastrous marriage as she immersed herself in writing, she was "Rapunzel, spinning straw into gold." Blending the spiritual and the profane, Feraca is beguiling.(Sept.)"—Publishers Weekly Copyright © 1997-2005 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ForeWord review"Another voice in the national dialogue
is Jean Feraca, poet, essayist and host of the National Public
Radio show, Here On Earth. I Hear Voices: A Memoir
of Love, Death and the Radio (University of Wisconsin Press
978-0-299-22390-8) begins with a strike at the concept of "a
calling," or inspired purpose. It addresses failed marriages
and the uncertainty regarding chosen and unchosen life pathways.
Those concerns are eclipsed, however, when Feraca's cultural
affairs show spurs positive change, such as construction of a
medical clinic in the Amazon. Excerpts: I was with him for five days before he died, all by myself toward the end, when my son, Dominick, staggered into the waiting room from a brutal two-week hike with the boy scouts in the Southwest in time to deliver an eagle feather into my brother's hands just hours before he died. It wasn't as if we didn't know he was dying.
The question was, did he know? He had been dying all his life.
He was born dehydrated, and my mother couldn't nurse him. If
it hadn't been for penicillin, he would have died of pneumonia
in the hospital. He went under the knife so many times in his
adult life he was like St. Sebastian, full of arrows. They opened
him up last Christmas and found the tumor too close to his heart
to operate. But this was his third cancer. There was something
about the way he stood up to it that made us think maybe the
old reprobate might just scrape by." –excerpt from
Chapter 1. "My mother was a monster who lived well into her nineties. Toward the end of her life, much to my surprise, I grew to love her. I loved her fiercely, in fact. It was the monster in her that kept her alive, and the monster that made me love her. I had moved far away, but a turn of events brought us together again, let me face her, let me, finally, in a strange way, love her to death. But in childhood, we all hated her–my
brother, my sister, and I. When we moved out of our cozy neighborhood
in the Bronx into a big sprawling house my father built in Scarsdale,
she spent the better part of each day cleaning house in her nightgown,
climbing a kitchen stool to scrub the walls she cursed, and polishing
the oak floors down on her hands and knees until they seemed
to burn. She was angry and spiteful most of the time, and none
of us quite knew why. Once, she threatened to scald me with a
steam iron. Another night she picked up a pitchfork and carried
it out of our two-car garage, intent on sticking it into her
brother-in-law.'"–excerpt from Chapter 2. "It is dark in the Amazon where it
is often overcast and raining, and vision is obscured by mists
and downpours. The river T. S. Eliot called the "brown god"
is muddy along most of its four-thousand-mile epic length, and
when the silt clears in the dark-water tributaries, the river
runs black. Very little light ever penetrates the gloom. In the
forest, the great trees that soar over 150 feet in their race
for the light are intertwined and laced with lianas and epiphytes.
A tree might hoard as many as two thousand epiphytes, clustered
on a single branch. When the sky breaks open, illuminating the
crowns, light is deflected, entering in the face of things. To
reach the forest floor, the sun must zigzag and deviate, making
its way through an immensity of tangled, interwoven layers. In
such a miasma, one can never be sure that what one sees is real.
Animals move through vapors disguised by spots and stripes, matching,
melting, and blending into their shadowy element. The jungle
is a shape-shifter, a place of mimicry, trickery, and camouflage
where the anaconda and the jaguar may be conjured by the ayajuasca,
and where the jaguar and the shaman are said to regularly switch
places."–excerpt from Chapter 6. "He likes clean lines. I like rococo clutter. We have tchotchke wars. Soon after we were married and I moved in and began redecorating, he imposed the Tchotchke Rules. Rule #1 (adapted from William Morris): A thing must be beautiful and/or useful before it's allowed in the house. Rule #2 (also known as the Steady State Tchotchke Rule): For every tchotchke that comes in, one must go out. He wants to keep things simple. That way he can think better, he says. He thinks about science. Mostly, when he is at home, he sits on the porch in his big tan overstuffed armchair and thinks. My son's cubist painting of him, thinking, with his whole head a jumble of nuts and bolts and widgets, hangs right above the chair. I like claw feet, cushions, carved furniture,
candlesticks on the mantel. I want paintings on the walls, baskets
and pottery above the kitchen cabinets, my mother's parrot lamps
perched on both ends of the sofa. I like to shop. He hates to
shop. On those rare occasions when we go in search of something
for the house, his brain goes into overload; he gets sleepy and
has to come home to take a nap."–excerpt from Chapter
6. Jean Feraca,
Wisconsin Public Radio's Distinguished Senior Broadcaster, is
host and executive producer of Here on Earth: Radio without
Borders. Feraca has received several honors including the
Nation's Discovery Award and two Hopwood Awards. Recipient of
an Ohio State and Gabriel Award for her Women of Spirit radio
series on female leaders in the early Christian Church, she also
received the National Telemedia Council's Distinguished Media
Award for her radio advocacy of people with mental illness. She
is author of three collections of poetry: South from Rome:
Il Mezzogiorno, Crossing the Great Divide; and Rendered
into Paradise.
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