I Hear Voices

A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio

Jean Feraca

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780299285746, 9780299223908
• eBook ISBN: 9780299285739
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

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.

Table of contents

• 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, “Il piacere e ‘tutta’ mio”
• 9. Selected Poems