I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This is not the book I intended to write. It is a much better book. For that, two people are primarily responsible: Molly Peacock, my friend and collaborator, who guided me through the first two chapters and cleared the way forward, and Raphael Kadushin, my editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, who shaped, chapter by chapter, all that followed . Without his subtle and wise influence, this would have been a collection of essays rather than a story of emergence. I am also grateful to Steve Salemson, my first contact at the Press who encouraged the idea of a book in the first place, to Norbert Blei, my generous friend who held up markers when I got stuck, and to Wisconsin Public Radio for granting the leave of absence that made the work possible. When I first embarked on this project, I imagined writing a book about my experiences as the host of Conversations with Jean Feraca, the talk show I coproduced with Carmen Jackson that was broadcast every weekday morning from 9 to 11 on Wisconsin Public Radio from 1989 to 2002. To the loyal members of my audience who might be disappointed not to find yourselves in these pages, I say, look again. For above all, it is to you I am most grateful, first, for welcoming me when I was newly arrived , a stranger to the culture of the Midwest, and secondly, for teaching me to be myself on the radio, to be real. This would not have been a story of emergence without you. Through you, I learned to think not just for myself but to listen to all sides. Through you, I discovered the collective genius of everyday people, and the power of radio to cross the great divides. You enlarged me. You grew me beyond my own boundaries . You grew my program until it outgrew itself, and then turned into something virtually limitless: Here on Earth: Radio without Borders. xi Many of the people I have written about in these pages appeared first as guests on my program, some several times—my brother, for one, who put me in my place the first time I introduced him as an expert in Lakota Sioux religion by announcing, “You already made a mistake!”; Suzanne Sklar, my dearest friend, the Blake scholar, who entertained and inspired us many times over, recounting her madcap adventures in places as far-flung as Siberia and Vanuatu; Donald Hall, my beloved teacher, who interpreted the poetry of his late wife, Jane Kenyon, my former classmate; Mary David Walgenbach and Joanne Kollasch, the brave Benedictine nuns who have since separated from canonical Roman Catholicism and renamed their center Holy Wisdom Monastery , who introduced their ecumenical vision on the radio. Linnea Smith, “La Doctora,” described the primitive conditions of her Amazonian medical practice on the radio, thereby inspiring Rotarians from Duluth to build her a state-of-the-art clinic. My sibylline friend Willow Harth launched “Hands across the Heartland,” a campaign that sent five hundred tons of food and medicine to Moscow to “end the Cold War with hot soup.” Alan Attie and I actually began our courtship on the radio the night he talked about winemaking, and continued thereafter , when we grinned and blushed our way through a program about the connections between poetry and science. To him, I also owe thanks for being, much to my surprise, as excellent and exacting an editor as he is a geneticist. To my amazing and forbearing sons, Giancarlo Casale, who served as my Middle East correspondent in Turkey, and Dominick Fernow, the artist, I owe my very self, for in giving birth to them, they have as surely given birth to me. xii Acknowledgments • I Hear Voices ...