Most anyone who listens to Wisconsin Public Radio has, at one time or another, heard the voice of Jean Feraca. As host of
WPR's "Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders," she is advocate and educator, an expert at mixing international issues with culture and aesthetics.
She traces her own life and craft through a collection of personal vignettes, retrospectives that consider the people who have shaped her and her journey to become a writer.
Feraca's life is as mixed as the selections of her program - growing up in an Italian-American New York family, courtship in a monastery, a Jewish wedding in a nightgown, poetic rebirth in Italy with a sick child. She skims over her messy divorces and personal loneliness in favor of the epiphanies that saved her, concerned with the positives and the process.
Her words evince her other career as a poet, filled with "liquid gold" by family stories and her veins running with "quicksilver" anger over her ex-husband.