Finding her Voice

As an author and poet, wife and mother, world traveler and commentator, Jean Feraca has become one of Wisconsin Public Radio’s most beloved hosts. Here, she opens up about how she found her voice—and the strength to use it

By Sarah DeRoo

Photographed by David Watkins

Hair and makeup by Debi Hull of the Ultimate Spa Salon

It is said the truth will set you free. Feminist Gloria Steinem took the adage one step further, saying, “But first it will piss you off.”

When Jean Feraca was delivered a truth—by way of a verdict handed down from a Kentucky judge—she wasn’t just angry, she was devastated. After a contentious battle over custody of her young son, she had lost.

The judge explained his decision to award custody to Feraca’s ex-husband saying that she was “intelligent, ambitious and, therefore, unfit” to be a mother.

At a time when an overwhelming majority of women were still found in the home, Feraca had chosen a different path—earning a bachelor’s degree, a graduate degree and beginning to work toward her Ph.D. before leaving school to write her own book of poetry.

Yes, intelligent and ambitious she was. But about her capabilities as a mother, Feraca would prove the judge wrong, regaining custody after taking her fight all the way to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

“The other thing that the judge said was that I was a ‘woman bound and determined to achieve her goal of self-fulfillment at all costs,’” she says. “And that really got to me.”

In the decades to follow, Feraca would marry, divorce and marry again; raise two talented sons; and bury her mother, father and brother. She would pen two more poetry books; write a deeply personal memoir that has been lauded as one of the best of the decade; and embark on a long career in public radio, where she reaches an international audience daily through her show, “Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders.”

Prevailing through disappointments and struggles with a quiet determination, she would ultimately come to a realization that defines her still.

“Going back to what the judge said, this is a ‘woman bound and determined to achieve her goal of self-fulfillment at all costs,’” she says, reflecting on that moment today. “He was right.”

The truth had been in front of her all along. Accepting it was the journey.

Poetry might be what started it all.

It was 1969. Feraca was young, married and living in Ann Arbor, Mich., where her then-husband was pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Feraca, already with a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from Manhattanville College in New York, was trying to live up to the happy housewife ideal of the era. Only she wasn’t happy. 

“I was trying to be domestic,” Feraca explains. “I took a sewing class and made a dress—but I never made another thing after that. I took a sculpture class and created a lot of alabaster lumps.”

Feraca and homemaking were not a good fit. It wasn’t a revelation that surprised her.

“[My father] used to say, ‘of all my children, you’re the one who is going to carry on the family name,’” she remembers. “Later on in life, my mother would say it’s the only one she could make stick,” she adds with a laugh.

Raised in a deeply Catholic Italian family in the Bronx, Feraca’s father, who had a law degree, made a living running his own construction company.

“My dad was very old-world Italian. He was very patriarchal, very overprotective. But he really believed in me, even though I was a girl,” Feraca says. “Growing up, my father was the one who was out in the world,” she adds. “I think it was because [he] believed in me, I wanted to be in the world [as well].”

Feraca took an initial stab at a career outside the home, teaching second grade at a local parochial school.

“I failed utterly at that,” she admits. “And I worked for [publishing company] Harcourt, Brace and World for awhile and was ridiculously bored.” She pauses. “I felt like a failure. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

Feraca looked to what had made her happy in the past. “I always really wanted to be a writer,” she says. “I always kept journals. I had won awards when I was a kid for compositions and stories that I wrote, but I never had any training.”

Feraca applied to the University of Michigan and was accepted. She enrolled in famed poet Donald Hall’s writing class. It was a place where Feraca finally felt at home. 

She poured herself into her newfound passion: crafting poetry. Nothing was off limits for Feraca’s unfettered poetic inspiration—emotions about her life, her family and, especially, her marriage
became fodder for poems she labored over. The quiet intellectual was finding a way to give voice to all she had been bottling up inside.

“Poetry taught me how to maintain a dialogue with my own heart,” she explains.

So entranced by the craft of putting poems together, Feraca failed to realize the messages that were weaving their way into her writing.

It wasn’t until a disastrous trip to Italy with her husband and 1-year-old son Giancarlo that it all became clear.

While in Italy, Giancarlo became ill. Suffering from a fever, he cried for days on end. An exhausted Feraca had almost reached the end of her emotional rope when a stream of poetry provided a
moment of clarity.

Feraca scrawled pages and pages of poetry, finding new meaning as she wrote. She finally realized the emotional neglect she had been feeling in her marriage, the desperation she felt to find passion in her life and her work.

“In poetry, the truth that you ultimately find—the alchemical
gold that you’re searching for—is sometimes a painful truth,” she says. “But if you are absolutely serious about not settling for anything but, and not stopping short of that, the rewards are
powerful. It moves you forward in your life. It moves you forward in self-understanding.”

Feraca realized she needed to make a change.

As she and her family returned to the United States—where they had moved from Michigan to Kentucky—Feraca made the decision to leave the Ph.D. program she had entered at the University of Kentucky to write a book of poetry inspired by her Italian travels. She also filed for divorce.

The custody battle that followed was something Feraca was unprepared for.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened in my life,” she admits. “The struggle that I went through, and the damage that was visited upon my son as a result, is excruciatingly painful to this day.”

She turned to the person who had believed in her most: Her father.

“Here’s this old-world Italian patriarch who says [about the judge’s statements], ‘Are you not American?’” Feraca says, pounding her fist on the table in front of her. “‘Do you not have the right to improve your life?’ He was outraged.”

Her father helped find an attorney who would prevail two years later. Feraca had custody of Giancarlo again. One condition of her custody arrangement was that she was not allowed to leave the state for three years.

By now Feraca had remarried and was pregnant with her second child. She had also found a job in radio, beginning a stint with WGUC radio in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Living just across the Ohio-Kentucky state line, Feraca commuted over the bridge each day to her job. After giving birth to her second son, Dominick, she returned to work only to find a pink slip waiting in her mailbox.

Her fighting instinct took over once again.

“I called up National Public Radio and got the editor for the Midwest [region] on the phone,” she explains. “I played him a piece I had done on a fundraiser for the Cincinnati Opera that was held at the zoo auditioning animals for the ‘Triumphal March’ in ‘Aida.’ I had auditioned a cockatoo. You could hear the cockatoo in the background screeching his heart out,” she says, laughing so hard she has to pause. “And he loved it. He taught me over the phone how to edit it … and it was broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition the next day.”

Feraca had her foot in the door. She began freelancing for NPR on a regular basis.

Professionally, it was the break she had been waiting for. Personally, she was at a standstill.

“I was poor. I didn’t have a [full-time] job. I was living hand-to-mouth with a man who was a Vietnam vet and couldn’t hold a job. He was becoming abusive. I was under the knuckle of the law and was not allowed to move. And I didn’t really even have enough to eat,” Feraca says. “It was bad.”

Like she had done before in her life, Feraca picked herself up and kept moving.

“This wasn’t supposed to be the way the story came out, and I knew that,” she says. “I had to really take stock and acknowledge that I had gotten lost.”

For $5 a session, Feraca began seeing a counselor at the local Methodist church.
Together they hatched a plan.

“It was a complex situation, so we had to break it into pieces. The first thing [to do] was to get a job. Then the next thing to do was to get out of Kentucky. And the third thing was to deal with the
marriage,” Feraca explains. “And that’s what I did.”

Step by step, Feraca worked on her plan. When the judge finally granted permission for her to leave the state of Kentucky to accept a position at Wisconsin Public Radio, Feraca headed to Madison with her two sons in tow.

Her career in Wisconsin began as humanities coordinator, traveling the state to interview scholars while editing and recording commentaries on the issues of the day. It was a job that took aspects she loved in poetry—the search for individual truths and honest messages—and turned it outward into the community.

“In the beginning I was responsible for one talk show every three weeks,” she says, laughing at the contrast with the production load she carries now. “I loved my job. I still do.”

In 1990, she began hosting her own two-hour morning talk show, “Conversations with Jean Feraca,” a program aimed at discussing current affairs, but with a special twist that was all Feraca.

“I found how to do it my way,” she says. “To come at it always with a humanities angle; never doing just straight news.”

The two-hour show focused on news for the first hour of the program, and lifestyle topics for the second.

“It was kind of free-wheeling,” Feraca says. “I loved doing it because every day necessitated practicing the art of conversation. We didn’t have any scripts. We didn’t have any editorial meetings. A lot of times it was just flying by the seat of your pants. It was like a form of jazz—it was riffing.”

Feraca pursued topics both far and wide, interviewing guests that ranged from Colin Powel to Captain
Kangaroo for the next 11 years, while raising her boys and coping with an infirm mother she had moved into her Wisconsin home from New York.

Though passionate about her job and the stories she could tell through radio, something was missing.

“I really wanted to write,” she says simply. So Feraca took a leave of absence from WPR, and began to do just that.

“I had told everybody that I was going to write a book about my program. And I fully intended to, but when I sat down to do that, it just didn’t come alive,” she says. “I had to ask myself, ‘what do you want to write?’”

Feraca found inspiration in telling the stories of her family—her late older brother and mother in particular. Writing about their lives brought Feraca new perspective on her own.

“It was liberating,” she says of opening up about such personal topics in her book, “I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio.”

She wrote honestly and openly about her brother’s life. A noted anthropologist and expert on Native American affairs, he opened Feraca’s eyes from a young age to the richness of other cultures.

And she wrote passionately about her mother. What had started out as a deeply conflicted relationship between mother and daughter evolved through the years into a powerful bond. As her mother aged, Feraca became her caregiver, supervising her care and visiting her often until she died just one week shy of her 94th birthday.

“I feel that her long life was a great gift to me because it allowed me to see the metamorphosis that we all go through,” she says. “That we’re not who we think we are at any given stage. We evolve.”

Ready to return to radio, Feraca had a renewed sense of purpose. She took a hard look at what she loved about her work, and found inspiration in her audience.

“I had a very vivid sense of the public radio community,” she explains. “I was really amazed that so many different kinds of people listened to the same program. It made me realize the power of public radio to create community across borders.”

The idea for a new show, “Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders,” was born.

Each weekday, starting at 3 p.m., just as traffic on the Beltline begins to thicken before the mad rush home, Feraca is on air at Wisconsin Public Radio’s downtown studio. Hosting an hour-long show that covers a diverse range of topics and hosts a beguiling mix of guests, from notable authors and commentators to international human rights advocates, poets, scientists, humorists and everyone in between.

“What I really love about public radio is the opportunity to have real conversations that have the power to bring about change,” she says. “I’m offering my program as a way of opening up a wider window on the world, and exposing as much as possible the giftedness we find in other parts of the world, and all the ways we could be learning and cooperating to help solve some of the really serious global problems that face us.”

For a woman who quotes philosophers like Plato and poets like Whitman while cracking self-deprecating jokes, she’s found a place of peace and acceptance with who she is and where she is in the world. 

What brought her to this place was both poetry—which helped her see undeniable truths about herself and her life—and one simple,
honest question. 

“Are you capable of happiness?”

It was asked to Feraca by the man who is her husband today.

“He asked me, ‘Can you tolerate tons and tons of unconditional love?’” she says.  “And I had to think about it—because my life had been so difficult. I had been taught to believe that suffering is noble. That it is through adversity you learn.”

Today, Feraca is finding what the Kentucky judge said so long ago is true. It was self-fulfillment she was after. 

“I decided that yes, I could be happy. I would choose happiness,” she says. “That’s when I realized it was a choice.”

She pauses and smiles.

“I checked the box marked, ‘Yes,’” she says with a wave of her hand, quoting a line from her own poem, “Happiness.”

But ever on the quest to better herself, she has a new goal.

“As I get older, I have a more intense appreciation for the gift of life,” she says. “I ask myself, ‘Are you present to this moment? Are you enjoying being here now?’ So much of the time we forget about the moment. I’m trying to remind myself of that—to be present to the moment and appreciate the gift of life.”

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