Mixed Media

The Mighty Queens... on Off thePage

by Bill Jaker

Reading a biography, autobiography or personal memoir allows us to add someone else's life to our own.  We can follow them through the pages and share their struggles and pleasures, victories and defeats. Through autobiography we can get to know someone well, even strike up an intimate relationship with a great person, a Helen Keller, Ulysses Grant or Charlie Chaplin. 

Sometimes their cautionary tales will be so good that we learn to avoid similar mistakes. In her new memoir, "The Mighty Queens of Freeville," Amy Dickinson recounts the stresses and analyzes the forces that took her through marriage, divorce and raising a daughter as a single mother -- all experiences common in our society.  

During her marriage she lived in London, and later moved to Washington, DC with daughter Emily.  She also worked her way through several jobs (including, at one point, receptionist and then a commentator at NPR) and went through periods of unemployment. But Amy emerges steady and victorious.  Today she writes a nationally-syndicated advice column.  She's now a regular on NPR's news quiz "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" (heard on WSKG Radio Saturdays at 11 AM) and on "Talk of the Nation" (WSQX 91.5 FM, weekdays from 2 to 4 PM).  But it's clear that she might not have landed with her feet on the ground if that ground hadn't been in the village of Freeville, NY, about fifteen minutes up the road from Ithaca.

Amy's family has lived and farmed in upstate New York since the 1790s.  The family history has lately not been easy.  "In my family," she writes, "the women tend to do the heavy lifting while the men -- well, the men are nice and fine and they love us for a time.  Then at some point, it seems that they tire of their indeterminate role in our lives, so they wage a campaign of passive resistance, and then they leave."  Her father suddenly left the family, and then in another act of abandonment sold off their herd of Holsteins.  But the women pull together.

The women of my family taught me what family is about.  They helped me pick up the pieces when my life fell apart, and we reassembled them together into something new.  They celebrated my slow recovery, witnessed my daughter's growth and development, and championed my choices.  The women in my life showed Emily and me in large and small ways that they would love us, no matter what.  They abide. 
                                                                  --from The Mighty Queens of Freeville

The wisdom and support Amy feels from the women in her family shows through in her daily column "Ask Amy" , which replaced the late and legendary Ann Landers, now appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide through the Chicago Tribune syndicate (in this area in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, the Ithaca Journal and the Elmira Star-Gazette).

Amy Dickinson joined Bill Jaker on OFF THE PAGE to talk about coming home again, drawing on the strength of family and sharing that with the nation. Click here to listen to the program online.

Inside WSKG's Off the Page

Whenever anyone asks about an appearance on OFF THE PAGE one of my first questions is, “Do you [or the author you’re representing] have a phone number starting with 607?”  I’m not necessarily looking for contact information at that point but it’s the quickest way to determine who is a “regional author”.  WSKG Radio’s primary coverage area fairly duplicates the 607 area code, albeit with some spillover into 315, 845, 585 and – not limiting ourselves to New York State – Pennsylvania’s five-seventy.

Occasionally I’ll go beyond the Southern Tier and adjacent lands if a book or author is of special regional interest, but otherwise I’m simply looking for well-written fiction and non-fiction, poetry and history and anything else created by a writer from our region.  Sometimes the most important activity going on in a community is happening in solitude and in one person’s mind.  We’ve discovered an abundance of good writing here in these hills.

One question I regularly receive is, “Do you read the entire book for an OFF THE PAGE interview?”  I certainly do, usually with a speedy re-read just before the broadcast.  There are some people who think you can get the idea of both style and substance by reading only the first and last chapters, but that seems to me like simply eating the crackers without the cheese in the middle.

A book can be itself an object of beauty, but there’s an old saying about not judging a book by its cover and it is literally true.  Some of the best books I’ve seen lately were cheaply printed and bound, perhaps by the author himself.  That should not detract from interest in the writing within. 

An increasing number of authors choose to self-publish, often because they simply don’t want to take the time to hassle with agents and publishers.  Especially at the beginning of a writing career DIY publishing is a sure way to get into print.  But it may be more difficult to get into the bookstores, or even on-line sellers, especially if someone has written an especially personal book or one that deals with their own community.  That should make such a book all the more relevant to the WSKG audience, for it means that on OFF THE PAGE you’re regularly learning about a first edition right from the person who wrote it, and possibly published it. 

These days even well-established publishing houses are turning to print-on-demand and the invention of the e-book has made it possible for anyone to get their words into distribution.  OFF THE PAGE will continue to concentrate on the content and quality of books by authors in our part of the country, how their mind and spirit was conveyed to us, with less concern about the system that made it happen.

- Bill Jaker is the host of WSKG Public Radio's OFF THE PAGE.