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"Lithium Jesus: A Memoir of Mania"

Aired on Wednesday, April 5th.

On this edition of ST, a rather "wild ride" of a conversation with Charles Monroe-Kane, a producer and host for the long-running Wisconsin Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge (which is heard locally on Public Radio 89.5 on Sunday mornings). Monroe-Kane has a new book out -- an autobiography that candidly reports on how he grew up with auditory hallucinations and bipolar disorder. It's a detailed yet breathless account that takes the reader from rural Ohio, to the Philippines, to Haiti, to Indiana, to San Francisco, to Alaska, to NYC, to Prague, and so forth. Per a critic writing for Kirkus Reviews: "A young man grapples with bipolar 'voices' via religion, hedonism, activism, and Lithium. In his debut, Monroe-Kane, a Peabody Award-winning public radio producer, brings a fresh perspective to familiar memoir territory.... [This is a] compelling account of wrestling with inner turmoil against gritty, dramatic international settings."  When Monroe-Kane was here in Tulsa recently to do a couple of events, he joined us at our studios for a discussion of his memoir.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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