I was born at the Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a fitting location for the granddaughter of Swedish immigrants. My paternal grandfather, Eli Berg, left his home in Dalarna as a teenager to work as a lumberjack in the Michigan forests, and his wife, Anna, had also come to the United States from central Sweden. One of my fondest memories of Eli as an old man is the sound of Chopin and Tchaikovsky coming from his woodshop; his record collection was my first exposure to classical music. He was fond of talking about his two cousins back in Sweden who played violin professionally, and also of my childhood poems, which he insisted I read aloud to him. Both of my parents were raised in rural Minnesota, and my mother spoke only Swedish at home until she learned English in her one-room schoolhouse in Chisago County.

We moved from Minneapolis to Shakopee, a suburb, before I started kindergarten, and my first musical experiences were singing in church and school choirs. I took up the clarinet in band in the fifth grade, but switched to the much more exotic bassoon the following year. By age 15 I was studying privately with a bassoonist in the Minnesota Orchestra, and throughout junior and senior high I performed with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies and the Minnesota Allstate Orchestra. I also studied voice at the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis and took weekend courses there in music theory, history and piano.

Playing Swedish
hymns in my great
aunt's parlor.

Money was tight when I graduated from high school, as my father, a machinist, had died of a leukemia-like blood disease when I was 16, so I lived at home my freshman year and attended a nearby community college. Thanks to music performance scholarships, I transferred the second year to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a music performance major to study with the renowned bassoon teacher Richard Lottridge. The university also had a strong Scandinavian Studies program, and the Swedish language and literature courses I took strengthened my connection to my Nordic roots.

Having a lesson
with my voice
teacher, William
Riley, in his New
York studio.

After UW I realized I had to make a decision between bassoon and voice, as it was unrealistic to train professionally in both. I chose voice and moved back to Minneapolis for several years to study voice and perform recitals at the Minneapolis Museum of Art and other venues. I became deeply interested in the writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung at this time, and enrolled in Metropolitan State University to take psychology courses at night while working during the day (sheet music clerk, bank secretary, radio station receptionist, waitress, you name it!). Soon after finishing my B.A., I moved with my new husband, opera singer Stanford Felix, to New York City, where we both pursued our music careers. I had no idea that my choice of a "day job" would lead to a new, second career in writing.

Performing the
title role in
Menotti's THE
MEDIUM at Texas
A&M Opera Studio

My new job as a junior copywriter at Bantam Doubleday Dell put me in the center of the publishing industry, and after I was laid off (with many others in the early 1990s) I continued this work on a freelance basis for Dell and other publishers. This work kept me rooted in the small world of New York publishing, and a freelance job for a packager landed me my first book deal. A book packager (something like an agent) hired me to help Irish tenor John MacNally write his autobiography. On the merits of that first book, the same packager (thank you, Tony Seidl!) got me a contract to write my first political biography, Christie Todd Whitman about the then-governor of New Jersey.

In concert with the
Virtuosi di Praga
chamber orchestra
in Prague (click
here to see
larger picture)

Seidl then got me a deal to write a biography of Harry Connick, Jr., for Taylor Publishing, which was followed by another music biography, Andrea Bocelli: A Celebration, for St. Martin's Press. My friend, photographer and graphic designer Susan Turner, accompanied me to Italy to take photos of Bocelli's picturesque home village and other Tuscan scenes for the book. Two pals on the beat in Tuscany-tough job, but somebody had to do it!

Detail of a portrait
of me by American
artist Mary
Veronica Sweeney
(The portrait will be
part of Sweeney's
show at the DiCarlo
Gallery in New York
City opening in
April 2006 (click
here to see
larger picture)

Worcester, Massachusetts, was the research site for my next book about the alleged stigmatic Audrey Santo. Writing Silent Soul allowed me to delve into the intriguing world of saints and mystics, and my visit to Audrey's home chapel was strange and memorable. The sweet-smelling oil that dripped down the walls, the origin of which could not be explained after multiple scientific tests, also appeared on a statue of Jesus that stood in front of my pew. I watched as a drop appeared out of nowhere, swelled on the bottom of the figure's index finger and eventually dropped to the floor. My goal with this book was to give readers a wide context in which to analyze the events surrounding this semi-comatose, severely disabled girl. By reading various theories about the origins of the oil and of Audrey's purported miracles, readers can make up their own minds about the veracity of Audrey's mother's claims.

Discussing the
percussion part of
one of my
compositions with
Aaron Welsch
during music
rehearsal for a
dance piece
choreopgraphed by
Jody Weber at
Green Street
Studios in
Cambridge,
Massaschusetts

My writing study in New York included weekly workshops with the Riverside Writers' Group and an intensive series of workshops and classes at the Prague Summer Writers Workshop one year. After Stanford and I moved to Texas in 2001, where he took an assistant professorship teaching voice and opera at Texas A&M, I entered a master's program in Language and Literature and received my M.A. in 2004. My master's thesis, which drew on my ongoing interest in Jung, is entitled "Shadow Voices: Negative Aspects of the Great Mother Archetype in Selected Works by Marsha Norman." Exploring Norman's work in terms of archetypal criticism, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Night, Mother," was a stimulating and enriching process. To my delight-and in very Jungian fashion-I had a series of dreams that helped develop my thesis and provided an additional, unplanned dynamic to the project. (click here to download master's thesis pdf)

A Czech concert
program featuring
the portrait by
Mary Veronica
Sweeney

Political subjects have been my primary writing focus in recent years, with biographies of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Newmarket Press 2002 & 2005) First Lady Laura Bush (Adams Media 2002), and NATO commander and Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley K. Clark (Newmarket Press 2004). The Bush and Rice books involved extensive national book tours and media appearances on American and international TV and radio. In 2005, I expanded and updated the Rice biography in light of her new role as Secretary of State, and that year I also returned to writing about music with the biography of musical savant Tony DeBlois (Some Kind of Genius, Rodale Press).

On the musical side, I made my opera debut in New York in the title role of Verdi's Aida at the legendary Amato Opera, a tiny stage down in the Bowery, about two years after we moved to New York. Other opera work included roles with Queens Opera and the Tweeds New Works Festival, but most of my performing has been done on the recital stage. Even though I had an agent when I lived in New York, there are thousands of talented lyric sopranos trying to get a break in New York on any given day, and I learned early on that I had to create my own performing opportunities. My recitals often included romantic Swedish art song, which many New York audiences had never heard before. By incorporating songs by Rangström, Petterson and Sibelius into my programs, I developed my own art song recital niche. My music study in NYC included an opera program at the Mannes College of Music and an opera apprenticeship program with Queens Opera, and one summer I won a scholarship to attend the Institute of Advanced Vocal Studies in Paris.

Some of the highlights of my performing thus far include concerts in Prague and Pilsen in the Czech Republic with the Virtuosi di Praga Chamber Orchestra; a recital in Moscow followed by a master class for the students of the then-named Galina Vishnevskaya Music School; and a recital in Paris in the Les Arts Georges V concert series at the Cathédrale Américaine. I also write vocal music and have been very fortunate to write pieces for voice and a variety of instruments for Boston choreographer Jody Weber, which have been performed at Green Street Studios in Cambridge and in New York.