Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC)
February 4, 2007

Getting back on track
Author: DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

Shoo fly, don't bother me. Shoo fly, don't bother me. Shoo fly, don't bother me. For I belong to somebody.

- Children's song lyric

Shoofly, the audio children's magazine of stories and songs, shooed away for seven years. Now it's back and buzzing around its new office in Carrboro. Shoofly is the editorial wife-and-husband team of Arlene Furman and Jack Nestor, who began producing audio recordings for children ages 3 through 7 in the mid-1990s.

The fun times of stories and songs were put on pause while the couple dealt with a devastating personal health crisis.

In March 1999, Furman was nine months pregnant with their third child. She contracted strep pneumonia, became septic, had disseminated intravascular coagulation and ended up in adult respiratory distress. Her blood pressure bottomed out and her organs began to shut down. She fell into a coma. Her daughter and son said their goodbyes. She was not expected to survive. But in May 1999, Furman awoke. She learned that they lost the baby and she was blind. But she awoke.

Shoofly takes flight

In the 1980s, Nestor was living in New Jersey off Exit 9 when he visited a friend in Rhode Island and met Furman. They started a long-distance relationship, married and moved to Jersey to work in New York City. They worked as editors in print publishing until 1989, when they decided the Triangle would be the best place to start a family. Nestor and Furman continued freelance publishing work from their Orange County home while they planned the launch of Shoofly.

The first issue was released in 1994. Shoofly began as an audio magazine, with three cassette tapes sent each year to subscribers. Poets and writers came through an open call. Voices on the tapes were frequently those of UNC or Duke drama students. Musicians were familiar and recommended, both local and national.

For the next five years, Furman and Nestor ran Shoofly from an outbuilding in the back yard of their house in the White Cross area of Orange County. It wasn't a straight shot to success, though. There was one disaster that resulted from the 10,000 Shoofly sampler tapes they sent out. It turned out the company loading the sound used not Shoofly songs and stories, but a recording about blue green algae on countless tapes. Nestor chalked it up to living and learning. Soon after, they also began to produce a catalog of both Shoofly and other audio recordings for children.

The number of subscribers grew from 57 the first year to 1,000 four years later, when they closed down during Furman's illness. Nestor sent out a letter to subscribers explaining why family time outweighed the business. The couple received a lot of letters back from their listeners. Some of them -- blind children who listened to the tapes -- could empathize. When Furman's blood pressure dropped and her organs began to shut down, her optic nerve was damaged. During her long recovery, which included relearning how to walk, Furman regained a small amount of eyesight. She has 5 percent vision in one eye. She described it as viewing the world at dusk, through the flickering snow on an old television set. It's enough to make it possible for her to walk to their Carrboro office on West Main Street from their current home, just two blocks away.

The office space is also used for their other work -- Technica Editorial Services. They are managing editors for seven academic journals and a chemical society book series.

In late 2005, Furman and Nestor decided it was time to relaunch Shoofly after years of grief and depression over the loss of their child and Furman's long recovery.

"Your life is going on too at the same time. You realize you have to do something or it's just going to run you over," Nestor said.

"For me, I wanted Hayley and Harry [their children] to see me figure out how to take something awful and horrible and make it into something workable," Furman said. "I wanted them to see us work through it all."

The couple is candid about Furman's previous health crisis on Shoofly's Web site. She has also recently faced another health problem -- breast cancer. Treatment involved several surgeries and radiation, which she finished a few weeks ago. Furman said that experience felt like a splinter in comparison to her previous ordeal.

Back to work

For the past year, they have transferred all of Shoofly's audio recordings from tape to CD and compiled them into volumes available again by catalog. This year they will put out a new CD of recordings made for the unpublished spring 1999 audio magazine as well as a CD of just music for children. Next year, they'll produce new Shoofly material on CDs. They won't go the subscriber audio magazine route this time. Instead of adhering to a publication schedule, they'll release two or three Shoofly volumes throughout the year so they can have several pieces in progress at a time.

They'll hold more open calls for writers, poets and musicians. And as before, they'll choose the sounds to accompany the voices. Furman has a new take on that element of their work.

"I think I have a different outlook on sound. Just when I'm out and about outside," Furman said, she notices the distinct sounds of cars, horns and voices. They use all kinds of things for sound effects, even son Harry's old toys. Harry, now 13, was their initial sounding board for Shoofly. Now that he's moved on to teenage pursuits, Hayley, 11, wants her turn in the studio, too.

Visit our website at www.shooflyaudio.com