About Ira

Ira Wood is the host of a weekly interview program called The Lowdown on WOMR-FM, the Pacifica Radio Network affiliate station with studios in Provincetown, Massachusetts. WOMR broadcasts to Cape Cod and the south shore of Boston. Since 2011 the show has covered national and local trends.

The Lowdown features authors, politicians, and scientists, as well as cops, addicts, and fishermen. Ira’s guests have included the famous, the infamous, and the eccentric, along with dedicated men and women who work to make the Cape and the world a better place. In his experience there are no uninteresting guests or subjects, only unprepared and self-indulgent interviewers. His 5-minute essays, which he calls Matters of Opinion air most Fridays at the end of the station’s weekly news magazine.

Ira’s novels reflect his experience. His first novel, The Kitchen Man, details the secret life of a gourmet waiter. His second, Going Public, is set in the early years of the burgeoning dotcom industry while Storm Tide considers the dark side of politics in a small New England town. You’re Married to HER? is a collection of autobiographical essays about sex, drugs, teaching, politics, publishing, and everything he did instead of writing. So You Want to Write is co-authored by Marge Piercy and stems from the workshop they taught for over 20 years at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and similar venues nationwide. It’s an award-winning text about the craft of writing fiction and memoir.

He and Piercy established an internationally distributed ‘boutique’ publishing company, which the Boston Globe called “the pulse of what’s hot in the publishing world.” Although it was sold its current owners continue to publish cutting edge literature by well-known and emerging writers.

Originally from the New York City area, he lived in Cambridge, MA, before settling in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a small fishing village known for its oysters, its art galleries, and the colony of writers, architects, painters, and intellectuals who have embraced life in a rugged outpost near the tip of Cape Cod.

Indulging his passion for public affairs, he served four terms as a selectman—one of a board of five women and men elected the principal administrative officers of the town— although his attempts to govern according to the precepts of the Tao Te Ching were a total failure.

Zazen meditation is an important practice as is organic gardening, in which he indulges with far too much time and passion resulting in way too many beans and zucchini. Disposing of the excess in ‘grants’ to friends, he and Piercy are known locally as The MacArthur Foundation of Vegetables.

Ira is married to the poet/novelist Marge Piercy. They live on four hilly acres of land surrounded by pine and oak forest, midway between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay. They share their space with four cats (again, way too many).