Inner States

In a city named after the founding colonizer of the Americas, in a state named after the people whose location he misidentified, there was, briefly, a memorial to the tension between those two names: Columbus and Indiana. I’d been to Columbus, Indiana, before and hadn’t given the irony a second thought. The difference this time was I was there to see the memorial that highlighted that irony. It wa...

Nanette Vonnegut grew up in an artistic household. Her father painted, her sister was “born drawing,” as Nanette put it. And her mother believed in all of them, and that creative work, especially writing, could save lives. When Nanette was 14, she did a painting that kind of changed her life. We hear about that, how art can help you deal with neuroses, about growing up with her father, the writer...

This episode originally ran February 4, 2022. The episode is called "Joyce Jeffries and the Cutters." But that’s not quite accurate, because those cutters don’t actually exist. I don’t mean the Cutters cycling team. They definitely exist, even if they were born from a fiction. But the actual cutters - the people who’ve worked in the quarries and stone mills of South-Central Indiana for a century a...

This episode first ran on August 28, 2022. For music critic Stephen Deusner , songwriters fall into one of two camps. There are the ones who have something they want to tell you, and then there are the ones who want to figure something out. For him, the longevity of the Drive-By Truckers comes from their residence in the second camp. For decades now, they’ve been writing smart, complex songs whose...

This episode was originally released on November 17, 2023. Marabai Rose was 38 in 2014. She was married, with two young children, she was healthy, and had a job she liked. Then a mysterious illness came over her. She was overwhelmingly fatigued. Soon, her legs could barely carry her through the house. And then, one day, a paralysis came over her. She could feel her breath getting more and more sha...

Erin and Matt found out about the protest by accident. They were driving home and saw a parking lot full of police officers. There were SWAT vehicles. Erin saw police officers smacking their hands with their batons. She opened her phone to find out what it was all about. What she learned was that an encampment was going up on the Indiana University campus in support of Palestinians.  Erin and Matt...

This episode was originally released on September 15, 2023. A while back, Ross Gay was trying to write a book that was going to make him an expert. It was a book that would, as he put it, “get him on the shows.” It wasn’t very fun. And then he read David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life , where Shields wonders about himself and literature through short, playful entries. Reading that book gave...

If My Hands Could Look Like Hers Artist Honey Hodges was born in Liberia. They came to the U.S. with their mom when they were three years old. Honey says their mom devoted every waking hour to making sure her child had what they needed to be a successful American. And when she wasn’t taking care of Honey, she was taking care of other people. Honey can see her age – and all that care – in her hands...

There’s something about gazing out a body of water that goes to the horizon that reminds you of the vast inhumanness of so much of the planet. I was struck by that last summer at the Indiana Dunes, on the shore of Lake Michigan. When the water rises up to the horizon like that, filling your vision, it’s not hard to imagine the existential panic Captain Ahab’s youngest sailor felt when he went over...

A while back, I went to our local public library to learn about the teen space. It’s this section of the library where teens can check out books, sure, but they can also play video games, do crafts, and hang out. I met with Grier Carson, the director of the library, and while we talked, I realized he had quite a vision for the future of public libraries. According to Carson, public libraries are f...

If you’ve spent time in classical music circles, you’ve heard this discussion. It’s about whether classical music is about the give up the ghost. But people have been asking that question for decades, at the very least, and the market share of classical music has been steady as long as that question’s been around. Orli Shaham is a pianist who performs with major orchestras around the world. She te...

We decided to make you a mixtape this week. Okay, the songs on the tape are actually stories. There are a few stories about people who do their work out of the limelight. Sometimes right behind it. There’s a story about what happens to your relationship with your father once he finally retires. There are poems. And, in keeping with the spirit of romance that a mixtape provides, we also sent out a...

When he was a teenager, Eric Deggans read a lot of movie reviews by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. He tended to have the same taste as Ebert, but it was Siskel’s reviews that showed him what was going on in a movie, and that helped him decide what he thought, even if he disagreed with Siskel’s take. That’s a good critic, and that’s what he aspires to as NPR’s tv critic and media analyst. This week,...

I’ve always thought that to be a writer you had to be able to go inwards. Cultivate solitude. I don’t think Yalie Saweda Kamara would disagree. But as a working poet, which is to say, as someone who both writes her own work and leads workshops and teaches at a university, Yalie also cultivates community and collaboration. For example, in 2022, she became the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet...

Jad Abumrad is the founder of the smash hit public radio show and podcast Radiolab. Radiolab exploded what narrative audio could sound like. Jad and his co-host Robert Krulwich made a show that was smart, and fast-paced, with incredibly detailed sound design. As much musical composition as it is journalism. At first, Radiolab brought us fascinating human stories and insights from researchers, main...

If you’ve spent time in Bloomington, you’ve likely come across the Ryder Magazine, a free magazine, printed on newsprint, with a cultural calendar and articles about local events, culture, and people. You may also have gone to see a movie, through the Ryder Film Series, that you wouldn’t have been able to see anywhere else. The Ryder was started – and sustained for over 40 years – by Peter LoPilat...

A few years ago, Ryan Schnurr developed a bit of an obsession with industrial fires. But it’s not like he just made a spreadsheet where he listed all their stats. He was interested in the fires themselves, sure – how they started, how they affected the places where they happened, in both the short and the long term – but he also wanted to understand the stories we tell about them. Take the Triangl...

Comedian Mohanad Elshieky came to Bloomington for the Limestone Comedy Festival in early June. He talks with producer Avi Forrest about why, after something bad happens, it’s important to wait before talking about it onstage, and how he tries to avoid being pigeon-holed as a comedian. Then, an Indiana author writes a novel set in Indiana, and it wins a National Book Award. WFIU’s Violet Baron talk...

How to Survive the Future is a podcast I made with Allison Quantz where we talk to people in the future about what things were like today, and how they’ve changed. One of the conversations I had was with botanist Ellen Jacquart, around the year 2045, at McCormick’s Creek State Park. Even though the day Ellen and I walked together through the park was humid, we were in the shade of the forest, and...

If you’ve walked around downtown Bloomington at night, you might have run into a creature on bouncy stilts, with an owl-like face, in all black except for his pale white mask. This is the Skeleton Harvester, known on earth as Reilly Donaldson. I did an interview with them. Then I heard about this “SCP” foundation that protects us from all the strange and sometimes dangerous creatures underneath us...

When Iryna Voloshyna, a PhD student in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, started a Slavic choir at IU in 2021, she didn’t realize it would be a local expression of a political situation halfway around the world. But then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and suddenly the choir was in high demand. Since then, they’ve been performing folk songs about Ukrainian...

It’s campaign season. Time to ratchet up your fear that that one presidential candidate is going to bring ruin on your country. From here on out, the rhetoric about fighting the other side is only going to heat up. We’re going to avoid that. Instead, we look back at a different approach that changed Midwestern politics…twice. It’s not about fighting your enemy, although it’s not exactly about bein...

People hunt for a lot of different reasons. One extreme is the men – I’m sure there are women who do this too, but I haven’t come across any – who go after big game so they can show off their trophies, the antlers or hides that prove what they managed to kill. At what I would call the other end are the people who hunt primarily for food, people who take seriously the taking of a life, honor the an...

When you’re young, you dream that if you work for years at that exciting, sexy pursuit, you can become a professional. Maybe you even do that work. Then, one day, you wake up in a cold sweat and realize, you just can’t play golf any more. This week on Inner States, we have stories of not one but two people who came really close to being professionals in very competitive fields, and then hooked lef...

Postcard Kara and Andy thought they’d be able to find community in Chicago, the big city, and they went there partly for its diversity: they wanted to be in a place that was less white. But it was so expensive to live there, it meant they had to work a lot, and it seemed like everyone around them was stressed, so they decided to leave, and go to the small town in southern Indiana where Kara grew u...