Inner States

Today’s episode is about the pleasures and perils of old film and old movies. We heard about a film series here in Bloomington that got started because of old film – like, actual old film reels, from the basement of the Lilly Library on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. Jack Lindner brings us that story. Then, we get advice from IU Cinema Director Alicia Kozma, about how to approach old (...

Freda Love Smith is a quitter. She’s been a lot of things in her life so far—a drummer in a number of acclaimed indie rock bands including the Blake Babies and the Mysteries of Life, an author of two memoirs, and a parent of two children. In January 2021, as the pandemic raged on and violence erupted at the U.S. Capitol, Smith started a series of what she calls quitting experiments—temporarily giv...

My 9-year-old admitted in early December that they already have a list of the most stressful things about the holiday season. Number one? Buying presents. There are things about your kids you can’t take credit for, and others you can. Unfortunately for my kids, I think I can take credit for that one. The holidays are a good excuse to treat the people you love. And it is so satisfying to give someo...

Middle School and Queer Superpowers Leah Johnson’s latest book is Ellie Engle Saves Herself . It came out in May. When she started it, she was supposed to be working on something else. It was just a fun escape. But she showed her agent, and they got a book deal for it within weeks. It wasn’t her first deal. She got that first book deal a month after she finished her creative writing degree. The bo...

Whatever you felt about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, you probably remember where you were when it happened. Graphic novelist Nate Powell had just finished his National Book Award-winning trilogy March , which he wrote with Andrew Aydin and Congressman John Lewis. It’s an autobiographical account of the Civil Rights Movement, and, you know, I feel like the main message we get about the Civi...

There was a time was psychoanalysis was the thing. Americans coming back from World War II, who’d gone through all kinds of violence and trauma, they could come home and talk with an analyst, and there was evidence that those sessions really helped with their struggles. What we would now call PTSD. That lasted until the mid-sixties. At this point most therapy is not psychoanalytic. But psychoanaly...

Indiana doesn’t touch the Mississippi River, but it’s still bound up with it. This week, we talk with Monique Verdin, Liz Brownlee, and others, about those connections.

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 shallow. As she recovered, her attendants celebrated it as som...

WFIU has a new podcast out, developed with NPR's Storylab. Rush to Kill is about what happened at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute from July 2020 to January 2021. Those were the final months of the Trump presidency, when his administration decided not only to resume executions, but to get through as many as possible. The show examines the legal arguments that made that possible, and s...

Susan Neiman is a philosopher. She writes about the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics. Some of that might sound esoteric, but she sees philosophy as a living force for thinking and action, so her books and articles are as much about contemporary politics as philosophy. She came to Indiana University as a Patten Lecturer in early March, and she’d been invited on the basis o...

The arguments over what its opponents call “Critical Race Theory” in classrooms, over banning books about race, over statues of Confederate generals – these are all arguments about historical memory. What parts of our history are we willing to remember, and what happens when we choose to forget other aspects? The work of remembering is ongoing, and for those of us who don’t live in former Confeder...

For the last decade, poets have gotten together every month during the academic year at the Bishop Bar in Bloomington. There’s a stage in the back room. The evening starts with an open mic, and then there’s a slam. Poets try to win over judges picked from the audience. It’s basically American Idol for the Bloomington slam scene. Well, maybe the competition isn’t the most important part. It’s reall...

Welcome to Night Vale has been described at the fiction podcast that launched a million fiction podcasts. It’s set in a desert town – Night Vale – where every conspiracy theory is true. Jeffrey Cranor - one of the show’s creators – says making a comedy show about conspiracy and horror got trickier as time went on. This week on Inner States, Welcome to Night Vale’s Jeffrey Cranor. Mallory Keenoy as...

Hector Loves Water Treatment Hector Ortiz Sanchez grew up in Puerto Rico. He got pulled into the world of water treatment as a young adult, and hasn’t looked back. He spent years running plants in Puerto Rico. But a few years ago, he decided he couldn’t realize his ambitions on the island. He moved to Bloomington. Now he runs the water treatment plants for the City of Bloomington Utilities, and he...

The Prison in 12 Landscapes is a documentary that came out in 2016. It’s a beautiful film. Intimate interviews, lush landscapes, and deep attention to the complexity of people’s lives, from cities to small rural towns. If it wasn’t in the title, it could take a while to realize that its central topic is prisons, and how they shape life far beyond their walls. The prison itself – the sprawling comp...

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,...

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 Ross permission “to be writing stuff that felt fascinating...

Until a few years ago, Todd Burkhardt had spent his whole working life in the military. Twenty-eight years. His last military job was running the ROTC program on the Indiana University campus. When he retired from that and moved to civilian life, and a civilian job, also on campus, it was a challenge. He was used to being in charge of things. Making things happen. Now he was…running a lot of meeti...

It’s a mixtape! Five songs (okay, stories), by five different producers. Three are about being behind the scenes. One’s about your dad retiring. And an investigation into love.

First, a conversation with artist Honey Hodges about collages, immigrating to the U.S., and the opportunity to care for someone who has always taken care of you. Then, naturalist Jim Eagleman reminds us why we should go outside in the winter, and at night.

This 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 and a half - I was chatting with some of them...

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. After that, we have a short throwback to an earlier episode. Then, a man calls Kayte, whose cat has been missing f...

An Indiana author writes a novel set in Indiana, and it wins a National Book Award. WFIU’s Violet Baron talks with Tess Gunty about why it was important to set her novel in her home state. Then, Austin Davis brings us poems about people living without housing, from WFIU’s Poets Weave. And in Chapter 3 of The Third Time Rita Left, Kayte and Carl get invited to exhume a dead cat, and in the midst of...

Psychology professor and comedian EJ Masicampo wasn’t expecting his divorce, but he’s pretty happy with how it turned out. He and his ex are colleagues, and sometimes they end up the only two people at the departmental coffee hour – and it’s still a good time. This week, EJ talks about divorce, and the connections between psychology and comedy. Then we have some rebel girl poems from Rachel Ronqui...

In which Kayte and Carl get invited to exhume a dead cat, and in the midst of everyone leaving work to look for Rita, we ask what work is really for, anyway.