I really believe in local government. It’s nice having a functioning sewage system. Zoning affects all of us. The parks here in Bloomington are hard to beat. And yet, in spite of all that, I cannot get myself to a city council meeting.

So I wanted to talk with someone who can, someone who was so into city council that they wanted to join it. Last spring, I heard Isak Asare on a local podcast, The 812, talking about what public life means to him. He had just become one of Bloomington’s three At-Large City Councilmembers. So I reached out. In his day job, Isak works at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies as the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs and as the Co-Director of the Cybersecurity and Global Policy Program. 

We talked in May. Isak was only two months into his term as a Bloomington City Councilmember, and he still had that warm glow of optimism most of us have at the beginning of a project. I think he’ll keep it, though, and, in any case, that can-do attitude is we want in our representatives. 

Isak and I talked about what public life means, how budgets are moral documents, and about how protocol – which is boring almost by definition (Shall petitioners receive three minutes or five minutes to speak on a topic? Shall councilmembers be required to request permission to ask a follow-up question?) affects who’s able to participate in a meeting. Which is to say, how protocol is intimately intertwined with justice.

When Justin Carney’s grandmother was alive, his family would get together all the time. His mom and aunt and uncles loved being around their mother – and each other. When she died, the grief hit each of the siblings in their own way, and for a long time, they didn’t see much of each other. Justin was in college at the time, studying art, and focusing on photography. He started taking pictures of his family. Through that process, his relationships with them changed, and their relationships with each other changed too. 

Justin has an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, and he’s just started as an Assistant Professor of Photography at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. In this episode, we talk about what Justin’s grandmother meant to his family, the slippage between grief and guilt, why the challenges of making art can be a good way of working through all that.

Credits

Inner States is made by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robbin Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

In 2019, singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner started Girls Rock Bloomington an after-school program and summer camp for girls, and trans and nonbinary youth. On this episode, we’ll hear from some of the youth at Girls Rock Bloomington, and Amy and I talk about how she got started as a musician – hint – it involved working at a Girls Rock program. We also talk about how personal loss can lead to creative growth, what it means to be an adults, and about a band that started in Girls Rock Bloomington and recently released their first EP. They were 12 and 13 years old.

Credits

Inner States is made by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robbin Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Instrumentals on this episode are from Amy Oelsner’s newest album, Mirror, Reflect, which came out in early May. You can hear the songs with the lyrics on your favorite streaming service.

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 was part of an exhibition in Columbus called, appropriately, Exhibit Columbus. The organizers had asked designers and artists to make public art on the theme of New Middles. They talked about middle cities in particular - the idea being mid-sized AND midwestern. Like Columbus. 

The exhibit started in August 2021. I went in October of that year. As I walked around with my mic, I watched people encounter the art. A lot of people just gazed at it, like they were looking at sculptures in a museum. But the pieces had platforms, astroturf hills, foggy screens to peer through, bouncy balls, which meant the kids were jumping right in. The day eventually got me thinking about history, memory, how we acknowledge the past that’s still with us. But at first, as we all wandered around the art, I just wanted to know who public art was for. 

Special thanks this week to Gregory Peck, Dusty Eggers, Jei Kim, Dorian Bybee, Richard McCoy, Emily Bord, Karla Guerrero, Enrique and Tasnim in Columbus, and Anna Grimes. Maggie Nye Smith provided invaluable editorial guidance on this episode. 

Music

Our theme song is byAmy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists atUniversal Production Music and Airport People. 

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 Kurt Vonnegut, and more. Then we remember Kurt Vonnegut’s friend, the writer Dan Wakefield, with excerpts from a 2016 interview. He talks about Indianapolis in the 1950s, spiritual writing, and his friendship with Kurt.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Special thanks to producer Yaël Ksander for not one but TWO interviews this week.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 and a half - I was chatting with some of them on a forum recently, and apparently they don’t call themselves cutters. 

The folks on the forum said they were known as stoneys. And they figured the reason it was changed to “cutters” in the movie was that in 1978, calling them stoneys would have gotten them confused with stoners, and that would have made it hard to focus on the plot.

An industry veteran pointed out there are a lot more specific descriptions of who they are: stone carvers, stone cutters, planermen, gang sawyers, draftsman, estimators, secretaries, supervisors. “All,” he wrote, “with high skills doing their part to build spectacular limestone creations!”

This week we hear about the limestone workers of South-Central Indiana. Joyce Jeffries, who grew up and worked among them her whole life, tells us the stories. We also tour the Bybee Stone Mill with Dorian Bybee and his wife, Jeeyea Kim.

Music

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music and Airport People.

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 characters add complexity to our picture of rural America, especially the South. Stephen’s book about the Truckers, Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers, was published in the fall of 2021, and is now on its second printing. On today’s episode of Inner States, we talk about the South, Southern Rock, rockets, the masculinity of Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the Truckers.

After our conversation with Stephen Deusner, Adriane Pontecorvo reviews Private Space, the latest album from Durand Jones and the Indications. The band started almost by accident in Bloomington, Indiana. The second track on Private Space, “Witchoo,” ended up on Barack Obama’s best-of list for 2021.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 shallow. As she recovered, her attendants celebrated it as something close to a miracle. But she wasn’t really better, and doctors started to dismiss her claims – in ways that resonate with a long history of women’s health issues being dismissed. Marabai tells her story, along with the process of finally diagnosing the problem, and the ongoing challenges of finding the right care.

Marabai wrote about her illness and what unfolded afterward in her book, Holding Hope: One Family’s Odyssey Through Lyme Disease and Psychosis. She also has a podcast inspired by the experience: Badass: Tales of Resilience.

We close with a poem by Daniel Lassell, from his book Spit.

Inner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge. Thanks to LuAnn Johnson of WFIU’s Poets Weave for the recording of Daniel Lassell’s poem.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Additional music this week from Ramón Monrás-Sender, Backward Collective, and the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 believed in the cause. Enough that they felt like they should go support it. But it’s one thing to decide you should do something. It’s another to actually get yourself over to the field where it’s happening.

And they had reason to be concerned. The day before the encampment went up in Dunn Meadow, which has been a free speech zone on campus for over 50 years, the university banned structures there. The police arrested protesters the Thursday the encampment went up, and again on Saturday. Some of those protesters—including students—were banned from campus.

This week, we talk with a few of the people who were at the encampment a week after it started, to understand what brought them there in the first place, and why they stayed.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 Ross permission “to be writing stuff that felt fascinating not only because it was interesting subject matter, but because it was the unfolding understanding of who I might be” (and, by extension, who any of us might be.

This week on Inner States, Ross Gay and I talk about his latest book, The Book of (More) Delights – it drops on Tuesday! – about his relationship to that most basic unit of writing – the sentence – about digression, and how part of being an adult is accepting that people don’t always understand why they do things. Ourselves included.

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Eoban Binder, Jillian Blackburn, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.