Inner States

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. Honey is enjoying being an adult now, in a role where she can reciprocate the care their mother has given them. Honey hopes their hands look like hers when they’re older.

You can find Honey’s collages and other work at allnewgrowth.com or on Instagram @allnewgrowth.

Make what you will of internet lists, but Brown County State Park recently made number six on a list of the most beautiful state parks. And no, this wasn’t the most beautiful state parks in south-central Indiana. It was the whole U.S. If, like me, your next question is, "Okay, but how’s it doing on Instagram?" I’ve got an answer for you there, too: apparently it’s number 13 among the most Instagrammed state parks. I’m sure we could get that ranking up, though. Just gotta get Instagramming.

It was right after I heard that news that I met up with Jim Eagleman. He was the park naturalist at Brown County for almost 40 years, until he retired a few years ago. We met in early December a while back. Technically it was late fall. It felt like early fall. Foggy and mildly cold. I wanted to talk to him about the winter. Preparing for it. What the woods are like. What life is like. What things used to be like. And what it feels like to fall through the ice.

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

Special thanks this week to producer Violet Baron for production help with Honey Hodges’ story.

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 overboard in a whale fight. The rest of the crew went off chasing the whale, and there he was, bobbing up and down with nothing but ocean around. Don’t worry, he got rescued, but in the hour he was alone in the ocean, something changed in him. While he had floated there, surrounded on all sides by undulating water ready to engulf him, “The sea had jeeringly kept his body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”

I was less likely to be engulfed by the inhuman expanse of the sea because I was on the shore, surrounded by giant umbrellas, beach balls, and plenty of sunscreened humans. Plus, out at the farthest edge of the coast, I could see the smokestacks of the steel industry. They’re strangely grounding, those giant structures at the edge of my vision. The sight kept the infinite of my soul from drowning, but probably because it felt like they were jeering at me. Sometimes if you want to be acknowledged, jeering is what you settle for.

The smokestacks reminded me of another way I’m engulfed – we’re all engulfed: in a world run by fossil fuels. Which is not great. Not just because they’re heating the planet up. Also because fossil fuel production takes land, and labor, and leaves an immense amount of pollution in the communities that surround it.

Jeering might be the right word, too, for how those smokestacks relate to the region around them. The Dunes are in the Calumet Region, which also includes cities like Gary, Hammond, and Michigan city – cities dominated, according to scholar and writer Ava Tomasula y Garcia, by smokestacks and “air you can see and taste because it’s so dirty.” The region was dominated for over a century by some of the dirtiest industries in the world.

Not too long ago, Ava published an article about all this in Belt Magazine. She tells the story of the oil and gas industry in Indiana, and considers how its influence continues to shape the region. It was because of that article that I wanted to talk with her. Ava is a graduate student in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she’s focused on medical anthropology. Specifically, she’s interested in undiagnosable illness that people living in the Rust Belt and the Calumet Region link to industrial toxicity. These are not “monumental” illness like cancer and asthma but things that are much harder to diagnose, like brain fog and nausea. I hope to have her on again to talk about that research. Today’s episode, though, is about how the geology of the region ended up shaping its industrial development, which also shaped its social history – who moved to the region, how race and labor struggles played out, and how regions like the Calumet, often known these days as the “Rust Belt,” are more complex than that term implies.

And after that, we go back through the archives of our classified ads, to remember what used to be for sale.

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

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 for bringing people in a community together in a free and open space. They’re also places that uphold the community’s free and open access to information. The mission means public library services are increasingly about access to digital resources, whether through computers at the library itself, or online services. It also means the library space is about far more than reading. It’s not just teens who can do more there. It’s a space for public meetings, performances, book clubs, cooking demonstrations, and more.

The question of whether libraries will have physical books in the future turns out to be a lot more complex than the rise of Google.

But I wanted to talk with Carson not just for his vision of libraries themselves. He also has big ideas about the future of narrative itself. We might not need books – or even movies – for that down the road either.

This conversation blew my mind a little. I hope it does the same for you.

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Avi Forrest. 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.

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 teaches at Juilliard, and she’s started multiple programs to introduce classical music to more general audiences. She’s not worried, because, as she puts it, “As a species we look for meaning. We want to understanding something that is beyond us, or that speaks to our emotions in ways we can’t articulate.” What we call “classical” music does that, and she believes people will continue to see it out.

This week, WFIU Music Director Aaron Cain talks with Orli Shaham about helping people find their way toward classical music, music students’ internalized pressure to get all the notes right, and how cassette tapes made music precious in a way that’s maybe been lost in the days of streaming.

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 reporter to determine whether love is real.

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, Eric Deggans on the life of the critic.

Then comedian Sara Schaefer talks about women in comedy, and why we don’t talk about “men in comedy.”

Credits

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, Jay Upshaw, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. Extra thanks to Avi Forrest for production help on the Eric Deggans interview.

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

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 Laureate. As part of that, she invited people from across the city and Northern Kentucky to write about what they’ve “discovered” in Cincinnati. Then she assembled their words into a poem, and it was displayed at Blink, the city’s biennial festival of light and art. She’s working on another series of polyvocal poems for the next festival, this spring.

That’s just one example of Yalie’s work in the community. She came up as a poet through 826 Valencia and Youth Speaks, two writing programs in San Francisco for young folks, and her first full-length collection has just come out. It’s called Besaydoo. Besaydoo won the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, and it’s been featured on a lot of most anticipated books lists in the past few months, including Lit Hub, and a mention in the New York Times Book Review. If you’re curious about the title, don’t worry, we talk about that too.

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, mainly about science. How the world works. How our bodies work. Listeners often left with feeling of wonder. At a certain point, Jad shifted his focus to society and politics. He started a spin-off series on the Supreme Court, called More Perfect. Then, in 2019, he did a series called Dolly Parton’s America, which asks the question – in a time of incredibly political division, what is one thing we can all get excited about? Dolly is the answer. Along the way he won a MacArthur Genius Award, and the show won two Peabody Awards. He also built a team of some of the best radio makers in the business, and when he handed off the reins in 2022, the show could go on, and continue to evolve.

Jad is coming to the Indiana University campus as a Patten Lecturer next week, we had a chance to talk before his visit. Jad has said that by the end of his time at Radiolab, he felt like he was doing interviews, preparing, having done all his research, and they weren’t clicking. He wasn’t getting to that natural chemistry. So he started interviewing interviewers. Not just journalists. Therapists. Conflict mediators. Salespeople. And he learned some things. That’s what we talk about here.

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 LoPilato. Peter passed away on March 7, and so we’re devoting the second part of Inner States to an interview Yael Ksander did with him in 2016. But first, we’ll hear from Danny Cain. Danny is one of a small handful of people in rural Indiana who continues to make fishing nets by hand. He was featured in a documentary, The Net Makers, a few years ago, and producer Violet Baron visited him to hear about being in the documentary, and making nets by hand.

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 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 in Manhattan. It was a horrible tragedy. 146 garment workers, mostly women and girls, died. It also helped lay the groundwork for revolutionary legal protections for workers. Ryan wanted to understand other fires too. So he created a podcast. (For those of you who are interested, it was also his dissertation!) It’s called Fire!: An American Burning. He produced it in collaboration with Belt Magazine, an excellent online publication about the Rust Belt. On this week’s Inner States, we’re presenting Episode 3 of Fire!: Inferno at Whiting, about the 1955 Whiting Refinery fire. We also talk with Ryan what we can learn from industrial fires about the modern world, our relationship to ecology and the climate, and how we organize society. Listen to this episode, and then go listen to the rest of his show on Spotify or at Belt Magazine.