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 talks with Tess Gunty about why it was important to set her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, in her home state.

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

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.

And that is not all, oh no, that is not all. We have poems from Shana Ritter AND Eric Rensberger, both local poets on the Bloomington scene.

And, I interview Todd Gould, the director of WTIU’s new documentary: Major Taylor: Champion of the Race, about who Major Taylor was (hint: did you know a track cyclist could be a superstar athlete? He could – in the early 1900s), and what a documentary is about beyond the film itself.

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 – monsters in our water pipes, that kind of thing. So I interviewed Ben Sisson, who’s written many of the articles on the SCP website, including the one about the secret SCP government facility hidden under Bloomington’s water treatment plant. He talked about growing up in Indiana and how his childhood memories translated into horror stories. And, channeling the voice of your normal host, Alex Chambers, I interviewed an expert. Literature professor Adrian Whitacre told me stories about werewolves and witches, and then explained what magic and shapeshifters can tell us about how we experience our own genders, internally and externally.

This episode of Inner States was produced and edited by Avraham Forrest, with support from Eoban Binder, Jillian Blackburn, Alex Chambers, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Jay Upshaw, 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.

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 cultural integrity and sovereignty over their land. Producer Violet Baron talked with Voloshyna about the choir, about the importance of archives, and about how cultural heritage becomes a point of contention in war. You can keep up with the IU Slavic Choir’s latest events on Instagram at iuslavicchoir.

Then, we go back to a story Avi Forrest produced in the summer. Comedian EJ Masicampo describes his good divorce, how it led him to comedy, and what he really meant when he told his future (ex-)wife that he liked nature. You can learn more about EJ at his website.

Credits

Inner States is produced by me, Alex Chambers, with Jillian Blackburn and Avi Forrest.

Special thanks this week to producers Violet Baron and Avi Forrest.

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

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 being nice and gentle with them either. It’s about surveying the landscape, the needs of the people around you, and getting them together – the churches, the unions, the farmers, the citizens’ organizations, getting them all on the same page (maybe they don’t agree with everything, but they agree on enough) and either getting the right candidate on the ballot, or just forcing the hand of the person in office. It’s called…organizing. And my guest today has some stories about how it happened.

Cory Haala is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point and a historian of Midwestern history, specifically political organizing, activism, politics in the 1980s. He’s working on a book about the Progressive Populists in the Upper Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s. This movement is perhaps best known by way of senators like Tom Harkin, Russ Feingold, and Paul Wellstone, but it came about through the on-the-ground work of countless organizers and activists.

We discuss the difference between fight and out-organizing your political enemies, what it means to be a “progressive populist,” what it took to build political power, a rumpled professor who became a beloved senator, and the time the entire South Dakota legislature flew to Washington, D.C.

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 animal, and do their best to be merciful. (For a poetic reflection on this relationship, I recommend Leah Naomi Green’s poem, “The More Extravagant Feast,” from her collection of the same name.)

Sam Shoaf is solidly in the latter camp. He’s thought hard about what it means to take a life, reflected on the suffering he caused when, as a young hunter, he shot a deer while it was moving and couldn’t find it until the next morning. He has immense respect for the species he gets to know in the woods.

Spending all that time in the woods made him want to take care of native habitats – and not just so he could keep hunting. Studying ecology in college, he realized he loved learning plants, and identifying birds by their songs. Now he works in ecological restoration. He still hunts, too. For Sam, both practices are ways of becoming a participant in the landscape, which is necessary, he says, if you want to take care of a place.

Sam and I took a walk in the woods owned by his next-door neighbor in early June. With his full-time job, and a young family, that’s the best place for him to hunt these days. We talked about calling turkeys, public lands out west, fire ecology, and what hunting is all about for him.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from Ramón Monrás-Sender and Airport People.

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 left. Diana Hong fell back on…stand-up comedy. ‘Cause that’s a safe bet. And Jack Canfield is packing boxes in a warehouse. Quite happily, as it turns out.

What I find interesting in Jack's story is that he came so close to making it in this prestigious, competitive – really, elite – career, and then left, to work in a warehouse. That may seem like a fall, but I don’t see it that way. I’m actually quite interested in people’s relationship to work regardless of the socially-agreed-upon "status" of the job. If you work in a job that our society generally doesn’t see as skilled, or interesting, and you want to tell me about what we're missing about that, please, get in touch.

Diana Hong's story was produced by Avi Forrest. The Inner States team is me, Alex Chambers, with Jillian Blackburn and Avi Forrest. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Special thanks this week to Diana Hong and Jack Canfield.

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

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 up: Paoli. Population 3,666. It’s a whole lot cheaper to live there, which means they don’t have to spend all their time working for other people. They bought an old factory building that used to make tomato products and now they live in it. Kara teaches yoga there. Andy makes bagels that he sells on Saturdays. They host lecture series there. They’ve been instrumental in putting on a festival for the town. They’ve been busy, in other words. This is a story about making community in a small town. It’s also a postcard from Paoli, a photo taken from one angle, with a fairly narrow lens. Which means there are at least twelve other ways of looking at Paoli, Indiana.

After the postcard from Paoli, we have a short (but great) poem. It's actually selections from a poem: Michael Luis Dauro, reading from his poem The Woman With No Name, originally featured on WFIU's Poets Weave.

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

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 Kara Schmidt and Andy Gerber of the Tomato Products Company, as well as their friends and guests, Heather Nichols, Patricia Basile, Darren and Espri Bender-Beauregard, Rosemary Park, and Rosemary’s good friend Lauren. And a special thanks to Gabriel Piser, of the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement, for helping to make this happen.

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 (or not that old) movies that depict outdated attitudes about race, gender, relationships, or otherwise. Hint: You have to talk about it.

The Inner States team is me, Alex Chambers, with Jillian Blackburn, Avi Forrest, and Jay Upshaw. 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.

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 giving up everything she used in a habitual, to-get-by way…first alcohol, then sugar, followed by cannabis, caffeine, and social media. Then she kept quitting, beyond even what she expected: she quit her job and her musical career as a drummer. She also started something, and finished it—a book about her experiments called I Quit Everything: How One Woman’s Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife. This week on Inner States, WFIU’s David Brent Johnson, in conversation with Freda Love Smith.