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 someone a good, special gift. Doesn’t have to be big, just thoughtful. But sometimes it take a lot of thought! Combine that with feeling like money’s tighter than you’d like, and that becomes just one of a number of stressful aspects of this season of joy and celebration.

This week on Inner States, we’re trying to avoid Christmas. Mostly, we’re going to fail.

We’ve got five approaches to the season.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Violet Baron, 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.

Special thanks this week to Joan Hawkins, Yané Sanchez Lopez, Erin and Michael Grudis, Caroline Tatem, and Jillian Blackburn, for her first Inner States story!

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

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 book that resulted, You Should See Me In A Crown, was a Stonewall Honor Book, the inaugural Reese’s Book Club Young Adult Pick, and it got on the list of Time’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Her second book is Rise to the Sun, and it’s also a young adult book. Ellie Engle Saves Herself, and is not a YA book, it’s a middle grade novel. (In case you’re not a librarian who pays attention to these distinctions, middle grade fiction is directed toward 8 to 12-year-olds, whereas the audience for young adult novels is more like 12 to 18.) Ellie is about a kid who’s ends up with special powers just when you least want them – right before starting middle school.

I met Leah at her house in Indianapolis, and we talked her new book, about how, when writing is your JOB, you actually have to get up and do it. Every day. We talked about money, writing commercial fiction in an MFA program, how it really feels to join the list of writers whose books have been banned, and, of course, queer superpowers.

One Comedian in One Car

Indianapolis was the place for this week’s stories. Comedian Katie Bowman’s schedule was packed so tight that we had to sent producer Avraham Forrest to interview her on the drive from the Indianapolis airport to Bloomington. They talked about the preponderance of cis men in stand-up lineups, how she got into comedy (it involved a mediocre date), and how and when (not) to do intimacy in improv.

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 Civil Rights Movement is about the arc of the moral universe. That it’s long, but it bends toward justice. Nate was feeling that too. He was telling his daughter that the first woman was about to be elected president. And then the votes started coming in.

He writes about – and draws – that moment in his newest book, Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest. It’s a collection of graphic essays about living at a time when for many people it feels less obvious that the universe is bending toward justice.

This week on a special fund drive edition of Inner States, Earth Eats host Kayte Young – who is also a graphic memoirist herself – talks with Nate Powell about censorship, military aesthetics in consumer goods, writing about his life almost as it’s happening, and how to talk to your kids about complex moral and political issues.

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

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 psychoanalysis has never just been about the individual patient. Even Freud used his theories to try to understand society. His practices may have fallen out of fashion, but his thinking stayed alive in the academy, and now there’s a new magazine, called Parapraxis, that wants to remind us how psychoanalysis can help us think now.

So I decided to bring in the magazine’s founding editor, Hannah Zeavin, to make the case for psychoanalysis and social analysis. She taught at Indiana University last year, and she came into the studio a few weeks after the magazine’s release. We talked about how growing up in a family of psychoanalysts shaped her relationship to her own feelings, how psychoanalysis can helped us think about social problems, gender panics, whiteness in psychoanalysis, and the space she’s created for thinking together. I should say, Hannah’s been busy. Her first book is called The Distance Cure. It’s about the interwoven histories of communication technology and therapy. She’s got another book in the works, called Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family, and she’s written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and more.

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.

Credits

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

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 specific cases of some of the inmates who were executed.

In conjunction with the show's release, I wanted to go back to a classic Inner States episode.

Jack was a grad student in music at IU when he met a man named Seigen at the local Zen center. Seigen was decades older, but in spite of the age gap, they became good friends. They took lots of walks. “This is a sassafras,” Seigen would say. They would look at that for a while. Once they’d seen one sassafras, it wasn’t as if they’d seen them all. They stopped to look at every tree.

Then, one day, Seigen asked Jack to drive him to an execution. The man being executed was Wesley Purkey, for whom Seigen was a spiritual advisor. Purkey was the second person to be killed in the Trump administration's "rush to kill."

This is mainly about Jack and Seigen's friendship.

It’s also, in part, about a secondhand experience of a federal execution. There’s nothing graphic, but if that’s something you or someone you’re listening with might be sensitive to, you might keep the topic in mind.

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

Our theme song is from Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. I continue to be deeply appreciate of airport people for sharing their music, which I’ve used to score a number of episodes. You can purchase their music here. The music in this episode is a version of “okay ohio part 1.” We also have music from Ramón Monrás-Sender..

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 of her 2019 book Learning from the Germans. That book looks at how the Germans reckoned with the Holocaust as a model for how Americans might address the legacy of slavery. Since then she’s written a new book, Left is Not Woke, where she argues that the left has to return to what she says are its core values: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

We talked about how her childhood and adolescence in the American South shaped her politics and philosophy, how she got into philosophy as a way to think about big questions that matter to people, not just obscure abstract concepts, and why she’s such a passionate defender of the Enlightenment.

These questions about the relationship between identity and politics are coming up a lot right now. For another perspective on all this, I want to recommend an article by Maurice Mitchell, executive director of the Working Families Party. It's called Building Resilient Organizations, and he, too, is grappling with the ways - as he puts it - "Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces." Along with analyzing how we got here, he offers a number of solutions - solutions, I should say, that do not involve ignoring identity.

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 Confederate states, it can be easy to think it’s just down there that people have to think about the Civil War or Jim Crow. Here in Indiana, there were plenty of lynchings. What do we do with that memory? How do we remind ourselves that the past is still with us, that the questions of the past are still unanswered?

This week, two stories about how art can keep those conversations going. First, photographer Kei Ito uses his breath to think about nuclear war. Then, an exhibition in Indiana looks back at two competing anti-lynching exhibits from the 1930s, and remembering lynchings here in Indiana.

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 really creating a space where people feel like they belong.

This week on Inner States, we’ve got a report from the Bloomington Poetry Slam. But first, a visit to The Ground Floor, the teen space at the downtown Monroe County Public Library. The library’s Southwest and Ellettsville branches have teen spaces as well. As you’ll hear, the teens there are accomplished and splendid – and wise.

The Bloomington Poetry Slam’s next event is tonight at 8:30pm at The Bishop Bar. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, there’s another slam November 10. You can find more information here.

For more information about The Ground Floor and other teen services at the Monroe County Public Library, visit their website.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Violet Baron, Jillian Blackburn, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, 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. Music in the teen story by Ramón Monrás-Sender and The Backward Collective.

Special thanks this week to the adults at the Monroe County Public Library. That’s library director Grier Carson, Director of Public Services Josh Wolf, Communications Director Tori Lawhorn, Social Media Specialist Aubrey Dunnuck, and especially Teen Services Manager Sam Ott.