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 asks her friends what they remember about a mysterious panic on a high school trip to France.

And Violet Baron's guilty pleasure: a dating podcast for the one - or maybe three? - percent.

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.

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

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’d like to make them among the best in the country. He’s inspiring the people he works with too.

We talk about a number of pretty serious things on this show – legacies of lynchings, the atomic bomb, family policing. I decided it’s time to have some more fun, too. So I started a new segment: Guilty Pleasures. I started with the person who got me thinking about my own relationship to guilty pleasures. Janna Ahrndt is a new media artist, and a connoisseur of guilty pleasures, including the early work of Jean Claude Van Damme.

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.

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

Special thanks this week to Vic Kelson for connecting me with Hector Ortiz Sanchez, to Hector himself and all the folks at the Dillman Wastewater Treatment, and to Janna Ahrndt.

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 complex of buildings surrounded by fences, razor wire, guards – is just part of the prison system. There are also police and courts. County jails. That’s still just what we can see. Like an iceberg, the system of incarceration has a whole lot more going on under the surface. But that’s what keeps it afloat.

Micol Seigel is an activist, scholar, and teacher who’s been studying this carceral system for a long time. Her most recent book, Violence Work, looks at how police and policing are a primary vector of violence enforced and enacted by the state – which is to say, governments. But lately she’s been focused on another part of this carceral iceberg. One that is maybe less obviously part of the same system. That’s the foster care system. That might come as a bit of a surprise. We think of foster parents as maybe the holiest of parents, doing that hard work of taking in kids they’ve never met before, who desperately need a place to go. A home.

But there’s a larger system at play. On this week’s Inner States, Micol describes how the foster system, and the Department of Child Services that helps run it, is also totally intertwined with the broader system of policing in this country. That doesn’t mean Micol is saying all foster parents are bad people. Just that they – and really, all of us – are part of a bigger carceral system that separates people from their communities, their families, and, sometimes, children from their parents. As a foster and adoptive parent herself, Micol has become deeply familiar with this system.

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.

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.

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.”

And if you want to hear more from Eric Deggans, join us in person at the Indiana University Cinema on Wednesday, September 22, where I’ll be talking with Eric about the writers’ strike, the future of television, and more.

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. 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.

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 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.

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

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 meetings.

The job – which he does like, by the way – is as the Director of Campus Partnerships at the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement. He helps faculty, staff, and students connect with IU’s resources to improve the well-being of rural Indiana. In this position, he’d worked Lauren Daugherty, an art therapist at the Eskenazi Museum of Art. One day, she invited Todd and all his colleagues to an open studio event. “Come on over,” she said. “I’ll take you through some art-based activities that help with stress. It’ll be fun!” So they went. She’d laid out a bunch of materials, there were various prompts for drawing and even some group activities.

Todd was surprised at his reaction to the whole thing. He was drawn to it. And it occurred to him that it could help other veterans. So he brought some people together and started Creative Arts for Vets. According to its website, CAV “aims to support veterans, service members, and military-connected populations of all ages and abilities through the arts and arts-based approaches that promote connectedness and improve mental health and wellbeing.”

This week, Todd and I talk about his life in the military, and what happens when veterans get in a room together and do art.

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.

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

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 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

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 for months, to tell her he’s captured a cat in a cage, and he thinks it’s hers. But the last time he called, the cat Kayte saw nearby was only posing as Rita. Will this one be an imposter too? We conclude this episode with the conclusion to The Third Time Rita Left.