Inner States

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 novel in her home state. Then, Austin Davis brings us poems about people living without housing, from WFIU’s Poets Weave. And in Chapter 3 of The Third Time Rita Left, Kayte and Carl get invited to exhume a dead cat, and in the midst of everyone leaving work to look for Rita, we ask what work is really for, anyway.

Psychology professor and comedian EJ Masicampo wasn’t expecting his divorce, but he’s pretty happy with how it turned out. He and his ex are colleagues, and sometimes they end up the only two people at the departmental coffee hour – and it’s still a good time. This week, EJ talks about divorce, and the connections between psychology and comedy. Then we have some rebel girl poems from Rachel Ronquillo Gray. And Chapter 2 of our missing cat story, in which Kayte encounters strangers in parking lots at 5am who are also searching for her cat.

The Funny Times is a newspaper full of comics. It’s about forty years old, and it’s all in print. The newspaper is in print, but until about a year ago, so were all their files. They lived in one well-protected filing cabinet. So when it was time to pass the reins to a new generation, who lived in Bloomington, Indiana, rather than Cleveland, one of the co-founders suggested they print out the cartoons that came in by email and send them by overnight courier to Bloomington.

Luckily, the new editor came up with an innovation: a “digital” filing cabinet.

This week, the Funny Times’ new publishers and editor talk about why the paper continues to thrive as so many newspapers fold, the kind of comfort you can get from political cartoons, and more. 

Then, a story that started in the fall of 2016. My friend and colleague, Kayte Young, host of WFIU’s Earth Eats, was taking her cat Rita to the vet, and Rita escaped. What followed, in the months Kayte and her husband and friends and community spent searching, had more twists and turns than I could have imagined. So many, that, as I put the story together, it turned into a four-chapter saga. This week, The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 1: Losing Rita, in which Kayte decides, in the midst of an emergency, to foster a monarch chrysalis.

Malcolm Mobutu Smith on comic books, collecting, and the exhibit he just put together based on that collection. Then, Bill Carroll uses the quantitative skills he developed as a chemist to analyze the billboard charts of the 1960s and 70s.

Two performances: the trials of Oscar Wilde on stage, and a puppet wedding. And more.

Ross Gay and I talk about his new book, Inciting Joy, about masculinity and grief, teaching and survival, and how joy and sorrow are completely, inevitably, intertwined.