PODCAST · society
Inner States
by Indiana Public Media
Inner States is a weekly podcast and public radio show about art, culture, and how it all feels, in Southern Indiana and beyond.
Episodes
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Introducing Nice Work
A new show about art and culture in South Central Indiana from the producers of Inner States, Earth Eats, and Journey Indiana
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Dad Took the Cake (Recipe)
Family recipes may be beloved within the family, but they don’t usually rise to the level where people ask for them outside the family. And when they do, sometimes the family is protective of the recipe. They feel it’s so much a part of their identity, they can’t give it away. I grew up with a...
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Action + Agency: 3 Live Interviews
A couple months ago, I got invited to help put on an experiment in collective art-making. I was working with two smart, creative thinkers here on the IU campus. Carmel Curtis is the interim director of the IU Moving Image Archive – she initiated the project. And Linda Tien is the director of the...
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Borders Part II: Where Is Home?
On our last episode, we talked about welcoming refugees in the U.S. And it got me thinking about what it’s like to live away from the place where you’re from, especially if it’s in another part of the world. Say your mother is Lebanese and, I don’t know, your father’s…American but also grew up in...
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Borders Part I: Resettling Refugees Before 2025
I’ve been thinking about borders for a few months now. The last time we had our current president, he talked a lot about building a wall between Mexico and the U.S. There’s been less talk of a wall this time around. Turns out, in the 21st century, a wall isn’t the most effective way to stop…
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How to Preserve an Orange (Inner States Bonus)
This iteration of How to Preserve an Orange, a participatory performance by artist and poet clay scofield, played on February 25, 2025 at Redbud Books in Bloomington, IN. This is the uncut performance itself. It's a bit of a ritual, or meditation, and you can absolutely follow along at home. If…
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Oranges, Play, and the Pursuit of Transformation
There’s been a lot of talk in the past few months about a range of important issues: the rule of law, checks and balances, free speech on campuses, whether people’s jobs will continue to exist. You know what I haven’t heard people talk about much? Oranges. I’ve heard precious little consideration...
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Saving Local News Through Print
Local newspapers are disappearing left and right. Even when they still exist, they’re increasingly owned by private equity firms or subject to corporate consolidation, making them local in name only. This is a problem. It's a problem for democracy. Research has found that after private equity…
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Nathan Dillon: Troubadour for Seniors
Nathan Dillon is the director of Everybody Rocks. It’s a music education company, and these days, it’s focused on bringing live music to old folks. Another way to describe Nathan’s work is that he drives around and sings at senior centers. He’s been running Everybody Rocks for a couple decades…
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Ready Parrot One
The other day I went to check in on my 10-year-old during her screentime. She was playing Goat Simulator on her Switch. She was also watching Gravity Falls on her iPad. Other times she just watches people play video games. I get it. It’s my role, to not understand my kids’ media habits. And, as a...
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Can art resist fascism?
My mission here at WFIU is to cover local arts and culture in Southern Indiana. The thing is, when you’re worried about the health of democracy in your country, local arts coverage can feel like too little too late. I believe you can’t have a healthy democracy without lively and thoughtful arts…
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The Challenge of Challenging Gender Norms
Stephanie Solomon and I became friends in our early twenties. We talked about everything. Gender was one of those things. The assumptions people carried with them about how men and women should be in the world, or how relationships should work. We saw the problems so clearly. As you do when…
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The Inner States (complicated feelings about) Christmas Special!
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...
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Whose Heartland?
When you hear the term “American Heartland,” you probably think of fields of wheat, barns, quilts, and farmers—probably of northern European descent. There might be a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps even the sense that, as the non-multicultural counterpoint to the more diverse United States as a…
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The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 4: Rita's Village
As the final chapter of our missing cat saga opens, it’s getting to be winter, and Kayte still hasn’t found Rita. The odds of Rita surviving are getting slim.
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The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 3: Missing Rita
If political news is too much right now, we’ve got a solution. It’s a story we aired a while back: The Third Time Rita Left. You can find the first two chapters here and here. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. In Chapter 3: Missing Rita, things are not looking...
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The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 2: Finding Rita
If political news is too much right now, we’ve got a solution. It’s a story we aired a while back: The Third Time Rita Left. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. In Chapter 2: Finding Rita, we hear how Kayte and Rita first met, then met again, and whether, according...
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The Third Time Rita Left: A Lost Cat in Election Season
I’m writing this on election. By the time you’re reading this, you might know who the next president will be. You might be disappointed. You might be relieved. Either way, now might be a good time to turn your mind to more local, and personal, questions. So we’re bringing you a story we aired a...
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The Elusive Rural Indiana Democrat
Election day is around the corner. We’re going to be choosing candidates for offices from the president to the county coroner. And a lot of those offices are going to be sitting uncontested on the ballots. Only one person running. So many of those. And, interestingly, the races that aren’t being...
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Fitting In Is Easy. Midwest Punk Is Harder.
I don’t know how to be cool. Which is fine. I’m cool with it, at this point. I feel like coolness is largely the arena of youth. In my case, I wasn’t cool then, either. Once, when I was 15, I was hanging out with some friends, and I don’t know what prompted it, but one of them told me I was…
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Your Trash is Mary’s Treasure
Mary Hunter runs the Materials for the Arts program at the Monroe County Waste Reduction District here in Bloomington. We know it as the recycling center. To find her, you walk past the Trading Post, where you can trade household goods, and open the door to the Materials for the Arts office. It’s...
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A Long-Dead Unionist’s Biggest Fan
If you’re wondering which house in Terre Haute, Indiana has the most followers on Twitter, I think it’s safe to say it’s the one on N. 8th Street, surrounded by Indiana State University parking lots, just south of the marching band’s practice fields. It’s the Eugene V. Debs museum. Long before it...
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What’s Fun About City Government? Ft. Isak Asare
I really believe in local government. It’s nice having a functioning sewage system. Zoning affects all of us. The parks here in Bloomington are hard to beat. And yet, in spite of all that, I cannot get myself to a city council meeting. So I wanted to talk with someone who can, someone who was so...
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Justin Carney’s Photography Reworks Family Grief
When Justin Carney’s grandmother was alive, his family would get together all the time. His mom and aunt and uncles loved being around their mother – and each other. When she died, the grief hit each of the siblings in their own way, and for a long time, they didn’t see much of each other. Justin...
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Amy Oelsner and Girls Rock Bloomington Start Rocking
In 2019, singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner started Girls Rock Bloomington an after-school program and summer camp for girls, and trans and nonbinary youth. On this episode, we’ll hear from some of the youth at Girls Rock Bloomington, and Amy and I talk about how she got started as a musician – hint –...
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Who and How to Remember: On Public Art and Memory
In a city named after the founding colonizer of the Americas, in a state named after the people whose location he misidentified, there was, briefly, a memorial to the tension between those two names: Columbus and Indiana. I’d been to Columbus, Indiana, before and hadn’t given the irony a second...
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Nanette Vonnegut: Self-Portrait at 14
Nanette Vonnegut grew up in an artistic household. Her father painted, her sister was “born drawing,” as Nanette put it. And her mother believed in all of them, and that creative work, especially writing, could save lives. When Nanette was 14, she did a painting that kind of changed her life. We...
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Joyce Jeffries and the Cutters
This episode originally ran February 4, 2022. The 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...
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Southern Rock, Midwestern Soul
This episode first ran on August 28, 2022. For music critic Stephen Deusner, songwriters fall into one of two camps. There are the ones who have something they want to tell you, and then there are the ones who want to figure something out. For him, the longevity of the Drive-By Truckers comes…
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Doubting Her Paralysis
This episode was originally released on November 17, 2023. 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...
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Voices from the Encampment
Erin and Matt found out about the protest by accident. They were driving home and saw a parking lot full of police officers. There were SWAT vehicles. Erin saw police officers smacking their hands with their batons. She opened her phone to find out what it was all about. What she learned was that...
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Ross Gay on How We Can Change, Sentence By Sentence
This episode was originally released on September 15, 2023. 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…
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If My Hands Could Look Like Hers
If My Hands Could Look Like Hers 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…
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Indiana's Oil and Gas Boom Still Echoes Today
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…
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Does The Future of Libraries – or Narrative Itself – Include Books?
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…
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Orli Shaham On Where Music Is and Where It’s Going
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...
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Mixtape: Stories about Music, Love, and More
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....
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NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans and Comedian Sara Schaefer Say What Needs to Be Said
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…
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How the Midwest Helped Yalie Saweda Kamara Write Her First Full-Length Poetry Collection
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...
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Jad Abumrad on Talking with Humans
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...
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A Net Maker, and Remembering the Founder of the Ryder Magazine and Film Series
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…
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Inner States presents Inferno at Whiting
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…
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Why Set Your Novel in Indiana, and How Comedy Isn't Therapy
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...
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A Nature Walk in the Future, a Cyclist in the Past
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. Even though…
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Your Neighborhood Shapeshifter
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...
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Singing for Ukraine
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…
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Don't Fight Your Political Enemies. Out-Organize Them.
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...
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Becoming a Participant in the Landscape
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…
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Don't Go Pro
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...
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Postcard from Paoli
Postcard 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...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Inner States have?
Inner States currently has 162 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Inner States about?
Inner States is a weekly podcast and public radio show about art, culture, and how it all feels, in Southern Indiana and beyond.
How often does Inner States release new episodes?
Inner States publishes regularly with 162 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Inner States?
You can listen to Inner States on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Inner States?
Inner States is created and hosted by Indiana Public Media.
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