Inner States
Inner States uses conversations with unconventional artists, thinkers, and doers from Southern Indiana and beyond as jumping-off points to explore big ideas about place, politics, work, ecology, and memory, among others. We dig into the art, culture, stories, and sounds of the southern Midwest, from the rolling hills to reddit, from comedians to country dances, getting to know the people, the ideas, and the landscapes that make us who we are. We ask big questions, get caught up in stories, and slow down for sounds.
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Raechel Anne Jolie came up in punk scenes around Cleveland in the 90s and early 2000s, and wrote a memoir about that and more, called Rust Belt Femme. She says when you don't fit in to mainstream society, there's plenty of community to be found on the outskirts of it. -
Mary Hunter runs Materials for the Arts at the Monroe County Waste Reduction District—the recycling center. She’ll find a place for almost anything you bring her. -
Allison Duerk didn’t go to college to become the director of a museum devoted to Eugene Debs, one of the U.S.’s most famous socialists, but she’s pretty happy it worked out that way. -
So many of us are happy not to be involved in local government. Bloomington City Councilmember Isak Asare talks about its satisfactions, and how questions of protocol are also questions of justice. -
When Justin’s grandmother died, her siblings stopped getting together. Then Justin started taking pictures, and things changed. Justin Carney is an artist who uses photography to think through family grief. It seems to be helping. -
In the past 12 years, singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner has released 9 albums. We talk about grief, creativity, and why she started Girls Rock Bloomington, a music program for girls, and trans and nonbinary youth. -
A walk among memorials and public art pieces in the fall of 2021. We talk with creators, participants, and passers-by about the meaning of public art, about Native presence in a state named for Indians, about immigration, Christopher Columbus, Columbus, Indiana, who we choose to remember, and how. -
Nanette Vonnegut on painting and getting older, and the late writer Dan Wakefield on Indianapolis, spiritual writing, and his friend, Kurt Vonnegut. -
Limestone work used to be quite dangerous. Joyce Jeffries remembers workers, including her grandfather, dying or getting injured. It’s gotten safer though. This week, Joyce, and others, on limestone. -
Music critic Stephen Deusner on the book he wrote about the Drive-By Truckers, the South, and more. Plus, a review of a locally-born band that made President Obama’s best-of list.
