Inner States

05/01/2025

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 Beirut, and their circumstances meant that you grew up in Cyprus and Pakistan and spent your later childhood and adolescence in Baltimore and they taught you English rather than Arabic so your mother’s family’s language lives in your brain but in a kind of ethereal way, not one you can just converse in. How do you relate to your roots in Lebanon? To Arabic? Where’s your home? What’s your mother tongue?

You’ve probably been wondering about that scenario, and of course you want to listen to this episode for the answers. So it saddens me to tell you that, while those questions are at the heart of this episode, we can’t just give you the answers. But I found a poet to help us think through the dynamics of that scenario. A scenario that is, coincidentally, quite similar to her own life, and which she explores in her first book of poems, which came out on April 28th. The poet is janan alexandra, and her book is COME FROM.

Listen to "Borders Part II: Where is Home" now on your favorite podcast platform!

Special thanks to L. Boyd Carithers, whose upcoming album Doom Town lent additional music to this episode and to this reel ("Dinnertime for the Cats")!

04/29/2025

Poet janan alexandra’s book come from came out on April 28. On the latest Inner States, we hear some of her poems, and talk about what it means to be from a place you don’t live and how it can be helpful to let go of the idea of whole.

Listen to "Borders Part II: Where is Home" Wednesday on your favorite podcast platform!

04/17/2025

As you may know (I didn’t), the president has a lot of control over how many refugees enter the United States. Every year, the president decides how many refugees the country will accept. In Obama’s last year in office, about 85 thousand refugees resettled here. In the last year of Trump’s first term, it was about 12 thousand. Biden brought it up to a hundred thousand. And then, as soon as he got back into office, Trump completely suspended the program, meaning zero refugees would be admitted to the United States.

A few years ago, Exodus Refugee, an Indianapolis-based organization that helps refugees resettle, opened an office here in Bloomington. I wanted to understand how Trump’s suspension of refugee resettlement has affected the office here, and the people they help, and to understand that, I thought it would be good to hear the story of how the office got started.

Erin Aquino is the founding director of the Bloomington office. Exodus has been around as an organization since 1981, but Erin got called in to start the Bloomington office at the beginning of 2022. When she took the job, she’s imagined having a few months to get things set up. But she ended up moving a lot faster than anyone expected. Which was good, because she you can’t meet with clients in a hotel room, and the post office was getting tired of all the carseats.

On this episode, Erin Aquino tells us how to set up a refugee resettlement office when the refugees have already started arriving. And what’s happened since January 20th.

Listen to "Borders Part I: Resettling Refugees Before 2025" now on your favorite podcast platform!

Inner States is a weekly podcast and public radio show about art, culture, and how it all feels, in Southern Indiana and beyond.

04/08/2025

Did you know you can listen to the full How to Preserve an Orange experience on our podcast feed? In addition to our main feed conversation with the artist, clay scofield, we have a full recording of the Feb. 25th performance that you can follow along with at home! Let us know if you do! Email us at [email protected].

Listen to "Oranges, Play, and the Pursuit of Play" and "How to Preserve an Orange (Inner States Bonus)" now on your favorite podcast platform!

03/06/2025

Listen to our conversation with The Correspondent's Stephen Crane now on your favorite podcast platform!

Our editor, Stephen Crane, got to spend some time recently with Indiana Public Media's Alex Chambers, who produces a bi-weekly podcast called "Inner States." In this episode, Chambers wanted to learn more about this dream-turned-reality — The Correspondent.
Not many people are starting a newspaper these days, but The Correspondent is bucking the trends and putting the "paper" back into newspaper.
It truly is an honor and privilege to do what we do, serving this community with "news from every corner of Morgan County."
So feel free to take a listen and get a little background on how we came to be.
It's a compelling story, and this community plays a pivotal role.

https://indianapublicmedia.org/innerstates/saving-local-news-through-print.php

03/05/2025

Researchers at Northwestern found that after private equity takes over local papers, voter turnout drops. People are more likely to vote straight ticket for the party they like, instead of voting based on local issues. Political polarization goes up. There’s more corruption in government and business. And people trust the media less overall.

This is a problem. It's a problem for democracy. But on the latest episode of Inner States, we talk to someone trying to bring local print news back to his community: Stephen Crane, founding editor/publisher/reporter for The Morgan County Correspondent in Martinsville.

If you want a more in-depth look at how private equity affects local news and the people who read it, check out Paper Cuts from the WFIU News. The multi-part story provides thorough insights into the steep decline of local newspaper coverage in south-central Indiana with the shift in ownership from family-owned companies to companies controlled by large private equity firms. You can find it at wfiu.org/papercuts

Listen to the latest episodes of Inner States any time on your favorite podcast platform!

03/04/2025

Later this week, I'll be doing live interviews at the Grunwald Gallery of Art's Action + Agency: Storytelling + Filmmaking event with this great group of creators and organizers, a few of whom I've gotten to work with before for Inner States. Scroll to meet this brilliant bunch!

Amy Oelsner is a Bloomington-based indie pop musician and the founder/director of Girls Rock, a music camp for girls, trans and non-binary youth that teaches positive self-esteem and self-expression through music education and mentorship. Recently, she won the Emerging Leader Award for the 2025 Women’s Achievement Awards from the City of Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women for her work at Girls Rock. Amy O was featured on Inner States last August in “Amy Oelsner and Girls Rock Bloomington Start Rocking”. (Photo by Justin Vollmar)

Stephanie Littell is a Developmental Pre-K Teacher at Smith Fine Arts Academy in Martinsville and works closely with the Martinsville Environmental Community Action Project. She’s currently helping to run a study that looks at long-term effects of chronic exposure to PCE, an industrial solvent. (Photo by Stephanie Littell)

Ileana Haberman is a fiber artist who has been creating embroidered self portraits for over 15 years. She interested in how we can give voice to our own stories and physical experiences using bodies, patterns, and the natural world. We talked to Ileana for the episode “Queer Embroidery” back in February 2022. (Photo by Alex Chambers)

Join us Thursday, March 6 from 6 to 8 pm at the Grunwald Gallery of Art for this free event! For more information, visit eskenazi.indiana.edu/exhibitions/grunwald-gallery

02/25/2025

As I mentioned in this week's episode, we have a lot of exciting events coming up. One of those events is Action + Agency: Storytelling + Filmmaking, a multi-faceted event for the Grunwald Gallery of Art's current exhibition, YOU (probably) HAVEN’T SEEN THIS BEFORE. This event will feature live interviews facilitated by me, Alex Chambers, about moments that embody a resistance to the status quo. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in experimental camera-less filmmaking, creating art inspired by the action and agency in the stories from Amy Oelsner, Stephanie Wesseler and Ileana Haberman. At the conclusion of the event, the strips of film will be spliced together and projected in the gallery.

Join us Thursday, March 6 from 6 to 8 pm at the Grunwald Gallery of Art for this free event!

Image courtesy of Linda Tien and the Grunwald Gallery of Art

02/19/2025

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 now, and all that time has given him insight into music and memory, the invisibility of old people in most of our society – and what it’s like to live in the gig economy.

On the latest Inner States, we visit with Nathan Dillon and a few of his fans after his latest visit to the Richland Bean-Blossom Health Care Center.

Listen to "Nathan Dillon: Troubadour for Seniors" now on your favorite podcast platform!

02/18/2025

How to Preserve an Orange is an interactive performance and experiment in object intimacy by poet and intermedia artist clay scofield, incorporating ritual, poetry, and movement. Each person is presented an orange and guided through a series of interactions and visualizations deepening their relationship with the citrus. Weaving poetic interludes throughout the process, participants are guided through moving with the orange, experiencing scent and texture, and accessing their own vast archives of memories connected to oranges. The performance culminates with an invitation to preserve the orange through “consumption.” The audience is invited to eat the orange, as the orange (and everything they have cultivated in this shared experience) will become part of each of us.

Join us February 25 at 7 pm at Redbud Books for clay scofield's How to Preserve an Orange, which will be featured on Inner States this Spring!

Thanks to clay scofield for the images and text used in this post.

02/13/2025

Join us later this month for clay scofield's How to Preserve an Orange, which will be featured on Inner States this Spring!

How to Preserve an Orange is an interactive performance and experiment in object intimacy, incorporating ritual, poetry, and movement.

This free event will take place February 25 at 7 pm at Redbud Books, 408 W. Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47404.

02/11/2025

Patricia Pizer's company, Parrot Concepts, is about more than just video games for birds. It's about finding new uses for technology and reshaping the lives of animals in captivity. This week on Inner States, we talk about how video games can help real-world problems, regardless of what species is playing them.

Listen to "Ready Parrot One" now on your favorite podcast platform!

Pictured: Pizer and her bird, Buster Keaton.