Inner States

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 Grunwald Gallery at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design. We invited people to the Grunwald to make film strips without cameras—which is to say, we had strips of blank film that they could draw on. While they were making their art, I interviewed three people—Amy Oelsner, Stephanie Littell, and Ileana Haberman—about times in their lives when they resisted the status quo. These weren't big, public shows of resistance, but changes in their own lives. After the conversations and the film-drawing, Carmel and her team of film archivists spliced the film together and we all watched the abstract film everyone had made. In today's episode, I'm sharing the interviews. If you want to see the film, you can watch it here.And I have an announcement: Here at WFIU, we are hard at work on a new project that will keep up the longform conversations with artists and thinkers that you love on Inner States. But will also do more reporting on what's going on in the arts here in Southern Indiana. That means this podcast feed's going to go quiet for a while. But don't unsubscribe! We'll announce the new project here in a few months. And I'm hoping to get at least one more Inner States episode out to you in the meantime.

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 started listening 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. They're essay questions, not multiple choice. They're too individual and complex, and, really, they keep shifting around as time goes by. Luckily, we have ways of delving into them. And if you were thinking, oh, poetry's probably a good way, I don't blame you. It's the end of April, which, along with being the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, is also National Poetry Month. We've all been thinking in poetry for the past 30 days. So, to keep that going, 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. On this episode we talk about how the geographical trajectory of her childhood has shaped her relationship to place and language, her evolving relationship to the United States, and why it can be helpful to let go of the idea of being whole.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Additional music this week from L. Boyd Carithers, whose album Doom Town is coming out soon, and on which album you might hear our poet, janan alexandra, playing the fiddle. We heard, in order, Whistle Rag, Dinnertime for the Cats, and Last Month on the Corner.

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 people coming into your country. It's bureaucracy. Visas, passports, customs, resident status. You can stop a lot more people by changing rules than building a wall, and that's what Trump has done this time. One of the rules he changed—this was on his very first day in office—was about refugees. So, 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.

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 you do, let us know how it went! Send us an email or voice memo to wfiuinnerstates@gmail.com.

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 of what you might whisper to an orange before you peel it.Admittedly, I wasn't thinking about that either when the basis of this episode got started. Last spring, I heard about a performance at the I Fell building in downtown Bloomington. It was called How to Preserve an Orange, and it was this ritual, participatory performance. I'd heard great things and decided to invite the artist, clay scofield, to do it again, this time at Redbud Books in Bloomington. Redbud is a community space as well as a bookstore.How to Preserve an Orange was strange and fun and it made me think about experimentation, being in tune with our senses, and play. clay and I sat down in the studio a couple weeks later to talk about the experience, about what it means to train our attention on something, why limiting possibility is important for people who want to amass power, how play can open up opportunities for transformation, and how, as a result, real, deep play can also be risky. Dangerous. Which is a little bit how I felt during How to Preserve an Orange, when clay asked us to ask our oranges to consent to being eaten.clay is a visiting assistant professor in digital art at the Eskenazi School of Art Architecture and Design in Art. They're on the board of directors of the School of Making Thinking, and they're a co-creator of the Deep Play Artist Residency. clay has MFAs in poetry AND in studio art.This episode includes excerpts from the performance of How to Preserve an Orange. If you want to try it at home, the full recording of the performance is also be available in the Inner States podcast feed. Let us know if you do! Email us at wfiuinnerstates@gmail.com.CreditsAssociate producer Dom Heyob put this episode together. Jillian Blackburn keeps our social media alive and well. Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young support the show behind the scenes. Eric Bolstridge digs us out of whatever holes we get stuck in.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 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. (See Paper Cuts to learn more.)But it's not all doom and gloom. Martinsville, Indiana, population 11 thousand, has a new paper in town. It's a print newspaper. The Morgan County Correspondent. It started in August 2023. And it's doing pretty darn well. Stephen Crane is the founding editor. And publisher. And reporter. I went up to the Correspondent's offices a couple weeks ago to talk with him. He told me what happened to the newspapers in Morgan County, where Martinsville is the county seat. Martinsville had a newspaper, and so did Mooresville, in the north of the county. They still do. In theory at least. Today's headline in The Reporter-Times, which was Martinsville's city paper, is about the Princess Theatre building's new owner. The Princess Theatre is in Bloomington. Looks like most of the other articles are also about Bloomington. Stephen and I also talked about how he got into journalism – he says he had some authority issues when he was younger, and his decision to start a paper two years ago is not unconnected. We talked about the differences between locally-owned papers and corporate-owned, the experience of reading a print paper vs online, and why he doesn't care too much about attracting readers under 40.

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.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar.The residents we spoke with at the Richland Bean-Blossom Health Care Center are, in order of appearance: Stephanie Sappingsfield, Daniel Allen, Rita Eaton, and Tammy Brohome. We'd like to thank them and also Dorothy Hinson, in Activities, who helped us meet people, and was just about the most cheerful person we've ever met. 

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 parent, it's also my job to worry about my kids' screentime. Maybe you don't worry. Maybe you're at one end of the spectrum or the other – like either have at it, kids! Or you set limits with the iron fist of nurturing boundaries. But most of us, I think, can't help but worry about what it does to their attention spans to be streaming TV while playing a video game. My 10-year-old does have limits on screens. For my teenager, the limits eroded over the years. I really don't know how much to worry about it. I want them to get outside, talk to real people, look at the sky, touch trees, experience the wonder and boredom of the analog world. But I'm not trying to be a Luddite. Maybe I've never been that into video games, but I realize they can offer rich, complex narrative experiences. And, you know, fun. I hear people like that, too.There might even be things that video games offer that are just too hard to access in the contemporary world otherwise. I don't know, the adrenaline rush of being chased by a wild boar. Quests to find treasure, even if in reality it was about potable water rather than a chest of gold. Or to prove yourself to a community. I'm trying to acknowledge the value of video games, but clearly I'm still a little skeptical about their importance for humanity. And yes, I do realize I'm saying all this on a podcast. Side note, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “podcast” first appeared in English in 2004. Decades after video games. I just want my kids to spend more time outside.Anyway. In the midst of all this, I heard about someone who's working on video games to support girls. That's great. And she's also working on video games for another group that hasn't traditionally had games made for them.In the video for her company, Parrot Concepts, she hesitates before saying what they're trying to solve is a…problem. But she goes ahead and says it. And defends it. By the end of our conversation, I was ready to agree. There's a real problem, and video games for parrots are going to help.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young 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.I also want to give a shoutout to Lydia Norton and Betsy Leija. Their interview with Patricia on the IU Media School's I'm No Expert podcast is how I found out about her love of parrots and parrot games.

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 and culture. But still, sometimes you want to face things a little more head-on. So I decided to invite my friend Faye Gleisser for an interview. She's a professor in the art history department here at Indiana University. I realize, on the face of it, that that might feel even more removed from the state of contemporary democracy. When I think “art history,” I picture students listening to a lecture about the slant of light in paintings of religious epiphanies. Good stuff, but different from protesting injustice in the streets.Faye Gleisser is not that kind of art historian. (She actually feels complicated about calling herself an art historian at all.) Her book is called Risk Work: Making Art and Guerilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987. It came out in 2023, and it's about how, in the 1960s, artists started using new tactics in response to changes in…policing. It's about policing and art. We talk about the relationships between those two things, and about an article she wrote about artists at risk in Indiana. And I ask her whether art can resist fascism. She get into her art historian chair and gave me some really helpful insights.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer, Dom Heyob, put this episode together. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. 

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 you're young. A couple decades later, it turns out it's not as easy to change it all as we thought.These days, Solomon works in domestic violence prevention. She still talks and thinks about gender a lot – in her professional and personal life. We sat down a couple months ago to talk about how those revolutionary dreams are playing out for us today. CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer, who was instrumental to putting this episode together, is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Thanks to Amy and Justin for the additional music on the episode as well.

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 one.The holidays are a good excuse to treat the people you love. And it is so satisfying to give someone a good, special gift. Doesn't have to be big, just thoughtful. But sometimes it take a lot of thought! Combine that with feeling like money's tighter than you'd like, and that becomes just one of a number of stressful aspects of this season of joy and celebration.This week on Inner States, we're trying to avoid Christmas. Mostly, we're going to fail.We've got five approaches to the season. A surprising fact about William S. Burroughs - you know, the Beat writer famous for the novel Naked Lunch and for his long-time addiction to heroin - is that he wrote a Christmas story. We hear about that, and how he saw the capitalist economy as being very similar to drug addiction. We find out what made both Yané Sanchez Lopez and her mom change their minds about Christmas. Jillian Blackburn brings us a family who got their most important winter holiday traditions from TV. Caroline Tatem tells us about realizing not all grandfather's dressed up and played banjo in parades around Christmastime, and about an Irish Christmas tradition of going to people's houses and putting on plays in their kitchens. Finally, Joan Hawkins, our resident William S. Burroughs scholar, reflects on gifts as a replacement for time and attention, the sense of humor that shaped Burroughs's Christmas story, and what we can learn from all of that. CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.Special thanks this week to Joan Hawkins, Yané Sanchez Lopez, Erin and Michael Grudis, Caroline Tatem, and Jillian Blackburn, for her first Inner States story!Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar, and the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 whole, this is the region that represents the core of the country, a core whose essence must be protected at all costs. Especially from people who seem like outsiders.That's not what the term meant at first. It didn't even refer to the United States. Originally, it was part of a theory that whoever controlled the central Eurasian landmass – that was “the heartland” – would control power globally. It wasn't until the Cold War that it was used to describe the American Midwest. Even then, it was about United States' ability to wield global power. It was even more recently that it started to be about agrarian nostalgia. But whether during the Cold War or since, “the Heartland” has often been about denying the ways the American Midwest has been involved with global forces, shaped by them, built by them, home to Native Americans, Latin Americans, Haitian Americans, and more.This episode springs from a panel I hosted at the conference of the Midwestern History Association in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last May. To understand the global roots of the Midwest, I also talked with historian Kristen Hoganson, about her book, The Heartland: An American History. You'll hear snippets from the Midwestern History Association panel. If you'd like to listen to the whole thing (it's worth it!), it's available on their website.Many thanks to the organizers of the Midwestern History Association, especially Cory Haala, for helping to make this happen, and to the panelists: Cory Haala, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Andrew Klumpp, Emiliano Aguilar, and Camden Burd.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Special thanks to our associate producer, Dom Heyob, for helping to make this episode happen. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young 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.

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.

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 good. Kayte's partner thinks Rita was probably eaten by a coyote. Kayte's boss says cats just have their own plans. But reports are coming in from a neighborhood near where Rita was lost. Has she been sighted? Will Kayte be able to coax her home? What if she doesn't want to come home? How do you deal with a lost cat and a lost election at the same time? It doesn't hurt to work in a place that takes your missing cat seriously.

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 to cat expert Mikel Delgado, there was any chance Rita remembered.

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 while back. It's called The Third Time Rita Left. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. (You might remember.) That's in the background, though. In foreground is my friend Kayte, and her cat Rita. It's got panic-inducing loss, friends coming to help, monarch butterflies, and more. It's four chapters, which we'll release over the next four Wednesdays. This is Chapter 1: Losing Rita.

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 contested – they're not split evenly between the parties. In 2022, Republicans let 14.5 percent of races go unopposed. Democrats? 51 percent. There were so many more Republicans running unchallenged than Dems. In this election cycle, here in Indiana, people have been trying to change that. That means Democrats running in solidly Republican districts. A lot of them rural. It seems like for most of those rural Democrats, getting into office is going to be a heavy lift. And I wanted to know what would motivate people when the odds are so stacked against them. Luckily, just down the hall, there were a couple of reporters who'd been looking into it. Clayton Baumgarth is our rural affairs reporter; he's got a good perspective on rural life in Indiana. And Ethan Sandweiss recently did some reporting on all this. (You can read the article he wrote about it here.)So I brought them into the studio to ask them a question: Why would you try to run for office in rural Indiana as a Democrat in 2024? That's what we try to answer in this episode.

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 already basically 30. She might have meant it as a dig, but I took it as an observation of basic fact. I took life pretty seriously. Good student, all that. I couldn't figure out how to dress in interesting ways, which at the time I was disappointed by but also decided to refuse to care about. Jeans and blank t-shirts for me. I've been 30 ever since. Well, at least until I was 40. I think I caught up around then. Now I'm 45. Still don't know how to be cool. But, as I said, I'm okay with that. Mostly.I've been thinking about it because a couple weeks ago I talked with someone who is definitely cool. I talked to her because I wanted to understand how punk scenes in the suburban Midwest are distinct from coastal cities. There are some pretty cool theories. But the conversation went beyond geography.Raechel Anne Jolie is a writer, scholar, teacher, and a queer femme who found her people at punk house shows as a teen in the early 2000s. Her memoir, Rust Belt Femme, came out in 2020, and was an NPR Favorite Book that year. She's written academic articles and essays and reporting in magazines like Teen Vogue and The Baffler, about class, queerness, pop culture, radical social movements, and more.We talked about how the built environment of the Midwest shaped the experience of punk music and house shows. We also talked about the general appeal, and complications, of coming of age in a punk scene in the early 2000s.CreditsThanks as always to the Inner States brain trust - Jillian Blackburn, Dom Heyob, and Natalie Ingalls - for crucial editorial guidance.Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producers are Dom Heyob and Karl Templeton. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young 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.

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 maybe a 12x12 room, and it's chock full of stuff. The walls are covered with handmade objects, made from bottle lids, cardboard, old silverware. There's a dress made out of soda can tabs, jewelry made of old glass bottles. It's kind of an art museum. And it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Mary accomplishes. The goal is to “divert reusable materials from the waste stream.” Mary has arrangements with companies like Cook and Baxter – both of them make medical equipment – and they send bins and bins of objects they don't need. Small bottles, tiny plyers, rubber stoppers. She takes paper. Cardboard. Sheets. Then she connects with nonprofits, churches, schools, and artists working on community projects who need materials.When someone gets in touch and asks for something, Mary's coworkers join in. Once, they collected tons of milk jugs for an igloo-building project a school was doing.Which brings us to a bigger question. When I heard about that project, I wondered what happened to the milk jugs after the school was finished with them. I didn't get a clear answer. Odds are, they did end up in recycling or a landfill. But here's the thing. It took them longer to get there. That's not nothing. Mary helped me think about materials differently, how we can reuse them, and how that reuse is also a way of caring for people.

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 was a museum, it was the home of Eugene V. and Kate Debs.A hundred years ago, Eugene Debs was the most famous socialist in the U.S. He was the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party's first five attempts, which suggests how well he did on that front. The last time he ran, he was in prison. He got 6 percent of the vote. At the time, it seemed not bad for a convict.Now it's a museum, dedicated to the memory of the most popular American socialists before Bernie Sanders, and, along with Larry Bird, who got his start playing basketball for ISU, one of Terre Haute's most famous sons.The museum is run, as it should be, by one of Debs's biggest fans. Allison Duerk started giving tours of the house in college, and, just as she was graduating and looking for her first job, the Debs Museum opened up a search for a new director. She's been there ever since.This episode is about Eugene Debs and Allison Duerk. They've got some parallels. It's also about what makes a person devote their career to a house, and a man who died almost a century ago.

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 into city council that they wanted to join it. Last spring, I heard Isak Asare on a local podcast, The 812, talking about what public life means to him. He had just become one of Bloomington's three At-Large City Councilmembers. So I reached out. In his day job, Isak works at Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies as the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs and as the Co-Director of the Cybersecurity and Global Policy Program. We talked in May. Isak was only two months into his term as a Bloomington City Councilmember, and he still had that warm glow of optimism most of us have at the beginning of a project. I think he'll keep it, though, and, in any case, that can-do attitude is we want in our representatives. Isak and I talked about what public life means, how budgets are moral documents, and about how protocol – which is boring almost by definition (Shall petitioners receive three minutes or five minutes to speak on a topic? Shall councilmembers be required to request permission to ask a follow-up question?) affects who's able to participate in a meeting. Which is to say, how protocol is intimately intertwined with justice.

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 was in college at the time, studying art, and focusing on photography. He started taking pictures of his family. Through that process, his relationships with them changed, and their relationships with each other changed too. Justin has an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, and he's just started as an Assistant Professor of Photography at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. In this episode, we talk about what Justin's grandmother meant to his family, the slippage between grief and guilt, why the challenges of making art can be a good way of working through all that.CreditsInner States is made by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robbin 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.

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 – it involved working at a Girls Rock program. We also talk about how personal loss can lead to creative growth, what it means to be an adults, and about a band that started in Girls Rock Bloomington and recently released their first EP. They were 12 and 13 years old.CreditsInner States is made by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robbin Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Instrumentals on this episode are from Amy Oelsner's newest album, Mirror, Reflect, which came out in early May. You can hear the songs with the lyrics on your favorite streaming service.

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 thought. The difference this time was I was there to see the memorial that highlighted that irony. It was part of an exhibition in Columbus called, appropriately, Exhibit Columbus. The organizers had asked designers and artists to make public art on the theme of New Middles. They talked about middle cities in particular - the idea being mid-sized AND midwestern. Like Columbus. The exhibit started in August 2021. I went in October of that year. As I walked around with my mic, I watched people encounter the art. A lot of people just gazed at it, like they were looking at sculptures in a museum. But the pieces had platforms, astroturf hills, foggy screens to peer through, bouncy balls, which meant the kids were jumping right in. The day eventually got me thinking about history, memory, how we acknowledge the past that's still with us. But at first, as we all wandered around the art, I just wanted to know who public art was for. Special thanks this week to Gregory Peck, Dusty Eggers, Jei Kim, Dorian Bybee, Richard McCoy, Emily Bord, Karla Guerrero, Enrique and Tasnim in Columbus, and Anna Grimes. Maggie Nye Smith provided invaluable editorial guidance on this episode. MusicOur theme song is byAmy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists atUniversal Production Music and Airport People. 

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 hear about that, how art can help you deal with neuroses, about growing up with her father, the writer Kurt Vonnegut, and more. Then we remember Kurt Vonnegut's friend, the writer Dan Wakefield, with excerpts from a 2016 interview. He talks about Indianapolis in the 1950s, spiritual writing, and his friendship with Kurt.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.Special thanks to producer Yaël Ksander for not one but TWO interviews this week.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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

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 from their residence in the second camp. For decades now, they've been writing smart, complex songs whose characters add complexity to our picture of rural America, especially the South. Stephen's book about the Truckers, Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers, was published in the fall of 2021, and is now on its second printing. On today's episode of Inner States, we talk about the South, Southern Rock, rockets, the masculinity of Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the Truckers.Music ReviewAfter our conversation with Stephen Deusner, Adriane Pontecorvo reviews Private Space, the latest album from Durand Jones and the Indications. The band started almost by accident in Bloomington, Indiana. The second track on Private Space, “Witchoo,” ended up on Barack Obama's best-of list for 2021.MusicOur theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 house. And then, one day, a paralysis came over her. She could feel her breath getting more and more shallow. As she recovered, her attendants celebrated it as something close to a miracle. But she wasn't really better, and doctors started to dismiss her claims – in ways that resonate with a long history of women's health issues being dismissed. Marabai tells her story, along with the process of finally diagnosing the problem, and the ongoing challenges of finding the right care.Marabai wrote about her illness and what unfolded afterward in her book, Holding Hope: One Family's Odyssey Through Lyme Disease and Psychosis. She also has a podcast inspired by the experience: Badass: Tales of Resilience.We close with a poem by Daniel Lassell, from his book Spit.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge. Thanks to LuAnn Johnson of WFIU's Poets Weave for the recording of Daniel Lassell's poem.Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Additional music this week from Ramón Monrás-Sender, Backward Collective, and the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 an encampment was going up on the Indiana University campus in support of Palestinians. Erin and Matt believed in the cause. Enough that they felt like they should go support it. But it's one thing to decide you should do something. It's another to actually get yourself over to the field where it's happening.And they had reason to be concerned. The day before the encampment went up in Dunn Meadow, which has been a free speech zone on campus for over 50 years, the university banned structures there. The police arrested protesters the Thursday the encampment went up, and again on Saturday. Some of those protesters—including students—were banned from campus.This week, we talk with a few of the people who were at the encampment a week after it started, to understand what brought them there in the first place, and why they stayed.CreditsInner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, 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 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, 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 Eoban Binder, Jillian Blackburn, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, 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.

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 of Honey, she was taking care of other people. Honey can see her age – and all that care – in her hands. Honey is enjoying being an adult now, in a role where she can reciprocate the care their mother has given them. Honey hopes their hands look like hers when they're older. You can find Honey's collages and other work at allnewgrowth.com or on Instagram @allnewgrowth. Ice, Wood, and Winter View Make what you will of internet lists, but Brown County State Park recently made number six on a list of the most beautiful state parks. And no, this wasn't the most beautiful state parks in south-central Indiana. It was the whole U.S. If, like me, your next question is, "Okay, but how's it doing on Instagram?" I've got an answer for you there, too: apparently it's number 13 among the most Instagrammed state parks. I'm sure we could get that ranking up, though. Just gotta get Instagramming. It was right after I heard that news that I met up with Jim Eagleman. He was the park naturalist at Brown County for almost 40 years, until he retired a few years ago. We met in early December a while back. Technically it was late fall. It felt like early fall. Foggy and mildly cold. I wanted to talk to him about the winter. Preparing for it. What the woods are like. What life is like. What things used to be like. And what it feels like to fall through the ice. Music 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. Thanks Special thanks this week to producer Violet Baron for production help with Honey Hodges' story.

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 vision, it's not hard to imagine the existential panic Captain Ahab's youngest sailor felt when he went overboard in a whale fight. The rest of the crew went off chasing the whale, and there he was, bobbing up and down with nothing but ocean around. Don't worry, he got rescued, but in the hour he was alone in the ocean, something changed in him. While he had floated there, surrounded on all sides by undulating water ready to engulf him, “The sea had jeeringly kept his body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.” I was less likely to be engulfed by the inhuman expanse of the sea because I was on the shore, surrounded by giant umbrellas, beach balls, and plenty of sunscreened humans. Plus, out at the farthest edge of the coast, I could see the smokestacks of the steel industry. They're strangely grounding, those giant structures at the edge of my vision. The sight kept the infinite of my soul from drowning, but probably because it felt like they were jeering at me. Sometimes if you want to be acknowledged, jeering is what you settle for. The smokestacks reminded me of another way I'm engulfed – we're all engulfed: in a world run by fossil fuels. Which is not great. Not just because they're heating the planet up. Also because fossil fuel production takes land, and labor, and leaves an immense amount of pollution in the communities that surround it. Jeering might be the right word, too, for how those smokestacks relate to the region around them. The Dunes are in the Calumet Region, which also includes cities like Gary, Hammond, and Michigan city – cities dominated, according to scholar and writer Ava Tomasula y Garcia, by smokestacks and “air you can see and taste because it's so dirty.” The region was dominated for over a century by some of the dirtiest industries in the world. Not too long ago, Ava published an article about all this in Belt Magazine. She tells the story of the oil and gas industry in Indiana, and considers how its influence continues to shape the region. It was because of that article that I wanted to talk with her. Ava is a graduate student in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she's focused on medical anthropology. Specifically, she's interested in undiagnosable illness that people living in the Rust Belt and the Calumet Region link to industrial toxicity. These are not “monumental” illness like cancer and asthma but things that are much harder to diagnose, like brain fog and nausea. I hope to have her on again to talk about that research. Today's episode, though, is about how the geology of the region ended up shaping its industrial development, which also shaped its social history – who moved to the region, how race and labor struggles played out, and how regions like the Calumet, often known these days as the “Rust Belt,” are more complex than that term implies. And after that, we go back through the archives of our classified ads, to remember what used to be for sale. Music Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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 realized he had quite a vision for the future of public libraries. According to Carson, public libraries are for bringing people in a community together in a free and open space. They're also places that uphold the community's free and open access to information. The mission means public library services are increasingly about access to digital resources, whether through computers at the library itself, or online services. It also means the library space is about far more than reading. It's not just teens who can do more there. It's a space for public meetings, performances, book clubs, cooking demonstrations, and more. The question of whether libraries will have physical books in the future turns out to be a lot more complex than the rise of Google. But I wanted to talk with Carson not just for his vision of libraries themselves. He also has big ideas about the future of narrative itself. We might not need books – or even movies – for that down the road either. This conversation blew my mind a little. I hope it does the same for you. Credits Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Avi Forrest. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, 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.

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 question's been around. Orli Shaham is a pianist who performs with major orchestras around the world. She teaches at Juilliard, and she's started multiple programs to introduce classical music to more general audiences. She's not worried, because, as she puts it, “As a species we look for meaning. We want to understanding something that is beyond us, or that speaks to our emotions in ways we can't articulate.” What we call “classical” music does that, and she believes people will continue to see it out. This week, WFIU Music Director Aaron Cain talks with Orli Shaham about helping people find their way toward classical music, music students' internalized pressure to get all the notes right, and how cassette tapes made music precious in a way that's maybe been lost in the days of streaming.

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. There are poems. And, in keeping with the spirit of romance that a mixtape provides, we also sent out a reporter to determine whether love is real.

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.” Credits Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from 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.

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 community and collaboration. For example, in 2022, she became the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate. As part of that, she invited people from across the city and Northern Kentucky to write about what they've “discovered” in Cincinnati. Then she assembled their words into a poem, and it was displayed at Blink, the city's biennial festival of light and art. She's working on another series of polyvocal poems for the next festival, this spring. That's just one example of Yalie's work in the community. She came up as a poet through 826 Valencia and Youth Speaks, two writing programs in San Francisco for young folks, and her first full-length collection has just come out. It's called Besaydoo. Besaydoo won the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, and it's been featured on a lot of most anticipated books lists in the past few months, including Lit Hub, and a mention in the New York Times Book Review. If you're curious about the title, don't worry, we talk about that too.

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 journalism. At first, Radiolab brought us fascinating human stories and insights from researchers, mainly about science. How the world works. How our bodies work. Listeners often left with feeling of wonder. At a certain point, Jad shifted his focus to society and politics. He started a spin-off series on the Supreme Court, called More Perfect. Then, in 2019, he did a series called Dolly Parton's America, which asks the question – in a time of incredibly political division, what is one thing we can all get excited about? Dolly is the answer. Along the way he won a MacArthur Genius Award, and the show won two Peabody Awards. He also built a team of some of the best radio makers in the business, and when he handed off the reins in 2022, the show could go on, and continue to evolve. Jad is coming to the Indiana University campus as a Patten Lecturer next week, we had a chance to talk before his visit. Jad has said that by the end of his time at Radiolab, he felt like he was doing interviews, preparing, having done all his research, and they weren't clicking. He wasn't getting to that natural chemistry. So he started interviewing interviewers. Not just journalists. Therapists. Conflict mediators. Salespeople. And he learned some things. That's what we talk about here.

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 been able to see anywhere else. The Ryder was started – and sustained for over 40 years – by Peter LoPilato. Peter passed away on March 7, and so we're devoting the second part of Inner States to an interview Yael Ksander did with him in 2016. But first, we'll hear from Danny Cain. Danny is one of a small handful of people in rural Indiana who continues to make fishing nets by hand. He was featured in a documentary, The Net Makers, a few years ago, and producer Violet Baron visited him to hear about being in the documentary, and making nets by hand.

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 short and the long term – but he also wanted to understand the stories we tell about them. Take the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 in Manhattan. It was a horrible tragedy. 146 garment workers, mostly women and girls, died. It also helped lay the groundwork for revolutionary legal protections for workers. Ryan wanted to understand other fires too. So he created a podcast. (For those of you who are interested, it was also his dissertation!) It's called Fire!: An American Burning. He produced it in collaboration with Belt Magazine, an excellent online publication about the Rust Belt. On this week's Inner States, we're presenting Episode 3 of Fire!: Inferno at Whiting, about the 1955 Whiting Refinery fire. We also talk with Ryan what we can learn from industrial fires about the modern world, our relationship to ecology and the climate, and how we organize society. Listen to this episode, and then go listen to the rest of his show on Spotify or at Belt Magazine.

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 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 debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, in her home state. Credits Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Avi Forrest is our associate producer. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, 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.

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 the day Ellen and I walked together through the park was humid, we were in the shade of the forest, and maybe spring ephemerals don't actually change the temperature, but they make you feel cooler anyway. There's some bad news there too, but I think it's another reminder that there are surprises in the natural world now, and there will be then, too. And that is not all, oh no, that is not all. We have poems from Shana Ritter AND Eric Rensberger, both local poets on the Bloomington scene. And, I interview Todd Gould, the director of WTIU's new documentary: Major Taylor: Champion of the Race, about who Major Taylor was (hint: did you know a track cyclist could be a superstar athlete? He could – in the early 1900s), and what a documentary is about beyond the film itself.