Inner States

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

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 chocolate cake recipe that my dad made for most special occasions. It was beloved within the family, and when other people tasted it, they wanted it to be beloved in their family too. It’s become a standard cake in a lot households connected to mine. But the recipe’s origins have been murky. So I went home and, while my dad baked another edition of the cake, I got the recipe – and pinned Dad down on where it came from.

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 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 [https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/s7527b51t]. 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.

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 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 [https://jananalexandra.com/], 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. Credits Inner 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 [https://amyoelsner.com/] and Justin Vollmar. Additional music this week from L. Boyd Carithers [https://loganboydcarithers.bandcamp.com/], 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.

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 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 [https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-refugee-resettlement]. 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.