Podcast
Inside the Blanket Fort
Hosted by Amy Etcheson, Mandi Jourdan · EN
Inside the Blanket Fort features special segments. You can meet the producers, get previews and reviews of episodes, and get a special glimpse behind the blankets. SIU Press and WSIU present Blanket Fort Radio Theater, a project highlighting works published by SIU Press. This series includes work from students in the SIUC Creative Writing Program, who have taken SIU Press books and brought them to life. Join us each Thursday for a new installment of Blanket Fort Radio Theater.
34episodes
Episodes
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Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 260
2w ago00:05:59Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we spotlight a list of SIU Press titles as part of our America 250 celebration.Sass Brown’s darkly funny debut collection of poems, USA-1000, explores both the isolation and the absurdity of twenty-something apartment living. The world Brown creates in these poems overflows with infomercials, classic Hollywood films, billboard messages, strip clubs, and fortune-tellers, illuminating our complex relationship with consumerism.The Star-Spangled Banner, Denise Duhamel's sixth book of poems, is about falling in love, American-style, with someone who is not American. In the title poem, a small American girl mishears the first line of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as "José, can you see?", which leads her to imagine a foreign lover of an American woman dressed in a star-spangled gown.These titles and more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 259
2w ago00:05:36Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore a just released paperback edition of Lincoln and the American Founding by Lucas E. Morel, part of the SIU Press Concise Lincoln Library.The Concise Lincoln Library series features roughly thirty titles. Through short, focused books, each concentrating on a different area of Lincoln’s life and career, the Concise Lincoln Library brings fresh perspectives to well-known topics, investigates previously overlooked subjects, and explores in greater depth topics that have not previously received book-length treatment. In Lincoln and the American Founding, a persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 258
4w ago00:06:00Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue to explore some of the titles that SIU Press is shining a spotlight on for Pride Month.Fraught with obsession, addiction, and unrequited love, Catherine Pond’s Fieldglass immerses us in the speaker’s transition from childhood to adulthood. A queer coming-of-age, this collection is a candid exploration of sexual identity, family dynamics, and friendships that elude easy categorization, offering insight on the ambiguous nature of identity. Reflective, graceful, and understated, Pond’s images accumulate power through restraint and suggestion.Lady Murasaki wrote in The Tale of Genji that thirty-seven is “a dangerous year” for women. Evoking the styles of Murasaki and other women writers of the Heian-period Japanese court, Lee Ann Roripaugh presents a collection of confessional poems charting the course of that perilous year. Roripaugh, in both an homage to and a dialogue with women writers of the past, explores the trials of women facing the treacherous waters of time while losing none of the grace and decadence of femininity.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 257
Jun 1900:05:59Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as SIU Press explores some of its titles for Pride Month.Q Policing: LGBTQ+ Experiences, Perspectives, and Passions, edited by Roddrick Colvin, Angela Dwyer, and Sulaimon Giwa for the Perspectives on Crime and Justice series, features eighteen contributors from around the world who explore the nature of the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and the police. The multiple award-winning Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy analyzes the life stories of sixty Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people along with archival documents, literature, and film. Author Eric Darnell Pritchard provides a theoretical framework for studying the literacy work of Black LGBTQ people, who do not fit into the traditional categories imposed on their language practices and identities. In the first publication of six plays by the flamboyantly uninhibited author, poet, and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, theater historian Robert A. Schanke rescues these lost theatrical writings from the dusty margins of obscurity. Often autobiographical, always rife with gender struggle, and still decidedly stageworthy, Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta constitutes a significant find for the canon of gay and lesbian drama.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 256
Jun 1100:05:34Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we look at a new book that was just released by SIU Press, The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign: February 6–16, 1862 edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear.In early 1862, the Civil War had been raging for almost ten months, and the Confederacy had enjoyed virtually uninterrupted success. From seizing federal property to early battlefield victories, Southern forces had effectively expelled Union authority from nearly all of the Confederacy’s eleven states. The Union suffered repeated setbacks, while modest victories in western Virginia and Kentucky had little strategic impact. By the end of February, however, much had changed.On February 6, Union gunboats under the joint command of Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, opening a crucial waterway into the Confederacy. Just days later, Grant moved against Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. After several days of fighting, the fort surrendered on the 16th, along with more than 13,000 Confederate troops—the largest surrender in US history to that point. These twin victories shattered Confederate control of Kentucky and western Tennessee, allowing Federal soldiers and sailors to use the rivers to threaten the Confederacy’s interior. This first major strategic breakthrough of the war signaled a dramatic shift in momentum and elevated Grant’s national profile.The essay collection examines how ecological forces influenced the campaign, the effectiveness of the joint command between the Union army and navy, and Union brigadier general Charles F. Smith’s assault that doomed Fort Donelson. They also explore the battle’s impact on the military career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the effects of surprise during the Confederate breakout attempt from Fort Donelson, Confederate colonel Gabriel Wharton’s memoir, and how the loss of the forts showed Texans that the fight to preserve the enslaved South would cost them more than they had imagined.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 255
May 2800:05:55Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue “Crimaynology,” SIU Press’s monthlong promotion of our criminology titles.These titles foreground the stories of victims of crimes, members of the justice system who have fought for them, and the workings of the justice system itself. In Chicago Heights: Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana, a riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights.In Sudden Deaths in St. Louis: Coroner Bias in the Gilded Age, Sarah E. Lirley investigates the process in which these outcomes were determined, finding coroners’ rulings were not uniform, but rather varied by who was conducting the inquest. These fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.These titles and more this week on Inside The Banket Fort.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 254
May 2100:05:35Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue “Crimaynology,” This week we look at more SIU Press titles the delve into the realm of criminology. These titles foreground the stories of victims of crimes, members of the justice system who have fought for them, and the workings of the justice system itself. Keep listening to learn more about more of these “Crimaynology” titles.While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would be a complicated, nuanced process. Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, edited by Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, features analyses and findings from more than thirty contributors in eleven essays.The role of a juvenile defender is riddled with conflict, and clients are uniquely challenging because of their lack of life experience and their underdeveloped decision-making abilities. In Dilemma of Duties: The Conflicted Role of Juvenile Defenders, Anne M. Corbin examines the distinct function of defense counsel in juvenile courts, demonstrating the commonplace presence of role conflict and confusion, even among defenders in jurisdictions that clearly define their role.Evolving Constitutional Rights: The Roberts Court and Criminal Justice, by Christopher E. Smith, Michael A. McCall and Madhavi M. McCall, offers a compelling and in-depth analysis of how the U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped constitutional protections under Chief Justice John Roberts. These titles and more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 253
May 1400:05:33Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we turn our focus on criminology books published by SIU Press. These titles foreground the stories of victims of crimes, members of the justice system who have fought for them, and the workings of the justice system itself.Exceptionally rare and valued by book collectors, Otto A. Rothert’s riveting saga The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock chronicles the adventures of an audacious cast of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in and around the famous Ohio River cavern from 1795 through 1820 (adventures featured in Disney’s Davy Crockett and the film How the West Was Won).In 1913, Charlie Birger began his career as a bootlegger, supplying southern Illinois with whiskey and beer. He was charismatic, with an easygoing manner and a cavalier generosity that made him popular. The stuff of legend, he was part monster, part Robin Hood. In the early days, he would emerge from his restaurant/saloon in tiny Ledford in Saline County with a cigar box full of coins and throw handfuls in the air for the children.On August 12, 2014, the body of 62-year-old Sheila von Wiese-Mack—the wealthy Oak Park, Illinois, widow of famed composer James L. Mack—was found stuffed inside a suitcase in the trunk of a taxi in Bali. Back in the Midwest, listening to the radio, Sgt. Rasul Freelain of the Oak Park Police Department pulled his car over to absorb the unthinkable news. Amid his shock, one coherent thought surfaced: “Heather did this.”
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 252
May 700:06:00Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we feature another interview from Saluki Con, with SIU Press author Darrel Dexter. He is the co-author of Pulling off the Sheets: The Second Ku Klux Klan in Deep Southern Illinois, which was published in 2024, and the author of Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois, which will be republished by SIU Press in 2027.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 251
Apr 3000:05:53Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we feature an interview with award-winning actor Henry Thomas, star of E.T., Cloak & Dagger, Legends of the Fall, Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, and many more projects across film and television, who recently attended SIU’s Saluki Con as the event’s headlining guest.Tune in next week to hear an interview with SIU Press author Darrel Dexter, also from Saluki Con.
Transcribe →