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.
31episodes
Episodes
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Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 257
1w ago00:05:59Tap 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
2w ago00:05:34Tap 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 →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 250
Apr 2300:05:53Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our celebration of National Poetry Month with some selections from the SIU Press’s Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress.Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s Dots & Dashes offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives. Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.In Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.”Plus more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 249
Apr 900:05:59Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we begin our exploration of some of the titles that SIU Press is shining the spotlight on for National Poetry Month, all of them from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, [the] death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception.Civil twilight is the astronomical term for the minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset. If one took a snapshot, it would be impossible to tell whether the light was increasing or diminishing. The poems in Civil Twilight arise in this liminal space. With luminous precision, Cynthia Huntington examines the civil twilight we live in now, unsure of whether the darkness is closing in or whether the light is about to break.For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, in Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before.These books and more on this week's Inside The Blanket Fort.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 248
Apr 200:05:41Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we wrap up our review of SIU Press Women’s History Month titles.Caresse Crosby rejected the culturally prescribed roles for women of her era and background in search of an independent, creative, and socially responsible life. Poet, memoirist, advocate of women’s rights and the peace movement, Crosby published and promoted modern writers and artists such as Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dalí, and Romare Bearden. She also earned a place in the world of fashion by patenting one of the earliest versions of the brassiere. Behind her public success was a chaotic life: three marriages, two divorces, the suicide of her husband Harry Crosby, strained relationships with her children, and legal confrontations over efforts to establish a center for world peace.Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women’s Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members. This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities.You can find these and more incredible women’s history titles on our website at siupress.com. Join us next week to hear about some of the books the Press is celebrating for National Poetry Month.
Transcribe →