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.
36episodes
Episodes
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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 →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 247
Mar 1900:06:00Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore some of the books SIU Press is featuring for Women’s History Month.Out of print in the United States since its original publication in 1915, Susan Glaspell’s largely forgotten novel Fidelity tells the story of Ruth Holland, a young woman who returns to her small Midwestern hometown after eleven years’ absence. Forced home by the death of her father, Ruth must face a family and community that have largely turned against her following her affair with a married man. Glaspell, mostly known as a playwright and for her founding of the Provincetown Players, was also an accomplished novelist. Students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, under the guidance of Kevin McMullen, project manager of the Walt Whitman Archive, have resurrected this neglected novel. The text includes contemporary photographs of Susan Glaspell, a new introduction, and annotations throughout, which provide useful commentary for students and general readers alike.While baseball is traditionally perceived as a game to be played, enjoyed, and reported from a masculine perspective, it has long been beloved among women—more so than any other spectator sport. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime by Jean Hastings Ardell upends baseball’s accepted history to at last reveal just how involved women are, and have always been, in the American game.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort: Remembering Herb Russell - Episode 246
Mar 500:05:47Tap to summarizeAuthor and historian Herb Russell( WSIU.org)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we celebrate the life of SIU Press author Herb Russell, who recently passed away.As written in his obituary, Herb was a college teacher, editor, and writer as well as a literary scholar and Illinois historian. He has been acknowledged as the foremost authority on Edgar Lee Masters and published the definitive biography of Masters with University of Illinois Press. He also contributed numerous articles on Edgar Lee Masters in scholarly journals and reference works, such as the Encyclopedia of American Literature, Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography, American Poets, 1880-1945. He loved Southern Illinois and wrote or edited several Southern Illinois University Press books which highlighted the beauty and resources of the area. These included A Southern Illinois Album: Farm Security Administration Photographs: 1936-1943; Southern Illinois Coal, A Portfolio; The State of Southern Illinois: An Illustrated History; and Fluorspar Mining: Photos From Illinois and Kentucky, 1905-1995. He received many accolades throughout his life, most notably, the Newberry Library Fellow award and several Superior Achievement Awards from the Illinois State Historical Society.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 245
Feb 2600:05:11Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore a book that’s making its paperback debut in March: Citizen of a Wider Commonwealth: Ulysses S. Grant's Postpresidential Diplomacy by Edwina S. Campbell, part of the World of Ulysses S. Grant series.In 1877, former president Ulysses S. Grant, along with his family and friends, embarked on a two-year world tour that took him from Liverpool to Yokohama with stops throughout Europe and Asia. Biographies of Grant deal very briefly, if at all, with this tour and generally treat it as a pleasure trip filled with sightseeing, shopping, wining, and dining. Far from an extended vacation, however, Grant’s travels in fact constituted a diplomatic mission sanctioned by the U.S. government. In this revealing volume, Edwina S. Campbell chronicles Grant’s journey—the first diplomatic mission ever undertaken by a former U.S. president—and demonstrates how it marked a decided turning point in the role of the United States in world affairs.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 244
Feb 1900:05:46Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, with SIU Press’s Looking for Lincoln series. This series explores locations in Illinois that were significant to Lincoln’s life, career, and legacy. This series was produced in collaboration with the Looking for Lincoln Heritage Coalition, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to working collaboratively with local, state, and national partners across the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area to tell the stories of Abraham Lincoln's life and times to provide high quality experiences for visitors, economic opportunities for communities and to improve the quality of life for residents. Looking for Lincoln partners with communities, organizations, and individuals dedicated to enhancing the communities and landscapes of central Illinois through recognition and support of their significant natural, cultural and historical legacies.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 243
Feb 1200:05:15Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we spotlight an excellent collection of SIU Press books in honor of Black History Month. In the groundbreaking From Du Bois to Obama: African American Intellectuals in the Public Forum, Charles Pete Banner-Haley explores the history of African American intellectualism and reveals the efforts of black intellectuals in the ongoing struggle against racism, showing how they have responded to Jim Crow segregation, violence against black Americans, and the more subtle racism of the postintegration age. Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. In The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922, David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt.Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? takes readers on a cultural trip through Chicago’s literary history. Editor Richard R. Guzman compiles the first comprehensive collection of the works of Chicago’s black writers from 1861 to the present day.
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