Alex Chambers: Nanette grew up in an artistic household. Her father painted, her sister was "born drawing", as Nanette puts it. And, her mother--

Nanette: She believed in all of us, there was nothing we could do wrong. And, she absolutely believed that this is what saves lives, in particular writing, because she was supporting her father in it.

Alex Chambers: Nanette's father was Kurt, Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut's gonna float through this episode, but he's not the main focus. When Nanette was 14, she did a painting that kind of changed her life. We'll hear her talk about that and how art can help you deal with neuroses and more. Then we'll hear from Kurt Vonnegut's friend, the late writer, Dan Wakefield, in an interview from 2016. Wakefield passed away in March, he was 91. Then at the end of the show, we've got an announcement about some changes that are coming to these Inner States. Stay with us.

Yael Ksander:  Yesterday, a friend of mine, who happened to be here was commenting about the contrast between his work and yours. And he said, "Oh my paintings are very dark, not joyful like yours". And you immediately corrected him. So, that's where I wanted to start, how anyone could think these paintings are joyful is actually beyond me because even though they are brightly colored and have some whimsical themes.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Thank you [LAUGHS] for that. But he was talking about himself. I felt like I was talking to another artist and struggling with working and not working. So he was pretty down on himself. I don't mind it when people say there is joy in it, but what surprises me, and I don't mean to be dark, but there's always something ghostly, or dark, or threatening coming from the edges. I don't know where that comes from, it's from my psyche but it's there.

Alex Chambers:  That's producer, Yael Ksander talking with painter, Nanette Vonnegut. Vonnegut has an exhibit in Bloomington right now, it's called Bad Math, it's an IU's Cook Center for the Arts and Humanities, it runs until July 3rd. As we've discussed, Nanette Vonnegut is the daughter of Kurt Vonnegut and her show is part of granfalloon, a festival here in Bloomington that's inspired by Kurt Vonnegut and celebrates art, ideas and community. Producer Yael Ksander, spent a couple of days getting to know Nanette, who visited Bloomington from Northampton, Massachusetts. They looked at the paintings together, a day after Nanette, who likes to be called Nanny, gave a public gallery talk.

Yael Ksander:  Let's start with the 56 year old painting of yourself at aged 14. It's a very expressionist painting and I don't know if the German expression is particularly meaningful.

Nanette Vonnegut:  I had no idea. It was just really fun. It was acrylic paint, so it dried fast and that was it all in maybe a couple of hours at most when I was 14 and playing. Actually my neighbor was Ben Thompson of Design Research. He had a really great eye. And I was so honored when he said, "I love that painting". He was really taken by it. Then I lost track of it and it got passed around to my nephews who thought it was funny and it would live at their house. It almost got thrown away [LAUGHS]. I didn't think there would be enough room in the gallery, so I cut that one from the show thinking, "Nobody is going to understand why it's there, it doesn't fit in." So many women loved that painting last night and were so glad I put in.

Yael Ksander:  No, I see it as the cornerstone of the show and also [LAUGHS] I'm so glad you did because it helps make sense of the rest of it.

Nanette Vonnegut:  If you see it, it's disturbed. That's disturbing.

Yael Ksander:  Just for the radio audience I'll say, any girl at 14 has ambivalent feelings about her appearance unfortunately, that's our culture. But in this one, you seem to have exaggerated them, you've made your hair crazy frizzy, you have crossed your eyes and you have a hand over your heart in some kind of gesture that seems like alarm perhaps? Do you remember what you were thinking at aged 14 when you made this painting?

Nanette Vonnegut:  I think I feel it. I look at it now and I do this all the time, I'm always holding my hand to my heart and it's trying to contain myself, contain something. So, I'm there. It's familiar to me. [LAUGHS] I look at it now, what I love about it is my brother took it, he's a paediatrician and put it in his office and young girls, adolescent girls really were fascinated, drawn to it, there's something in it that made them feel a less alone, because this person is out of her mind and I really was quite-- I'm a very sensitive person, 14 for me, was really tough.

Yael Ksander:  How so?

Nanette Vonnegut:  I had social anxiety. I still do. It was a way of working out my neuroses. Here I am, this is it and it felt really good. I remember enjoying doing it. So that was the beginning of art therapy for me honestly, art as therapy.

Yael Ksander:  Was that just something that you came upon yourself? Just the idea that art could be a conduit for painful feelings or other feelings?

Nanette Vonnegut:  My father, I will refer to him every now and then. He said, "People work out their neuroses in their art.". And it really is so life-saving for me, to be in my studio and be able to play. And it takes a long time, I don't know how things are going to turn out, but I know I have to do it. I would not be remotely okay if I didn't make art. And my father said whenever he goes to write, he felt he had no arms. He just really did not know where to begin. And that's so encouraging to hear that. So he motivates me all the time to just keep at it. I was steeped in art because of my family. My father did wild paintings himself, sort of like that, wildly expressively, self portraits, carving tables.

Nanette Vonnegut:  My big sister was born drawing. So that's all I saw around me, so it was a very natural thing to do. But also quite intimidating because people are already doing it and then there's a little bit of competitiveness [LAUGHS] in the family. But no, I was very encouraged. But there's so many of us, I wasn't noticed. And that's okay, it was just too many of us and too much chaos to think, "Oh, look what Nanny's doing". Except for the neighbor down the street said, "Wow, that's a really good design". That's what he said, there was a sense of design in it. I loved Matisse, the really beautiful bold. And that's where that comes from and that's the design sense that was around our house.

Nanette Vonnegut:  My father had incredible taste, he liked all kinds. He didn't necessarily go for realism, he went for good design. That's a family tradition, beautiful lettering. So the paintings in the house and watching my father do his stuff. My mother, [LAUGHS] she believed in all of us, there was nothing we could do wrong and she absolutely believed that this is what saves lives. In particular, writing because she was supporting my father in it. Kurt Vonnegut would not be in the world as he is, and that's the biggest thing I could say about my mother and it's the truth. And she believed in me and she was the sustenance for all of us, really. And as the years go on, then you need people that believe in you and support you. So early on, my sister was a huge influence. When I went to art school, she was surprised that I could draw. [LAUGHS] My sister said, "Oh, okay.". There's enough to go around. But it was always there, but you don't want to do the same thing your siblings are doing. Writing is also another thing that I feel drawn to, but also very closeted about.

Yael Ksander:  Is it intimidating?

Nanette Vonnegut:  It is but I have to say, 70 is great because [LAUGHS] I describe my father as the elephant. I don't know how to put it. It's a lot to digest. He's huge. But finally at this age, he's integrated in my bones and my spirit. I can carry all of it and be who I am and be grateful for it. So holding all of this at this age is a beautiful thing when my body starts falling apart. [LAUGHS]

Yael Ksander:  I think the expression you used at one point was that he was like an elephant giving birth to another elephant 20 times its size or something?

Nanette Vonnegut:  That's it, just trying to find the metaphor and I'm glad because I was trying to remember it. It's something I wrote and that's what it feels like.

Yael Ksander:  That living with him was like that?

Nanette Vonnegut:  Yes, absolutely. The need to create and the pain of it and the labor. How he labored.

Yael Ksander:  You talk about him in a deferential way, I know that having a parent who is doing something like that tends to sometimes take all the air out of the room.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Oh absolutely. He was the atmosphere in the house, but it was also the most fun house in the world. He was in his study, but I had a sister and a brother and then three cousins come.

Yael Ksander:  How old were you when the three cousins--

Nanette Vonnegut:  Four. It's a big story, there's so many aspects but I have to keep it simple because it's so complicated. But they came, the Adamses. My father's sister passed and her husband did too all at the same time, pretty much, and came to live with us. But I don't know what I would have done without the Adamses. They were the funniest. Humor is also the thing I can't live without. To say it's art. If you can't figure a way to find the humor in things, I think I'm going to sink. So I have to pay tribute to every single person in my family [LAUGHS] for different reasons, but talk about funny.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Gallows humor a lot of the time too. I'm just thinking of those serving plates that you said you served, look at them. Those serving plates that you said you serve Brussel sprouts in at Thanksgiving. And one of them has a gnome doll and one of them has a naked Barbie. And that's like kitsch and gallows humor. Were those the hallmarks of the humor that categorized your house?

Nanette Vonnegut:  Pretty much. It's just a lot of play on words too because the title of those. it's Badam [LAUGHS] is a troll doll and he's got covered by a little flower. [LAUGHS] And then it's evil. So I don't know, it's like what my father did in writing. You're sitting there and you're trying to think, and ideas come and it's fun, it's playful. But for the show, I just grabbed everything out of my house to put in the show. And the person who delivered the artwork was my house mate and he had Thanksgiving at my house and was laughing because he was thinking, "She serves food out of this."

Yael Ksander:  But humor can be a real life raft, that's for sure. I know that when I'm out of humor, I'm in a pretty sorry place. IT seems to me with your dad, there was like a lot of satire and skewering with his humor of the military industrial complex and a lot of pompous people involved with it. Is that going on for you too? The troll doll and the Barbie?

Nanette Vonnegut:  I don't know, I just think I'm just being playful and playing on words and the juxtaposition of the troll next to Barbie. I collect things at the thrift store and then somebody gave me the troll and I put them together and it's joyful to actually start doing it and then you're done. And then you have it. And that was fun, there wasn't any hidden meaning in it. [LAUGHS]

Yael Ksander:  I'm trying, I'm trying.

Alex Chambers:  Let's take a break. We're listening to a conversation with Nanette Vonnegut whose paintings are currently on view in the show Bad Math at IU's Cook Center for the Arts and Humanities. She spoke with producer, Yael Ksander in the gallery. If you want to see some of the paintings, go to the web page for this episode.

Young at Heart Choir:  Get up. Get up and dance. Get up and dance to the music. Get up and dance to the funky music.

Alex Chambers:  Inner States, Alex Chambers, one of the music acts at this year's Granfalloon was the Young At Heart Chorus. The singers in the group are young only at heart, since you have to be over 75 to be part of the group. Their repertoire is mostly rock, but they mix in some punk because it turns out punk lyrics apply surprisingly well to older folks. The Chorus is based in Northampton, Massachusetts, that's where Nanette Vonnegut lives and it was founded by Nanette's partner, Bob Cilman. We've got an interview with Bob Cilman and his co-director on the WFIU art'spage. One of the biggest paintings in Vonnegut's show in Bloomington, depicts a pandemic era Zoom rehearsal from the Chorus.

Yael Ksander:  To get back to that motif of the deceptively joyful or playful quality of many of your later paintings, there's maybe no better example of pain and collective pain than the pandemic. We're looking at your painting of the Young At Heart Chorus on Zoom, right.

Nanette Vonnegut:  It was really something to behold, it was hilarious because nobody knew how to work it [LAUGHS] and then there are starts and stops, but you know, I like grid, doing grids anyhow and I love actually doing faces, doing portraitures, it's one of my favorite things to do. So, this was an opportunity to do portraits of people that also in the Young At Heart Chorus which is a profound organization or whatever, what do you call Young At Heart? It's an entity, it's poignant, these are people just showing up on stage and giving it their all and finding, you know, at this time in their lives, towards the end, another life and I relate to that because now I'm feeling I'm there too.

Yael Ksander:  Well apparently you're far younger than the average age which is 86.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Yeah, the average age, right, but I just feel like I couldn't do what they do, it's not like, you know, group therapy, you have to work hard to get on stage and get it right. There's nothing more beautiful than these performers and many things that are beautiful to me, but these performances of people who don't have necessarily the best voice, get out there and belt it out, you know, in the moving and you know, some people have walkers, I mean it's just like, "Oh my God, I admire it so much," and I've followed it for years and then the [LAUGHS] pleasure of and during the pandemic, to witness these meetings, you know, the Zoom meetings. And I think everybody survived it because of showing up on Zoom and doing these.

Yael Ksander:  To me, it's an example of prevailing through pain.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Absolutely, that's it, that's what it is, the Young At Heart, it's unbelievable.

Yael Ksander:  You know, it's just an emblematic experience of the power of art and the power of the human connection.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Absolutely, yeah, the connection was everything, you know, for them to meet by Zoom was life-saving.

Yael Ksander:  For sure. It seems to me though like the grid thing, that predated your Zoom lens itself it seems, to the way you work.

Nanette Vonnegut:  This is what I'm already doing, I can't believe how, you know, it was a gift to me and I didn't wanna say anything like that during the pandemic cos everybody, you don't brag that you're doing great, you know, this format was a gift. But I already was doing it, for years doing the grid and it's all about maybe telling stories, cartoon, you know, flip books, you know, I love those things, so it sort of rooted in loving that.

Yael Ksander:  Flip books like rudimentary animation? You incorporate your draw humor like Groucho Marx glasses? But also at the same time, who is interested or who is drawn to the format of the grid? Like what does that say about you? To me, it feels like needing desperately to make order in the world.

Nanette Vonnegut:  You got it, exactly. Even if I write, I need to lay a grid on it, I need to-- because I'm disorganized, I don't wanna use a term everybody is using, ADD. [LAUGHS] But anyhow, the grid, I need it to organize myself and it's helpful and I love how it looks, you know, it's very decorative and I think Saul Steinberg, he early on, my hero, love him, I'm crazy about Saul, talk about like brilliance, I mean that guy. My father knew him and my father was intimidated by him [LAUGHS] cos he was too smart. [LAUGHS] But, and I met him and I could barely speak in his presence because I'm crazy about his work. So I think he did grid patterns too. Also, Paul Klee, I love Paul Klee.

Yael Ksander:  I was thinking about Klee, I was thinking about just like the concept of containment and grids and how even in your landscapes, there's not a feeling too often of freedom, like what the heck is going on here, Nanny? You have this perfectly nice landscape, but then, you know, you've plopped this, you know, you seem much more interested, the landscape is like...

Nanette Vonnegut:  Decorative.

Yael Ksander:  Yeah, it seems kind of fabulous or something. But then the real, the action is happening in the house.

Nanette Vonnegut:  This goes way back, you know, when I had young kids and so I just liked to illustrate the chaos of family life, that's the beginning and I love the idea of cutting a house in half, you know when it's a doll's house.

Yael Ksander:  It's a doll house.

Nanette Vonnegut:  So I loved doll houses growing up, little doll houses.

Yael Ksander:  What's so interesting to me in your rooms, I mentioned Vuillard and you mentioned Klee, that the claustrophobia and that is something I see in the grids too and I'm just wondering the feeling of that busy, crowded house that you grew up in.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Absolutely, I mean I can't articulate it, but a good interviewer like you will notice it and bring it out. But Vuillardwas totally packed, you know, in clutter and I love it, I love his paintings so much and I see what you mean, it reminds of Vuillard, all the stuff in it.

Yael Ksander:  The stuff but also the application of paint, that glue-like surface, so there's never really air.

Nanette Vonnegut:  I wonder if I started painting loosely which I wanna try, like more of and with more space around it. I have a desire to try it, so I wonder what that means, you know like, I don't wanna pack so much stuff in a painting and there's something pure about abstract painting, I admire all kinds of art, you know, but I love this, that it exists.

Yael Ksander:  Okay, let's talk about the clowns. The levity notwithstanding, I mean like these clown paintings, this is like the essence of dark humor. The painting that drew me in initially, it was centered around, I think it was on the poster, was that landscape and I thought it was just terrific, I couldn't see that they were clowns.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Well, you know, it started off a lighter landscape and then I did that one next to it before and I thought, "I just wanna put that idea in the dark," you know, in the distant.

Yael Ksander:  In clowns camping?

Nanette Vonnegut:  Yeah and to me, it was the light, the effect of light and dark, you know, as an artist is what I love seeing in paintings, you know and so that was so abstract, that was so quick, that little bit of painting. It wasn't labored at all.

Yael Ksander:  It's kind of your world view in miniature really, like this dark, beautiful, mysterious world and you gotta [LAUGHS] you gotta be a clown camping in it.

Nanette Vonnegut:  And then I put my thumb-- with this good lighting, I realized, I forgot I put my thumb prints in everything and it's over there and it's in there-- so, what a treat to see things well lit, but yeah, I don't know--

Yael Ksander:  Like Mrs Jack Graham in Jailbird, who can only identify herself with her thumb prints.

Nanette Vonnegut:  Magic happens, you know, I just am stunned by how things unroll, you know, and I don't credit myself, I just think there's magic in it and I inherited this air from both my parents, you know, that this is important, creating is important and it's not for everybody, you know, but it's the only thing I can do, I wanna try stand-up comedy next.

Male:  [SINGING] What? What you do? If I sang out of tune

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song

I will try not to sing out of key.

Oh, I get by with a little held from my friends...

Alex Chambers:  That was produced Yael Ksander talking with painter, Nanette Vonnegut. Vonnegut's show, Bad Math is up at IU's Cook Center for the Arts and Humanities through July 3rd. Nanette Vonnegut's father, Kurt Vonnegut, was from Indianapolis and he was friends with another writer from Indianapolis, Dan Wakefield. Wakefield passed away in March at the age of 91, Yael Ksander interviewed him for the WFIU show, profiles in 2016. We're gonna take a little break, when we come back, we'll hear some exerts from that interview. Stick around.

Singers:  [SINGING] Does it worry you have to be alone?

Male:  [SINGING] Oh no

How do I feel...

Alex Chambers:  Inner States Alex Chambers. Dan Wakefield was an established journalist when he published his first novel in 1970. Going All The Way is set in Indianapolis in 1954. When Kurt Vonnegut reviewed the book, he said it would ruffle enough feathers in Indianapolis that, having published it, Wakefield would never be able to go home again. He eventually did in the early 2010s and Yael Ksander interviewed him there in 2016. One of the things they talked about was that first novel Going All The Way.

Yael Ksander:  It's been called the [PHONETIC: huja] Catcher in the Rye. It was a bestseller, as you mentioned. It was turned into a movie. What I adore about the book is the view of middle America in the 1950s. That extremely well-observed and jaundiced view. We are seeing Indianapolis after the Korean war, through the eyes of a young man who has just come back and doesn't quite know what his next step is.

Dan Wakefield:  Well, it's two young men and they're both trying to figure out what to do with their lives. You're right, it is a satire of mainly the Midwest, but the whole country was like that. One of the characters in the book, and this never happened in real life, as part of his rebellion in Indianapolis, one of the characters grows a beard and they don't let him go into the Meridian Hills swimming pool. In fact, I didn't know anybody who had a beard in Indianapolis in those times. I think they might have been kicked out of town. But what I said to people was the same story could have happened in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit, but I don't know anything about those places. I think you have to have a feeling and emotion and a love of the place that you're writing about. A lot of people didn't get that, but that's in there.

Yael Ksander:  The book centers around this friendship between Sunny and Gunner, the two GIs who have come back. But we see a lot of interesting female characters that seem to represent some gender stereotypes that women, I think, were bucking against at the time.

Dan Wakefield:  Yeah. You know, what I tried to say is does anybody think I was promoting it? I mean, the behavior in there that affected, and I think damaged both men and women is not-- I mean I was trying to satirize it. I was trying to say this is crazy. But a lot of people take it like, oh, I guess you really like that, or something. I don't know.

Yael Ksander:  Well, I think what makes that clear is that, again, we are learning about this world through the eyes of a 20 something year old.

Dan Wakefield:  Yeah, and the way he would be thinking at that time. That's the thing. You can't go back and impose the way people later understand things, and that causes a lot of misunderstanding.

Yael Ksander:  As Vonnegut predicted, the book did ruffle a lot of feathers. Talk about the effect that it had.

Dan Wakefield:  Well, one guy was going to come to Boston and shoot me. That's where I lived. Two were going to come and beat me up.

Yael Ksander:  They thought that they saw themselves portrayed in the book, is that it?

Dan Wakefield:  Yeah, and one woman, who I only knew her name, said that I had ruined her marriage. I knew nothing about her life. She thought she was like one of the characters. It's well known, and I have said this too, that the character Gunner, the former Jock hero, is based on an old friend. The funny thing is, I didn't really get to know him until we were both in New York. I didn't know him when we lived in Indianapolis. I met him at the Red Key Tavern, Christmas of '54. He was going to come to Colombia on the GI bill, and I was just about to graduate. We shared an apartment. We were best friends. Also, I wanted a complete contrast of Gunner, the confident jock, to a really shy, introverted, intellectual guy. That was not me. I was the editor of the yearbook and I wrote a sports column in the Short Ridge Daily Echo, and all that stuff. But there was a guy in my class who I thought of who was so shy, he really blushed. I've never known many people to blush. So, I wanted a contrast and I imagined these two different guys.

Dan Wakefield:  One thing I loved, when I first met the two young men who made the movie of Going All The Way, the director said ever since he was in high school and read the novel he wanted this to be his first movie. I said, "But you're just 30-years-old," this is 1997, "How did you even know about the book?" He said, "Well, my father was in the literary guild and it was a literary guild selection. One day it was raining and I wanted something to read. I looked on his shelf, I saw this had something to do with sex and young people, so I read it." But then the great thing was he said, "You know, those two guys, Sunny and Gunner?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I'm both of those guys." And I love that because I think, in a way, we're all both the confident guy and the shy, unsure of himself guy.

Yael Ksander:  Long before you returned to your Huja hometown, you returned to your Christian faith, which I found to be quite a surprise. Religion figures in both of the novels we've been discussing, but in a kind of interesting way. Arty, the little boy, he goes through the motions and prays superstitiously. Sunny, of course, is adamantly opposed to the religion that his parents are trying to shove down his throat. He is downright sacrilegious. Again, I was surprised to discover that you had embraced your faith. Maybe you can share with us about that transition.

Dan Wakefield:  Well, I think most people when they return to faith it comes out of really a high point in their life or a low point. I think it was Tolstoy, who is regarded as the greatest writer in the world, who said, "Is this all there is?" There's got to be something else. With more people, like me, you come from a low point. I had been in Hollywood, I did this series James at 15, but then after that I stayed on and I tried to do other things. I wrote three scripts, only one of them was made. I was drinking more. I went to a doctor and found my resting pulse was 120, twice as much as it should be. I went back, and this is good, the doctor said, "Well, everything else physically seems okay. Tell me, are you in the entertainment business?" I said, "Oh yeah, how did you know?" So, I was smart enough that I got on a plane to Boston the next day and I was lucky to find a great doctor who had started a cardiac rehab program. For the first time in my life, I got on a diet and started doing exercise. My pulse went down to 80. Then he said, "Would you be willing to not have a drink for a month? It should be 60."

Dan Wakefield:  I did that, and just before Christmas, I was in a bar, not drinking but that's where my friends often were, and another table I heard a guy say, "I think I'd like to go to church on Christmas Eve." It was just like oh, I'd like to do that. I didn't even know what churches were in Boston, though I'd lived there 20 years. I looked in the Boston Globe religion page and it said Kings Chapel Candlelight Service and Carols, so that sounded innocuous enough. I went there, but they didn't say that the minister would read little passages between the carols. He read something from an Evelyn Waugh novel about the latecomers to the manger, and then mentioned the latecomers to the church. I thought oh my God, he knows I'm here. It was one of those below zero days, nights in Boston. I started quaking and shivering and thought maybe I'm having a religious experiences, but it turned out to be the flu. Then I went on Easter, which was a nice day. Anyway, I became deeply involved in that church.

Dan Wakefield:  One thing I really liked was that the minister talked about conversion not as some lightning out of the sky, but I think the Greek or Hebrew word for conversion was turning, and that's what I felt like. It was just a turning. You turn a little way and you're going in a different direction. That whole experience at Kings Chapel in Boston was just a great part of my life, and it really went back. I'd had a really deep childhood experience when I was nine-years-old, going to a Sunday School that a friend, Adie, at school took me to. Anyway, it built on or restored something else.

Yael Ksander:  It really seemed as though you had a real animus against religion though previously.

Dan Wakefield:  Yeah, well in college it was part of the revolt against home and all that. My heroes were Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I remember reading a Hemingway story called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in which the man has his own prayer, which is, "Our Nada, who are in Nada," the Spanish word for nothing. I latched onto that. Yet, amazingly enough, when I was in Israel only two years after college, and I did that story going out with the fishermen on Galilee, it was quite beautiful and mysterious. We came back at dawn, the fishermen come in at dawn, and the captain of the boat, which was really eight guys with very primitive oars, said, "I can't pay you, but we'll take a couple of fish and eat them." He went into the town of Nazareth, where there are people who had fires, and we cooked the fish over the fire, and I thought gee, something about this seems familiar. One of my favorite passages in the New Testament is John 21, where it's after the Crucifixion and the disciples are out fishing and a figure on the shore says, "Drop the nets on the other side," and they come up with fishes. They realize the figure on the shore is Jesus, and he has this fire waiting on the shore to put the fish on and he says, "Come and dine." I thought I experienced that.

Yael Ksander:  You spend a lot of your creative energy these days helping people access their own spirituality through writing. Can you talk about that work?

Dan Wakefield:  The way that the book Returning began, I took a course at Kings Chapel that the minister gave called Religious Autobiography, and out of that came an essay in the New York Times Magazine called Returning to Church. Then I had offers to make it a book. Usually when I finish a book I just want to take time off and do nothing, writing or literally, but I had this impulse to teach something like the course that had done so much for me. I'd been asked to teach courses at the Boston Center for Adult Education, but they just wanted me to teach a writing course. I thought I don't need to do that, but I went to them and I said, "What about a course called Spiritual Autobiography?" I didn't want to say religious because I'm not a minister and I wanted it open to everybody, whether you belong to any religious faith or not. They said, "Well, we'll put it in the catalog and see if anybody comes, but we need 12 people to have a course go forward like that." I went in the night it was to begin and there were 12 people sitting around the table. That began, and then about half of them invited me to their churches and then other people invited me, and then somebody said, "Could you do it for a weekend?"

Dan Wakefield:  That was in 1987, and I've done it all over the country and in Northern Ireland and at health spas, churches, monasteries, religious, and so on. One of the best was at Sing Sing prison. I did the course for three years there. It's been an amazing part of my life and taken me to all kinds of places, meeting all kinds of people. I just did a version of it this spring, six Sundays before Advent, at Northminster Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, and that was great.

Yael Ksander:  When you're instructing people or guiding people in this process, you're encouraging them to approach the task the way you did, to reflect on you life and your relationship to God, or the--

Dan Wakefield:  Not even that. I just give them a series of exercises, of writing things, that evoke memory. I say if you can't think of a spiritual experiences of childhood, just think of a meaningful experience. I found my favorite definition of miracles in a Willa Cather novel called Death Comes for the Archbishop, and at one point it says in there, "Miracles seem to me not to come from voices or faces coming to us from far off, but from our own sense being made finer so our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." I thought wow, that's it. One of the exercises, I have people go out and take a plant, a leaf or a stone and meditate on it for 15 minutes, and then write what thoughts, what things come out of it. So, a lot of it about the senses.

Yael Ksander:  Is it in any way similar to the kind of training that people refer to as mindfulness these days? Or is it strictly Christian, theologically?

Dan Wakefield:  It's not Christian. I read a couple of things. I am a Christian, but I don't require that other people be a Christian or anything. I wrote a book called The Story of Your Life, writing a spiritual autobiography, and I used writing from people who had done these exercises on the course. There's a quote from James Carroll, a writer who used to be a priest, and he said, "The very act of placing one word after another to tell a story is by itself holy." Joan Didion starts out an essay saying, "We tell stories in order to live." It's one of the deepest impulses. What I also found is that writing the story is a deeper experience than just telling it. We have a lot of wonderful things like 12 step programs where people tell their story, but you can tell your story so much it becomes glib. To really write it means you have to master it. In fact, I've always said writing is a kind of meditation because the idea of meditation is to clear your mind of all the extraneous stuff, but when you're writing, by definition, you're putting down words on paper and you can't be thinking about 70 other things. You have to be quiet, you have to be centered, as it were, as you're writing. I think even to write about difficult experiences, it's like you master the experience, it's integrated, it's not just floating around there.

Yael Ksander:  Another writing activity you've been involved in in recent years has been editing Vonnegut's letters. Can you talk about your relationship to Kurt Vonnegut?

Dan Wakefield:  I always think of Vonnegut as the Godfather of Going All The Way. The publisher who liked the manuscript for Going All The Way had just published Slaughterhouse Five the year before, so he said to me, "Could we send this to Kurt? It would really help if he gave us a blurb or something." I said, "Yeah. I've only met him once but we've corresponded and he seemed like a great guy." I said, "My novel is nothing like what he does, so I have no idea what he'd think, but go ahead." A couple of days later the published called and he said, "I've got a telegram here from Vonnegut that says you must publish this important novel, get this boy in our stable." Then he reviewed it in Life Magazine and it was one of the funniest reviews. It said, "Dan Wakefield is a friend of mine. I would praise his novel even if it was putrid." Nobody has ever used putrid in a book review before, but he aid, "I wouldn't give my word of honor. It was really good and I give my word of honor," and then it went on. We were friends from them on. He was so supportive of not just me but all his writer friends. I love that his letters include people from his high school days, friends throughout his life.

Dan Wakefield:  Typical of him, the last time I saw him I was in New York with a book called The Hijacking of Jesus, and the book didn't get much response and he had come to a talk I gave in New York about it. He said, "Let's go have dinner," and we were sitting in the Waldorf Bar having a steak and two young guys see us and they obviously are staring at Kurt, and they come over and one of them says, "Are you the real Kurt Vonnegut?" He says, "Yeah, but this is my friend Dan Wakefield," and he starts telling them all about my book, which they have no interest in in the world. But that was the way he was, to promote his friends and help them. He was a rare human being. By the way, we had a funny longstanding dialog about humanism and Christianity. The Sunday that my piece, Returning to Church, came out, I came home from church and on the answering machine it said, "This is Kurt. I forgive you." Years later, I saw he had a poem in the New Yorker. I never knew he'd written any poems. I sent him a postcard, I said, "I see you're now a poet. I forgive you." He sent back a postcard saying, "Not as bad as you becoming a Christian." The funny thing is, I've written a pretty long essay called Kurt Vonnegut, Christ Loving Atheist, and that's his term. He really wrote more perceptively about Jesus than most theologians. He was very sensitive about that.

Alex Chambers:  That was Dan Wakefield in conversation with producer Yial Cassander, in 2016. Wakefield died in March, at the age of 91.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, before I go, I want to let you know about some changes to Inner States that I'm really excited about. For the past two and a half years we've been bringing you stories about culture, society and how it all feels, to podcast feeds and the radio every week. We're going to end the radio broadcast at the end of June. We'll be replaced by Splendid Table on the air. Starting on August 7th, we'll have new Inner States episodes in the podcast feed every other week. If you're a fan and you normally catch us on the broadcast, now would be a great time to subscribe to Inner States on your favorite podcast platform. You can expect the show to get even better; fewer reruns, more playing around with length and format, it's going to be really cool. New episodes coming August 7th.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first the credits. Inner States is produced and edited and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our social media master is Gillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Luan Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstrich. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music and, on this week's episode, the Young At Heart Chorus. Special thanks this week to Yial Cassander for not one but two interviews. Alright, time for some sound.

Alex Chambers:  That was Bees and Jazz. Brian Park, Bloomington, Indiana, early May. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers, thanks as always for listening.