Alex Chambers:  Ileana'san embroiderer. She creates beautiful expressive images that explore queerness, the natural world and more. But that creative part, designing and drawing the image, only takes about two hours. What she really looks forward to is the months of minutia after that.

Ileana Haberman: There's just something about hours and hours of tedium that I just love. Also I'm really proud of it when it's done because that's not valued in our culture. We don't value someone sitting alone in their living room, for years [LAUGHS] working on tiny stitches. It doesn't really make sense, and it makes me so happy. And I just do it because it makes me happy.

Alex Chambers:  This week on Inner States, a conversation with Ileana Haberman about embroidery, queerness and mental health. Stay tuned after that; we'll have a review of Woodworker Nancy Hiller's book, Shop Tails; the animals who help us make things work. That's all coming up right after this.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome to Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. This is part one of a series I'm doing on textile politics. I'm stealing that name from a class that was taught at Indiana University in the fall of 2021. I'll be talking with the person who created that class in a few weeks, but I want to kick the series off with a conversation about queer embroidery, with a friend of mine, Ileana Haberman. After two years of Covid, and the isolation that so many people have had to endure, although not everyone's been able to isolate, let's remember that. Finding ways to take care of ourselves, to keep from going crazy, but also to be more tender toward ourselves, the importance of that is evermore apparent. Turns out, as my guest today will help us understand, embroidery is one way to do that.

Alex Chambers:  Embroidery has traditionally been the domain of women, at least in recent centuries in the west. In Europe, upper class young women learned decorative embroidery. Working class women learned to embroider too, especially if they were responsible for household linens. It was about mending cloth, and also labeling bedlinens, napkins, tablecloths. It was a marketable skill. They had to be accurate and first, and working class women would use the need to embroider as a way to get together with each other; which also made embroidering a political act. It was a chance for women to share their stories and speak their minds away from men and employers. And that's just the social side. The products could be political too, as a way for women who never learned to read to tell their stories. My guest today, Ileana Haberman, brings another kind of feminist and queer angle to embroidery. Embroidery is a way to ornament cloth. That cloth often covers up the body; sometimes for warmth, sometimes modesty.

Alex Chambers:  The images Ileana stitches turn that covering up on it's head because, if you wore Ileana's images, you would often be wearing nude bodies. Her own body actually in bedrooms, gardens, in creeks, in trees, in dreams, it's embroidery as autobiography, in a way, although you want get her life story just through the images. She also stitches quilts; like pictures with quilts in them, and leaves and pine cones and spring ephemerals. I'm excited to talk with Bloomington artist, Ileana Haberman today about stitching, queerness, patterns and practices of tenderness. Ileana, welcome to Inner States.

Ileana Haberman:Thank you that's very moving to hear. [LAUGHS] Maybe I should have you reflect myself back on myself more often. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  I wonder if you could start with you talking about how you got into embroidering.

Ileana Haberman:I've been embroidering basically my whole life. My mom would be very upset if I didn't mention that she taught me when I was four, but it is part of my maternal line. Everyone in my family stitches or quilts or whatever, so it is a tradition. But then, when I was finished with college and kind of lost, and also newly exploring my queer identity, I thought "What if I make someone naked with stitch; wouldn't that be hilarious?" So that's where it started, and it was just a novelty at that time, and now it's much more rooted in mental health. It's grown into such a much bigger part of my life than just making myself laugh.

Alex Chambers:  One of the things that I love about the images is that, the images themselves aren't funny per se, but there is a cheekiness to the whole idea. I wonder if you could talk a little more about the idea and what it means to be doing the nude bodies, as an embroiderer.

Ileana Haberman: First it was just something that made me laugh and seemed really subversive and, also at that time, there was not a lot of nude embroidery happening. It's much more common now, but this was 15 years ago. I had never seen it before, and I noticed something happening, which was that the more I used my own body, the more I viewed my body differently in ways that felt really exciting, because I am prone to societal norms on bodies, and can dive into some hateful territory for myself there. And the more that I drew pictures or took photos, or whatever it was that I was working with, the more I would shift the way I started looking at my own body, and think "Oh, that curve is really interesting. That fold is really beautiful. This dimple is really important here."

Ileana Haberman: So that got more and more exciting as I realized that I could hack the way the world tells me to look at myself. It's mixing a way to really celebrate this one body that I have, to experience this one life, and also place it in a moment that I want to slow down in. Most of the embroideries that I do will spark when I realize that I'm re-remembering a moment, or something feels really important, and I just want to sit with it for a while. And I will literally sit with it for months, because these embroideries can take hundreds of hours to finish. I think it's kind of funny that not only am I saying this moment's important, let's slow down in this moment, but I'm literally slowing myself down by sitting and doing these minuscule stitches for hours and hours.

Alex Chambers:  One thing I'm curious about, related to all that is how doing the art as you were trying to figure out being a queer human at the same time, did doing the art help at all?

Ileana Haberman: Well I am getting older and the world has changed a lot in the last 15/20 years, and probably I was looking for some representation I wasn't seeing out in the world. So I don't embroider other people, it's almost always just me. I know how I feel, I don't know how other people feel, so I don't really embroider other people. But for me to have an embroidery that I know is about falling in love with someone, when I was not seeing people with bodies; specifically like long hair, you know, not a lot of fem/queer bodies experiencing those things. That is something I really did not see, and was probably confusing to me as a young queer person who feels a lot of assumptions were made about me. I was probably making artwork that I wished I had been seeing.

Alex Chambers:  It's been a little while now, 15/20 years since you started doing this. I'm curious if, over that time, it's made you look at your body differently, and whether thinking about your body changing over time has been a part of it.

Ileana Haberman: I would love to say that this practice has revolutionized the way that I feel in my skin, but that's not true; there are moments. So when I'm working on a piece I can get into a really loving and exciting space but, it's not like doing this for 15 years has made me [LAUGHS] some kind of elevated human of any type. The thing with embroidery is that you have to pull out lines, and you have to choose which lines you're going to use and which lines you're not. Now that I think about it I'm not sure, aside from the skill because the skill has definitely changed in 15 years, but I'm not sure you would be able to tell that my body is aging based on embroidery; which maybe is in some way that I'm choosing some denial about how things are changing. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  I'll have to ask you again in 15 years.

Ileana Haberman: Please, ask me again in 15 years and we'll see if I still have the same answer.

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS] So it hasn't really made you think about time necessarily?

Ileana Haberman: I just took a lace making class because I like the idea of making lace elements which take forever, and then putting them in embroidery. You put three months of embroidery and a month of lace together, and no-one has any idea that it's a 200 hour project, but I do. That's what makes my brain feel good.

Alex Chambers:  I guess that that's a different relation to time. Not like historical time of life, but how long it takes and how you're into that.

Ileana Haberman: It's my favorite.

Alex Chambers:  Tell me more about that.

Ileana Haberman: I love detailed, intricate work. There is something that happens in my brain that just calms down when I have a minor task and I have to do it 6,000 times. If I have something like a chain stitch for 18 hours [LAUGHS] I can be in the moment, I can relax and the part of my brain that doesn't know how to sit still is busy. And then the parts of my brain that maybe need a little more attention or I need to process some feelings, or figure out what my feelings are, that part can come out because the busy part is quieted down with a task. Creating art is just so fun, so there's a period of time, maybe two hours, where I will be taking photos and making drawings, and sketching out what I want it to look like. That's really fulfilling, but it only lasts two hours. Then I have months of the minutia, and that's the part that keeps me a little more even, gives me an opportunity to really figure out what I'm feeling. There's something about hours and hours of tedium that I just love.

Ileana Haberman: I'm also really proud of it when it's done because that's not valued in our culture. We don't value someone sitting alone in their living room for years, working on tiny stitches. It doesn't really make sense, but I do it because it makes me so happy, and I love that that can be a priority in my life.

Alex Chambers:  I want to emphasize that, having seen your art over the years, I certainly haven't known how long it takes. You're talking about a therapeutic aspect to it as well, but I think it also has really great artistic value. It's really smart, thoughtful work. But I want to back up a little bit more; can you talk through the whole process? You brought some work in, maybe you could start by describing the piece and talk me through the whole process.

Ileana Haberman: This is from my latest series that I've made. I started it in July and I finished it in August, and I thought this will be a nice way to wrap up the pandemic; which is clearly not what happened so I do feel a little bit strange being like "I made this in the pandemic and that's done," because that's not real. I couldn't embroider in the beginning of the pandemic, because I was too stressed out, and really scared and anxious all the time. I finally started [LAUGHS] and my brain was much healthier once I started actually embroidering. So this is from that series. We have a nude body - it is mine - reclining and she is looking into her hands which are held out in front of her. Then the background is hundreds of pebbles with white lines, and the white lines are sunlight through the water. This moment happened in the summer of 2020. I was with my parents who I was not parting with. I was social distancing from my parents, and I was with my sister's kids, who I was not social distancing with. I was assisting in them spending time together. We were just walking barefoot through a creek playing, and the reason this moment felt so important is that, inherently because we were in the creek, we weren't thinking about social distancing. We were just running around looking at things in the creek.

Ileana Haberman: For a brief moment I got a break from the panic, and from trying to protect my older parents, and I just didn't have to think about who's close to who and who's breathing on who. I didn't think about any of it, I just got to be present in the moment in a way that I hadn't been able to be in long time, and that felt important. So I was thinking about that a lot, and I kept thinking about the way the sunlight looked through the water and how mesmerizing it is, and it was a really beautiful moment of just being. I took some photos for the body, and then I painted about ten layers of paint as a background, then I embroidered these pebbles; and there are hundreds of them. I don't really know what I was thinking because, not only did I embroider them once, then I went over each line again, and then I embroidered in between every single line. This took months. Sometimes I wonder why I make the choices I make, but I'm really pleased with it in the end. And then there's the white sunlight on top, to give dappled look. So I really like this one; it makes me remember that you have to let go [LAUGHS] sometimes and just be present. So that's the process. We've got a body, we've got a painted background, we've got tons of embroidery. I think I even painted it again a few times because it wasn't enough. If I can add something, I'll add it.

Alex Chambers:  Over the years has it been a steady progress of making things ever more complicated?

Ileana Haberman: Absolutely, yes. I won't do simple anymore. Here's one that's also from the pandemic series, and this is one of the first ones.

Alex Chambers:  For people who are listening, this is a little bigger than 12 x 12?

Ileana Haberman: I think it's 12 x 12 but the frame makes it look a little bigger.

Ileana Haberman: And it's a wooden frame. It's a square.

Ileana Haberman: This one was before I started to feel moments of ease, which I think is funny because when you look at it, she looks calm, she looks relaxed, but I know that she's not. There's a pieced quilt as a background with really small pieces, free form quilting, which is in the tradition of crazy quilting, so the idea is that it's really fragmented. The body is relaxed but I don't think the background is calm.

Alex Chambers:  There's the body in the center, she's lying there resting, with eyes closed at least, [LAUGHS] but she's surrounded by this crazy quilt, which has all these different shapes going on. A lot of triangles but not in a steady way, and the quilt aspect to me at least, makes it automatically feel a little more calm, because there's a sense of comfort with quilts.

Ileana Haberman: In the tradition of crazy quilts, if you look, there's all these beautiful Victorian velvets, and then there's this feather stitch is used on all the seams. But to me it almost looks like centipedes. It doesn't feel calm to me. I think it's funny because people say it looks calm, but she just looks so unhappy to me, because I was. This was the solution. But my point, bringing this up is, I was like what if I used the tiniest pieces possible to make a quilt, and then quilt it with a very detailed stitch that I didn't need to do? But I did it because it was something extra I could do that would take another week or so. I just love adding stuff; if I can spend another few hours and make it complicated, I will. That does feel political too, in this capitalist society to say "I'm probably not going to make money on this." It's not about that, so why not just do what feels good? And it feels really good. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  If you're just joining us, we're talking with Bloomington artist, Ileana Haberman about embroidery, mental health and the appeal of making stitches more complicated than necessary. This is Inner States, we'll be right back.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. We're talking with Bloomington artist, Ileana Haberman about how her relationship to embroidery changed during the pandemic. About how complicated stitches are useful for mental health, and about quilts.

Alex Chambers:  So what are crazy quilts?

Ileana Haberman: A crazy quilt would be a quilt that is free form, it's not a pattern. You're just sewing pieces together; you can use scraps as you have them. A lot of them are heavily embroidered, if you look at old ones. It's not the best name, it could be renamed, but that is what it's called. And free form quilting is so fun, because you just don't know what is going to happen, and trying to get it to fit in this perfect shape.

Alex Chambers:  In looking back over your work in the past couple of days leading up to this, one of the things that I've enjoyed the most is seeing the quilts in the embroideries, because I like the playfulness of a stitched thing. But you're not actually stitching the quilt, you're just stitching an image of the quilt. And we're seeing it in 3D in a way because we're seeing the textures and the folds as it lays over someone's body or whatever, it's not just a flat image of the quilt. I guess I just wanted to hear more about your relationship with quilts.

Ileana Haberman: Well quilts are another thing that are very traditional in my family. My grandma made them, my aunt is a curator at a quilt museum. This is definitely part of my maternal lineal line. I love quilts, I always go back to quilts. I love patterns, I love triangles so much. We could talk for hours about how much I love triangles. So quilting has a lot of triangles and repetitive triangles just do something to my brain. I don't know what it is, I love them. Also there is such a rich tradition of quilts. I only know mostly about American quilting, but there are so many patterns and they all have names, and so you can assign meaning. And I'm sure other people have assigned very different means than I have, but I did a whole series a few years ago of all quilt themed embroideries, and it was not a happy series.

Ileana Haberman: I was going through a horrible time in my life, and so I just assigned all these meanings to quilts. And that was a time when I was a little more secretive about my private life. I didn't want everyone to know what the quilt meanings I assigned were, and so I had a show and I did not tell people what the meaning was, but it was a way for me to put secrets in and choose a quilt pattern that I knew was referencing something, but then I didn't have to be vulnerable. I've done a lot of quilts.

Alex Chambers:  Did it feel vulnerable anyway?

Ileana Haberman: It was awful. [LAUGHS] Some people knew what was going on and could tell, but I needed that boundary, because I do like showing them. I do like letting people know what I'm doing when I say I'm not going to hang out, I'm too busy, I mean I'm staying home embroidering a quilt. It is nice to let my community come and see art. That does feel fun, but at that time I was not prepared to let anyone know how I was feeling, so embedding secrets. Also I just think it's fun. Again, I'll add layers of stitching, but if you can add layers of meaning as well, why not?

Alex Chambers:  What are some examples of quilts with different layers of meaning?

Ileana Haberman: My all time favorite quilt pattern is called Wandering Geese. It's just repetitive triangles, over and over. It's the most beautiful quilt.

Alex Chambers:  What does it look like?

Ileana Haberman: It's isosceles triangles with their hypotenuse on the bottom, again and again and again, so just rows of triangles. And sometimes you can flip some on their head to make them more interesting, but it's just rows of triangles. It's pretty simple, I don't have a lot of skill with quilting. I like to do it but I have never put much time into learning how to do more intricate patterns, so it's a pretty accessible pattern. Wandering Geese you can take a couple of different ways. I think I've put it in comics that I've done. There's the Mary Oliver poem about wild geese. Sometimes if I want to reference that but I don't actually want to reference it, I'll put in a Wandering Geese quilt pattern. I know I'm referencing Mary Oliver, even if no-one else does, which is good enough for me. I've also used it to imply infidelity, because of the wandering aspect. When I used it at that time, it was about infidelity. Now, I've reclaimed it because I will always love that pattern, so now it's more of a Mary Oliver meaning.

Ileana Haberman: There's also one called Broken Dishes, which maybe you can imagine ways in which you can use a pattern called Broken Dishes. I just like to assign meaning to things and then use them. Quilts are such rich patterns and repetition is so delightful.

Alex Chambers:  Why?

Ileana Haberman: Because you don't have to think about it, you're just doing it. It's a break from the spiraling of having to come up with something. You can get out of the need to produce something new all the time, and you're just making a triangle over and over and over and it just gives your brain a break. I'm sure there are brilliant psychologists who can explain why it feels so good. [LAUGHS] I just know it feels really good.

Alex Chambers:  When did you realize that?

Ileana Haberman: I have no idea. [LAUGHS] It started to be pointed out to me that, if I wasn't embroidering regularly, I was a little bit of a jerk, and I would start to feel frantic and get a little controlling in the ways that when things feel out of my hands, I can get a little bit controlling. There have been times in my life where people have said "You need to go and embroider." So I did start noticing there was a correlation between feeling like I was a little bit out of control and maybe not being my best self, and doing this. In retrospect I can look back over the last 15 years and say I wasn't embroidering during that period. It's not like not embroidering creates mental unrest, but there are times when I just can't do it, and that's really indicative. Now I know if I haven't been making things for a little while, I need to pay attention because something is not right. That's very useful.

Alex Chambers:  I'm thinking about how making art is a thing that you have control over. I mean art never comes out like we want it to. I don't know about you. [LAUGHS]

Ileana Haberman: I'm a little more elevated than that. [LAUGHS] I also think iit's funny that I can be a chaotic person, like when I think on what my art studio looks like right now, it's pretty embarrassingly trashed. It does bother me but I don't fix it very often. But the finished product is so tidy and clean and crisp, and there is a whole thing in embroidery about the backs of your embroideries; the backs are supposed to look as tidy as the fronts. But, that is not my world. I don't care about that, I never have. I remember the first time my brother-in-law saw an embroidery of mine and he flipped it over to look at the back, because his mom is an embroiderer, and he knows the back is supposed to look like the front, and he was like "Oh jeez" [LAUGHS]. My world is a little bit chaotic and that's fine with me, and I think there's a lot of creativity in chaos. But there is something really nice about a finished piece that everything is in it's place, it's very tidy, and I feel a little bit like I've tricked people into thinking that I'm also tidy. [LAUGHS] I'm not, I just needed this to get there.

Alex Chambers:  I would love to hear about the culture of embroidery.

Ileana Haberman: Embroiderers come from everywhere. There are people from all walks of life embroidering. It's very affordable so it's also very accessible, which I think is great. There are kits, so almost anyone can embroider if they want to. It's not technically difficult, so you get everybody, which means sometimes you get some not so lovely things. For example there's an embroiderer that came out as really trans-phobic a couple of years ago. She's very talented, unfortunately, [LAUGHS] and she has a large following because she's very talented. That was really upsetting; it's not shocking because everyone can embroider so you will get all thoughts present in embroidering.

Ileana Haberman: I think maybe because embroidery is also like this craft that has reclaimed in a way, people are fighting for embroidery to be recognized as art, and it is happening. There are people whose art has been in galleries. I have shown in a lot of places. It is starting to be recognized more and more, and there are some really cool pockets of embroidery, where there are a lot of queer and trans embroiderers doing really cool stuff. It was awful when she came out with her trans-phobic stuff, and she has not stopped, it continues, but it did bring together a lot of people making really neat stuff. I'm connected to other queer embroiderers and people who are making really subversive, beautiful, really political inspiring art.

Ileana Haberman: There's also plenty of people who, like my grandmother, are embroidering pigs on dishtowels. You get everything, but it's still so new. I feel like there's this whole argument of art versus craft, and I'm uninterested in that argument, and totally arguing with myself about that all the time. I make my embroideries as a square. I like that, but it's also to trick your brain into thinking of it as art, not craft. If it was on a hoop, I think you would think craft, so I put it on a square so that you think art on the wall. That's a game I'm playing even though, I just told you I'm not interested, I'm still doing it. There's a lot of really amazing embroidery, and you get all kinds of different styles. It's a huge medium, there are thousands of people doing thousands of different styles, in so many different ways, which is so exciting.

Ileana Haberman: I feel like every day I find someone new on Instagram doing something incredible that I've never even thought of. Maybe that's true with other mediums, this is just the one I pay attention to. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  There's something else there. The art versus craft thing, I am curious, has that tension increased in the past couple of decades, or has that always been there?

Ileana Haberman: My guess is that it's always been there, and I think actually it's not art versus craft. It's real "Male dominated art" versus the other arts, which are more practical. My art is in a frame to go on a wall but, traditionally speaking, this is for clothing and linens. It's practical, the same as weaving and knitting, all these things are practical; they're women's work, so we don't care about them. That's really what that conversation is about. Also accessibility. Oil paints are expensive. I don't know how to use them. Embroidery floss is 30 cents and I know how to use it because my grandma taught me. There's accessibility and gender in that. It's probably always been there. I don't know if embroiderers have been fighting. When I came in 15/20 years ago it felt new, like, eembroidery hadn't stepped out of towels onto the wall yet, and that's definitely not true. I'm sure there have been people doing that for a long time, but it wasn't remotely mainstream and it really is now. There's probably a louder argument but it's always been there.

Alex Chambers:  Do you feel like the internet has been part of that too?

Ileana Haberman: For sure. It was Flicker in the early days [LAUGHS] and then we jumped to Instagram. But I jumped really late so there's tons of things I don't know about. I am not very good at technology, which is fine with me; I like a needle. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Which is also technology of a different sort.

Ileana Haberman: This is true. Modern, internet and electricity based technology.

Alex Chambers:  Thinking about trying to recognize the needle as technology just as the craft is also an art.

Ileana Haberman: This is true.

Alex Chambers:  You talked in a great way about the gender aspect already, but also queer and trans representation in embroidery. Is that a thing that's also been of cultural importance?

Ileana Haberman: I would like to think so, I also need to leave room for the fact that I have a well curated bubble of queer and trans embroiderers that I follow. What I'm seeing could be skewed, but I would like to hope that it's not. That's what I see and my world is just beautiful. [LAUGHS] Again, because everyone can embroider and there are a lot of people embroidering in the same style as my grandmother, I'm not sure that there is a larger movement, but I hope so. I feel like there are websites like Subversive Stitch and Not Your Grandmother's Stitch; all these cheeky terms that about how we're taking something and making it; like a lot of swear words and nude bodies, a lot of things grandma would not have been okay with. There's a delight in that right now that probably was not there 20 years ago, but I'm not sure that it's specifically queer. I just curate my own life [LAUGHS] to mostly only see queer embroiderers.

Alex Chambers:  What does your grandma think of your work?

Ileana Haberman: Darlene died a few years back. I pushed the boundaries with my grandma for sure. I did come out to her and that was not her favorite thing in the world for a little while but, with enough time she was very on board, which was really special and surprising. I also do lots of silly little embroiders, just like she used to do, of chickens and things,so I probably showed her more of those. She didn't live in Indiana so she did not come to any of my shows, but my grandma really believed in me creatively, and she was also a creative type. I want to call her a crafter, and I feel really gross about that, but I think she would have called them crafts too, and I don't know if that came from a good place in her either. She was always busy with making paintings and embroideries and quilts, so she felt like we had a connection over that. I probably didn't ever show her embroideries with nipples in them. [LAUGHS]. But I know she was proud of that part of me regardless.

Alex Chambers:  Can you talk a little more about how that connects you to your matrilineal line and heritage?

Ileana Haberman: My mom really wants credit, and I really hesitate to give it to her [LAUGHS] because I feel like she put a needle in my hands and taught me how to do it, and I would make patches for a tear in my jeans here and there. But I really came into this as an adult, and so it feels like there was some basic framework of, this is how you make a quilt. You put these pieces together in this way, or this is how you tie a knot and you do a chain stitch. Those basic understandings of these crafts were there, but I really feel very clearly that I took it in a very different direction that is all my own. This is definitely something that is part of my family, but no-one else in my family does it quite like me. They're still very much in the traditional sense. It feels like in the way that embroidery is women's work, I inherited it from the women in my family, and I have pushed it into a new place, but it will always have come from that. It's like the inherited tradition of fiber plus my queer awakening in my early days smushed, together into this strange way that honors both of them, and are entirely mine. [LAUGHS] I don't want to share that credit with anybody. And the mental health part, as a child I would escape to the basement where there was a craft table, and that is where I would go when things were not okay upstairs, so it's like, if you want credit, family, I can give you credit, but we're also going to say that art was good for my brain because things were not okay. [LAUGHS]

Ileana Haberman: I'm grateful for that; what an excellent coping mechanism, but that feels like if we're going to do credit I want to do full credit and say, I did discover this as a child, I just didn't know what I was doing until I was much older. Looking back I can see that craft table in that dark basement was really important for me.

Alex Chambers:  How has having this practice shaped your experience of the pandemic?

Ileana Haberman: I think when the pandemic first started I was so anxious that I did not want to consider that this was going to stick around. But there was a moment when I realized it was okay to make art about these moments, because they're not going anywhere. In the way that I like to choose a moment and slow down on it, I really did not want to do that with the pandemic, because I wanted it to go away. And starting to make the choice to actually stop in the pandemic feeling, and making embroidery about feeling anxious or scared, or feeling lonely or not safe, whatever it was; those are feelings I typically don't make art about. If I look at the broad spectrum of what I've made art about, it's usually more positive feelings, and these are pretty negative. That's not universally true for my art, but it's more of a value is that those are the moments I really want to sit with. So this was sitting with something very different.

Ileana Haberman: I had to give myself permission to do that, and I got so much peace from it. I work with small children who are still unvaccinated and might never be, and that has been really stressful. We hung out outside all year, and my toes were cold every day. I don't really know how I did that but. Having something at the end of the day to calm my mind from constant fear around these little kids, was an enormous blessing. I don't know that I would have got through, or how I would have kept my sanity or my job. I don't think I kept my sanity but I seem to be okay now; I feel like I'm doing pretty well. Without that, that wouldn't have happened. Having something to busy that part of me that was like "Who's wearing a mask, who's not wearing a mask, how close am I?" and then just sit down and make triangles, whatever it was, it always comes back to triangles. There's something that happens when you have somewhere to put a feeling so, if I'm making an embroidery about pandemic anxiety, and I'm feeling a lot of pandemic anxiety, you can put it in that piece and let a little bit off yourself. Having a vessel for your anxiety, means you're not carrying so much yourself, and that was really important.

Alex Chambers:  Ileana Haberman, thank you so much for coming in.

Ileana Haberman: Thank you so much for having me.

Alex Chambers:  That was Bloomington artist, Ileana Haberman. You can find her work at Ileanahaberman.com, or follow her on Instagram. We'll have links on our website. It's time for a short break, be right back.

Alex Chambers:  It's Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers, welcome back. At his hilltop retreat in Brown County, painter T.C. Steele carved a phrase into the mantel. "It has seemed to me that the greatest of all the arts is the art of living." A century later Bloomington writer and cabinet maker Nancy Hiller, has arrived at the same conclusion, thanks in no small part to dogs. Next up on Inner States, Yaël Ksander reviews Nancy Hiller's latest book, Shop Tails; The Animals Who Help Us Make Things Work.

Yaël Ksander:  A morning dove with a broken wing, a mouse kept in a pocket. A parrot, a guinea pig and an endless parade of cats and dogs. According to her latest book, Nancy Hiller's never met an animal she doesn't like and isn't willing to be seriously inconvenienced by. At the book store Hiller's Shop Tails: The Animals Who Help Us Make Things Work, might easily get sorted alongside All Creatures Great and Small. Unlike James Herriot's comfort reading however, Hiller's memoir isn't a refuge from a less comfortable reality. Instead it documents her separate peace with it. Hiller had published a book about her life as a cabinet maker in 2017. When I interviewed her about that book: Making Things Work, she insisted "I did not set out to write a memoir. Whenever I see people refer to this book as a memoir, I feel a little embarrassed because I'm not the sort of person who thinks she is worthy of writing a memoir."

Yaël Ksander:  That impostor syndrome grips some of the most interesting and accomplished people is one of life's great ironies. If the life of a woman who has distinguished herself over the past four decades, in the overwhelmingly masculine orbit of fine woodworking, is not worthy of memoir, whose is? Add to that Nancy's Florida childhood wherein hippies built shanties in the backyard and shared psychedelic drugs with her; a stint at a Dickensian boarding school in England, and eventual matriculation at Cambridge. Her early 20s spent cycling to and from a furniture making apprenticeship in a shop full of 19th century lunch pail types; a return to the academy in the 30s for a Masters in Religious Studies. An all in approach to romantic relationships, and the places they'll take you, and an uncompromising dedication to her craft, some poverty, crippling health insurance costs, sleeping where you have to, and peeing in a bucket.

Yaël Ksander:  These and many other stories of the rebel girl who is Nancy Hiller can be found in her two memoirs. The first, of course, about cabinet making, and this latest, of course, about animals. But, just like your shrink might tell you that the thing you think you're upset about is not the thing you're really upset about, there's a difference between subject matter and content. Even before this pair of memoirs, Hiller's been known to use subject matter as camouflage. In her 2009 book, The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History, Hiller pushed a big old piece of furniture in front of her, so she could actually talk about the evolution of women's place in the home and the world. Hiller was at it again in 2011, with the Lush tomb, A Home Of Her Own, which could easily have passed for a coffee table book on decorating, if you didn't also read the stories of the women who had saved and transformed these old houses and, in the process, saved and transformed themselves. I called that fierce book A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing.

Yaël Ksander:  With Shop Tails, it's more fun with animal disguises, to a point. But you won't get too far into it without realizing that you've signed up for more than a book about critters. The merry tales of wee mice, naughty parrots and kitchen restorations are book-ended, interrupted and interspersed with suffering, loss and existential inquiry. And this time there's no ambivalence about the genre. This work is largely a memoir, Hiller states on the copyright page. A small step for a woman, it's a large step for womankind when a woman decides to take up space. Shop Tails was written at a reckoning point. We learn early on that Hiller is facing a life threatening illness. Recovery, she decides, will depend not only on medical treatment, but on healing from childhood pain and the pattern it set up, constantly needing to prove her worth to others through achievement. While the book might be regarded as one more bona fide in a formidable series of them, it isn't just another achievement; it's an artifact of the deep healing Hiller knew she could no longer put off.

Yaël Ksander:  "I was dangerously dependent on outside forces," Hiller writes. "People who express their opposition no less than their approval. It suddenly felt deeply exhausting. Whatever might happen with the course of my cancer, I was not going back to my old ways of living." The path toward a new way of living began in the hours before her chemo port was implanted, putting aside decades of justifications, Nancy sat down and wrote a letter to her parents. A couple of talented and unusual individuals she had "long appreciated as people, but at a fundamental level didn't trust as parents." Within an instant of receiving her parents open hearted responses to her letter, and this is no exaggeration she insists, the life I had made appeared in a new light. Shop Tails is a pien to that life Hillard has made, bathed in the new light that reconciliation and reorientation have afforded. Not unlike James Herriot, Hillar records the routines and pleasures of daily life and the flora and fauna of all species she has encountered along the way.

Yaël Ksander:  But this book does not offer an escape from reality. It documents a mindful embrace of it. That's where Hillard's specialization in re-envisioning period furniture and interiors comes in. She respects what she calls the authorial intent of an original room, and at the same time the need to adapt it to "suit the family who now lives there." Hiller's book prompts us to think of our own life as an old house. Whether we grew up in a mansion or split level, the place usually needs some restoration, rehabilitation and creative re-use in order to be thoroughly functional, let alone fabulous. Reinterpretation might in fact be the very antidote to the pain, loss and suffering life brings. "So much is beyond our control" Hiller concedes, "but we do have a say in how we respond."

Yaël Ksander:  After decades of gutting it out, producing objects for others approval, Hiller's redefinition of the artist's way is an act of survival. "Making something constructive out of challenging circumstances," she writes, "is every bit as creative as baking a loaf of sourdough bread, building a canoe, or assembling a kumiko panel." Even the renowned Hoosier impressionist T. C. Steele would have agreed. The mantel of his Brown County home was inscribed, "It has seemed to me that the greatest of all the arts is the art of living." Nancy Hiller comes to the same place, in no small part thanks to dogs, because dogs, unlike most humans, have the good sense not to underrate the value of a predictable, and contented life. Take Nancy's beloved dog Winnie, for example. Get up, go out, eat breakfast began her morning routine. Make sure mom, dad and Jonas are safely off to work and school, then take a nap.

Yaël Ksander:  Watch robins hop through the grass. Greet the family when they come home in the evening. Go out in the dark and tell the coyotes they better not even think about coming into the yard overnight. Have a bedtime cookie and a drink. Lie down with Lizzie near the wood stove for the night. "In other words" Nancy Writes, "a basic life of responsibilities, simple rewards, a loving family, and rest well earned." Hiller concedes that appreciating this lesson in fulfillment took a while to sink in. Years later, in this especially uncertain time, her acceptance of a dog's wisdom offers solace for us all. I'm Yaël Ksander.

Alex Chambers:  Yaël Ksander reviewed Nancy Hiller's book Shop Tails; The Animals Who Help Us Make Things Work. Published in 2021 by Lost Art Press. This review is produced in partnership with Limestone Post Magazine, where you can read the full review. We'll have a link of the episode website. Limestone Post is an independent magazine focused on solutions based journalism, that covers the arts, outdoors, social justice issues and more, in Bloomington and the surrounding areas. Tune into Inner States March 6th for Yaël's next review of debut novels by Bloomington based writers, Greta Lind and Denise Breeden-Ost. You've been listening to Inner States. If you have a story for us, or you've got some sound we should hear, let us know at WFIU.org/innerstates. Speaking of found sound, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first the credits.

Alex Chambers:  Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Eoban Binder, Aaron Cain, Mark Chilla, Michael Paskash, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is John Bailey. Special thanks this week to Ileana Haberman and Yaël Ksander. Our theme music is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar.We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music and Airport People. Time to take a breathe and listen to a place.

Alex Chambers:  You've been listening to cicadas over the Lost River, at the Wesley Chapel Gulf, Orange County, Indiana. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.