Words and Music: An Audio Exploration of the Life and Work of Indiana Writers is a humanities-based program produced by Big Car Collaborative and aired on our radio station, WQRT FM. You can listen to the full season of eight episodes made by Big Car artists Jim Walker and Oreo Jones on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, and more.
Thanks to support from Indiana Humanities, Words and Music brings poetry and creative prose into the world in eight audio documentaries. These feature Hoosier writers as co-hosts and explore history and contemporary culture through the lens of Indiana-connected writers.
Words and Music harnesses the power of technology to deliver humanities programming through Big Car Collaborative’s community-led FM radio station and on-demand digital platforms. With these eight episodes led by Walker and Jones — often in collaboration with authors Susan Neville and Adrian Matejka — we created and shared content designed to call attention to writers from Indiana we should all know more about.
Poet and essayist Terrance Hayes wrote in To Float in The Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, “The way to engage art is to make art; the best way to grasp the wonder of poetry is to make poetry. Making involves action, not deduction. It involves wading into the restless liquid of language.”
We’re offering a deeper, more connected experience to writing, to history, to the culture and communities that make up Indiana. By taking listeners on journeys inside the work, by exploring the stories behind the work — the stories of the writers — and by connecting the dots with the context of time and place and people, we’ve created deep investment in the humanities for our listeners. And we connect them in new ways to language, to literature, to Indiana history, to philosophy so integral to poetry and prose, to criticism and theories behind the work, and to what it means to be a person living among so many different but connected lives in this world.
