Big Talk

For the second week of Fall Fund Drive 2022, we feature more music created and performed by guests who’ve appeared on Big Talk through the years. Last week and this, we’ve presented music by Amanda Biggs, Busman’s Holiday, Henry Leck and the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, Jason Fickel and Ginger Curry, Jeff Isaac and the Postmodern Jazz Quartet, Kacie Swierk, Krista …

This year’s Fall Fund Drive runs from September 8th through the 18th. As always, we’ll be interrupting normal programing to ask you, the listeners and community, for help to keep us on the air for the next six months. So as not to give short shrift to our guests, Big Talk this week and next will feature music created and …

Our conversation with Rick Armstrong, the new executive director for Stages Bloomington Theater Company, aired last week, Thursday, August 25th. Our chat continues this week as Rick tells us about his path to becoming a high school science teacher and youth theater educator. This edition of Big Talk aired Thursday, September 25th, 2022. Hosts Michael Glab and Alex Ashkin chat …

He staged plays with his stuffed animals when he was a little kid. Rick Armstrong went on to spend much of his adult life helping young people learn the workings of theater, both onstage and off. Now retired from Martinsville High School, he’s taken on the challenge of leading Stages Bloomington Theater Company, a unique program for young people. Hosts …

There are still young, exciting writers in journalism, even as we tumble headlong into the social media age. Jeff LaFave began work as a reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Times and now teaches feature writing and literary journalism at Indiana University’s Media School. Writing news stories can be an art and, as LaFave explains to Alex Ashkin, it’s a gift people are …

He went from making old time music to making apple cider in Vermont. Then Sam Bartlett crossed the country serving as cities’ and towns’ artist-in-residence and “public art instigator.” His life took another turn with the publication of several of his Stuntology books. Bartlett creates art along the edges and, so, must make it constantly to survive. Hosts Michael Glab …

She asked her husband, a neurosurgeon, what he might want to do as an alternative to the pandemic-stressed medical field. Samantha Eads at the time was a nurse practitioner working toward her doctorate in Integrative Health. Her husband said he dreamed of owning a bookstore. Two weeks later Rick Morgenstern put out the call for investors in the second incarnation …

It’s an oddity in a college town: a bar/music venue that shies away from an undergrad clientele. In 2009, Steve Westrich was emerging from a traumatic romantic breakup and decided to try his hand at a new, risky business. Also unhappy with his career to that point, he wanted to open the kind of bar he’d like to hang out …

She begins her second year leading one of the nation’s premier repositories of film and video. Alicia Kozma has studied, researched, written, and taught about films and other media since she was a teenager. She has focused on labor in media — who works in movies and TV and what their working conditions are — as well as gender both …

They didn’t become farmers until they were in their fifties. Now, Juan Carlos Arango and Robert Frew are all in. Their Sobremesa Farm just outside New Unionville, northeast of Bloomington, provides them and their customers with nutritious food grown using sustainable permaculture practices and it is a destination for vacationers, campers, and visitors from around the world who want to …