A Ball State class’s journey to create a podcast about sexual violence.
“Through stories we gain power.”
This is a guiding principle for Professor Jill Christman. If you’ve met her, she’s hard to forget—if people were lights, Jill would outshine the night sky on the Fourth of July. She has taught creative nonfiction at Ball State for 18 years, published two memoirs and a lot of essays—like, really, a lot—and, in the fall of 2019, she became the executive producer of a podcast called Indelible.
Indelible was created as part of an immersive learning course through the Virginia B. Ball Center, which is located in a huge, beautiful, totally haunted mansion south of campus. I was one of the students in that fifteen-credit-hour class in that totally haunted mansion.
I had the extreme good fortune to be working alongside Jill and 13 other brilliant, hardworking undergrads. Our mission for the semester was both simple and seemingly impossible: to fight sexual violence on college campuses through the power of storytelling. More specifically, the power of podcasting.
Ironically, I almost never listened to podcasts before last fall. I didn’t have the first clue about how to make one, and I was equally clueless about our subject matter: sexual violence. How do you turn that into neat 30-minute episodes that are educational without being dry and make narrative sense?
Somehow, we figured it out. By the end of the semester, we had a trailer, a pilot episode, a video documentary about the class itself, and plans to present our work at a regional conference. As fall turned into spring and the world devolved into pandemic-induced uncertainty and grief, we continued to produce new episodes. By the end of our second semester, we had finished the first full season of Indelible.
The journey to get to that point was filled with extraordinary people and a fabulous quantity of cooperation. It was also filled with many moments of despair. The more you learn about sexual violence, the more hopeless you feel—even though, somehow, the hope that remains feels more intense than ever.
We named our podcast Indelible because of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford, who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s and later testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee. During that hearing, she was asked to describe her strongest memory of the incident. She replied that the way her assaulters were laughing was the one thing she couldn’t forget, the un-erasable mark left on her brain. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said.
Indelible: what a strange and specific word to choose, and how well-chosen it was. Literally, indelible means “written in permanent ink.” As we would learn and relearn throughout the semester, so many things are indelible when it comes to sexual violence.
To compare this project to any other English class I’d ever taken is like trying to compare a velociraptor to a stapler: you can’t. If anything, that semester was taught like an art class. We learned how to use recorders and editing software by using them. We learned about sexual violence by reading and listening to the stories of people who’d experienced it themselves. We figured out how to approach deeply complicated societal issues in podcast format by discussing it over too much coffee in a really cold room in a totally haunted mansion that most Ball State students don’t know exists. In short, we buried ourselves in research up to our eyeballs in preparation for a podcast that still felt kind of impossible.
And then, two months into the class, I conducted my first interview. It was a Skype call with a woman who’d been assaulted in a parking lot outside a bar, and agreed to share her story on the condition of anonymity. (You can now find this interview in the second episode of Indelible).
I was nervous as an astronaut on the very first space shuttle. All the other things I was doing for Indelible—sending long, carefully worded emails, composing music, writing scripts—all those things, I was comfortable doing, but conducting a professional interview was something I’d never done before.
I kept looking at my list of questions, wondering if they were the right ones, stammering as I asked them. I worried over what to say if she started crying. As it turned out, the woman on the other end of the call was more at ease than I was, and told her story with eloquence and a lot fewer ums than myself. We had a really good conversation.
After I clicked the “end call” button, I sat motionless for a while, feeling a lot of things at once. It was real. It was happening. This podcast we’d been talking about as a concept was no longer just a jumble of Google Docs filled with brainstorming—it was the calm, matter-of-fact voice of that woman as she described the cologne of a man violating her half-naked body in the backseat of her own car. It was the audio file saved to my computer.
I’ve conducted my fair share of interviews since then, but I will never forget that first one. I suppose you could call it indelible.
As the semester hurtled forward, days blurring into months and summer blurring into October snow, our class encountered questions we had no idea how to answer. How do you explain something as complex and systematic and stigmatized as sexual assault? How can you tell a survivor to have hope when you know that their assaulter will almost certainly never spend a day in prison, because that’s how the system works? How do you not go nuts and start screaming into the abyss when you’re thinking about rape all day, every day? It felt like we were fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.
Regardless of everything, the podcast took shape. We gradually grew familiar with that wildfire. We interviewed Title IX administrators, counselors, professionals in the field from far and wide, sexual assault nurse examiners, and victim advocates. We heard the statistics so many times we memorized them.
80% of sexual assaults are “acquaintance rapes,” carried out by someone the victim knows. 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college. More than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses don’t report their assault.
All of these statistics come from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, although numbers vary from source to source—as we found out, statistics for sexual violence are exceptionally complicated to pin down. Different studies use different methods and definitions (e.g. sexual assault vs. sexual violence vs. rape), which makes them challenging to cross-reference. Many studies are outdated. Some studies, such as statistics for gender-nonconforming individuals, are essentially nonexistent. We learned these things, too.
We learned that there’s no “normal” way for a survivor to act after an assault. Being tearful and quiet is only one response; they also might be full of nervous laughter, or completely numb and unresponsive. They might avoid sex for a long time afterward, but at the other extreme, they might become more sexually active. They might go back to their abuser again and again.
We learned how much we didn’t know. We had the phrase “know your resources” drummed into us, and eventually, we did know them: Title IX, the Office of Victim Services, websites like rainn.org and nsvrc.org, hotlines like the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673), crisis shelters like A Better Way, support groups, counseling, and other podcasts and books about sexual violence.
We learned that belief is the first and most important step, and that giving control back to the survivor in whatever way possible is the next one. Sometimes the best thing to say is, “I can’t tell you what to do, but whatever you do, I can be there with you.” But only after, “I believe you.”
We learned that through stories, we gain power.
On January 29, 2020, we released the first episode of Indelible, nearly half a year in the making. Our baby is out in the world, now. When I put in my earbuds and pressed play, knowing just how much had to happen to create those 21 minutes, 38 seconds of sound, I felt like I took a deep breath for the first time in months. It was real. We made something. More than that, we made something (possibly, hopefully) indelible.
And that first episode was only the beginning. Over the course of the next semester, we produced three more episodes, and even worked through the summer to produce our fifth episode to finish off Season 1. Most of our team has now graduated, and our beloved, totally haunted mansion is now empty, and, honestly, the world sorta kinda feels like it’s ending, but we’re still making this thing. Still fighting this fight. And we’re not going to stop.
Listen to Indelible on Simplecast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, and follow our social media on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates and behind-the-sounds material.
More information about sexual assault and a more in-depth resource list are available on indeliblepodcast.com. If you or a survivor you know is interested in sharing their story on Indelible, or if you just want to chat, get in touch with us at [email protected]. And, one last thing—Professor Jill Christman’s favorite benediction:
Treat yourself with gentleness today.
