Waywords Studio

3 March 2025 National Reading to Keep Us Human Month Hi, everyone! Lots of projects and works fusing and cohering for me behind the scenes! My initial efforts at local advocacy against book banning are batting .500 with a positive dialog with my library and an opaque silence from the schools: time to escalate. Writing, podcasts, other recording projects, reading priorities, are all materializing into a solid direction for 2025. (I dare not be overly hopeful.) Frustrated and disheartened as...

2 February 2025 Let's Wander a Bit Literary Nomads is up and running--well, traveling, anyway! Since we've chatted last, two episodes have gone up, an introduction to the podcast (with a taste of dramatic irony, never a bad thing), and some discussions of how that impacts literary accountability. These ideas, the narrative distance we often overlook as readers, will be essential to understanding what we make of Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress," which we will "camp out on" for...

5 January 2025 In Practice The challenge is ever quantity vs quality, but I keep fighting myself to hold to some different words altogether: words like consistency, habitude, routine. What will I do each day? No matter what we produce this calendar year, let's promise ourselves something close to these latter ideas. It's not that the writing and reading we do must always be extraordinary, but that it happens, regularly, in the now. The second promise we might make is to do something with what...

8 December 2024 Solstice & Podcasts Ahead Mid-December warmth, to all! I've always been more drawn to the Solstice than the traditional New Year, that shortest of daygleams, that center of Halcyon illusions of serenity. What it marks moving forward, though, is the gradual lengthening of light. And with it, perhaps, resolve. Still, in keeping with a tradition both Victorian and far more ancient (imagining birth and death rituals, Saturnalia, Stonehenge), Waywords will bring a ghost story...

17 November 2024 What Comes Now? Well, Reader, Whatever is ahead for the US and the world, our reading and writing thoughtfully, in significance, will be more important than ever. Young folks largely understand how to emote publicly (though performatively); but it's important that they read models of discourse both honest and measured, not build upon the provocative hyperbole and absolutism which threatens to topple reason. Equally, though, as individuals and communities hurting emerge...