Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On Dis-Reading, Manifestos, and Killer Rabbits
13 April 2025 A Manifesto Forming Reader, I've offered ideas of writing back, talking out, projecting our thinking into the world. Behind all of that, of course, is some broader thinking on what reading is probably for. I'm not talking about the rather pedantic reasons so often given by "employment literacy" advocates or the worthy but solitary self-enrichment activities of most of us. What's been forming for some time (and I mean years or decades) involves some scary words when attached to...
On Comforting Myths, Poetry, and Writing Back
30 March 2025 Talking and Writing Back Reader, April (National Poetry Month!) is upon us and now is a good time to engage our poetic and political voices, reading, talking, and writing poetry into public spaces, encouraging and listening to others do the same. Maybe writing poetry isn't your thing. That's cool. Write a short piece and we'll call it a prose poem. Check. Or maybe you think writing politically isn't where your passion lies. No worries. All writing is inherently political: it...
On Reading for Action, Uncertainty, & Even Kafka
17 March 2025 Hard Conversations Hey, all! I've these past two weeks discovered some interesting dynamics in my local efforts to foster healthy book challenge policies: lawyers and leaders are choosing instead to keep their heads down and hope for the best. As one education leader said to me, "We are working to avoid any spotlights." It's a fear response, a kind of paralysis, which we have all seen in countless places across the news. It's also, at its kindness, an unhealthy position for...
On Reading, Resolution, and Remembering
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...
On Found Poetry, Metaphor, and Transpiration
16 February 2025 Reading as Inhalation It's a tempting metaphor, that. We breathe in words, ideas, worlds. Certainly in many senses, our acts of reading are a "taking in," a cognitive absorption of the ideas of another. The idea is not new, but paired with its complement, "Writing is Exhaling," it is often attributed to literacy expert and LitWorld founder Pam Allyn. This makes sense as a limited metaphor and poetic aphorism to promote literacy and writing: "If you read, you should make it...
On Blame, Booker Lists, and Mystic Varmints
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...
On Community, Composing Anew, and Cameroon
19 January 2025 Considering Community For the past many years, I have spent the third Monday of January helping coordinate volunteer projects around the community with my school district. After all, treating MLK Jr Day as a Day of Service seemed an easy choice; I used my youth Rotary club, Interact, to help coordinate our work. But it wasn't long before I became disillusioned. While we would engage hundreds of people in celebrations of Dr. King's words and then sending them out in the fresh...
On Practice, Play, and The Prince of Cats
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...
On Irresolution, Waywords 2025, and Digging up 2024
22 December 2024 Irresolved Whether it's Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Saturnalia, Festivus, or in any combination, I wish for you all the best this holiday season and the time to reflect on the close of one year and the opening of another, as we have so many times. I'm not one in favor of New Year's Resolutions: popularism, tradition, and external Influencers of "joiner culture" seem slim foundation for success. Consider such resolutions made in these next weeks as "by the way" in terms of...
On the Solstice, AI Notebooks, and Returning Light
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...
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!