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 Bellow's Tears, Shedding Straws, and Misreading
11 May 2025 Responsible Readers Writing Back Reader, The job is huge, not the least because we ourselves fall so easily to contributing. The rhetorical "strategies" of communities seem determined towards simple division, scraped down and packaged into semi-coherent shouts of opposition packaged as shareable memes or barely-suppressed acts of rage. Medical wranglings, immigration policies, foreign affairs, the US Constitution, legal proceedings, and personal mores are whittled on demand: "Give...
A Recipe for a Literary Nomads Podcast Episode
4 May 2024 What Goes Into a Podcast Episode? Partly staged, partly the natural Waywords chaos (full scale image linked to pic) Reader, A newsletter about time, partly to offer you all a glimpse behind the scenes of producing some of the Waywords content, and partly to sketch out for myself my pattern: perhaps we'll spot something interesting! One Episode of Literary Nomads I already know that I do more prep than many podcasts, mostly before recording in reading and research and "curricular"...
On Themes, Carpe, & Movement
27 April 2025 Some Coherence Reader, May promises to be a frantic month for me as I do double-duty to prepare materials in order to take most of June off for a special "travel project:" details soon enough! As you probably understand by now, 'work flow' is the great bugaboo around here: what gets done first, what requires small tinkering, what can I get off the table now, how can I get more out of each read and write? And perhaps it is the nature of the (insert your favorite adjective here)...
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...
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!