Waywords Studio
Explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs. Grab a copy of our Readers Manifesto! I'm Steve Chisnell, an educator for 35 years and an aggressive reader for 50---Let's read and write together and I'll let you in on a few things I've discovered and am still learning!
On Horror, Power, Story, and the Too-Thin Differences Between Them
20 Sept 2026 Reader, Story is terrifying Have you read Kenneth Burke, yet? Well, I guess I don't expect him to be everyone's go-to favorite, but despite his often obscure style and sometimes obtuse references, he was fairly formative for my thinking. (It helps that I had the opportunity in my grad school years to speak with him.) Like many of the early modern era thinkers on language, he understood that not only isn't our language neutral, but neither is what it produces, which is basically...
On Untimely Times and Obvious Absence
30 Aug 2026 Reader, Upgrading is not always faster . . . When I made the decision to upgrade my main studio computer, I was optimistic when the tech said he could have my new build inside a single day. Then it was simply a matter of restoring all of my former backups. Ah, that word "simply!" Of course, it was nonsense, but hey, at least my browser is up again and I could respond to emails on a full monitor and even access my newsletter software! (After three weeks.) As for the rest? Mostly,...
On Creatures, Colonialism, and Welcome Comments
10 Aug 2026 Reader, Two Opportunities! First, fairly soon after Frictional Reading goes to press, I will be publishing my first work of original fiction and short prose, a book yet to be named. Most of this new anthology is written, having filled in various spaces of writing time for me over the past few years. In general, its themes also revolve around structure (as Unwoven does), but in a more meta-textual sense. Its fiction and near-fiction works poke at and test various elements of...
On "The End of Reading" and "Original" Documents
26 July 2026 Reader, On "The End of Reading is Here" I promised a response to Rose Horowitch's Atlantic article that has been stirring up all kind of literacy apocalypse screams across social media. If you missed the article, a pdf version First, I have nothing against its writer Horowitch, a younger journalist who is splashing her way to a successful career by tracing a number of cultural shifts in technology and academia. It's important work, and I admire much of what she has written, even...
On Reviews, Revolutions, and Resilience
12 July 2026 Reader, No More Book "Reviews" Well, yes and no. As I've been working through my own "strategic planning" for Waywords at its anniversary, and while I've often enough lamented my own struggles with work flow, I've recognized that some projects I've been placing so much time in simply didn't "fit." And that was Book Reviews. My longer reviews, whether simply written or in short or long-form videos, were a real time-consumer, and I was producing three each week. And while they...
On Freedoms, Frictions, and Fairy Tales
28 June 2026 Reader, Why Friction? I was speaking to some folks I met at the MLA Intellectual Freedom Summit a couple of weeks back (Hi and welcome if you are one of my new subscribers from there!), and during some of our infrequent free moments, we got to talking about our own projects and Frictional Reading arose. Since the group was mostly librarians, I was little surprised at their response: curiosity, engagement, enthusiasm, and then a gentle and healthy skepticism. One of the first...
On TBR, Tourism, and Gratuity
14 June 2026 Reader, I'm Reading! Why Does My TBR List* Just Get Longer? *To-Be-Read List When I retired from teaching, my TBR List was a few hundred titles long: I read a great deal while I taught, but too often had to set authors aside for classroom priorities. (And writing for my self? Forget about it!) Now, after five years, that TBR List is well over one thousand books, even though I've read nearly 500 books since! I don't know if your experience is similar, but it is becoming obvious to...
On Travel, Reading Lists, and Too Much Juice
31 May 2026 Reader, Is The Summer Travel Juice Worth the Squeeze? Ever since I listened to an interview where Michigan Senator Ellisa Slotkin (D) used the phrase "Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze" no less than four times when describing foreign policy choices---and forcibly reminded myself that she has a background in national intelligence---I have been using the phrase in a kind of overbearing irony. You know, to balance her apparent sincerity. The indifferent off-handedness of it, a cavalier...
On Brazilian Writers, Thinkers, Teachers
17 May 2026 Reader, Reading Paulo Freire If you're a teacher, you've probably come across his name, and if you're a good teacher, you've read him or wanted to. But odds are he wasn't included in your teacher preparation curriculum, no matter the university. Some grad programs are beginning to include him, though he passed almost 30 years ago. Not a teacher and wondering why you might read him? Because he argues---in all of his books---a singular premise: that we are unfinished people, that we...
On Lies, Ecology, and Expendables
3 May 2026 Reader, Who's Lying? Lessons from a Waywords Table Recently I had the opportunity to create a table display that featured my works and Waywords in general. The audience was small, the event very local, but I thought it might be interesting to offer all of you a taste of what I did. Primarily, I wanted to model various approaches to frictional reading in different interactions, each an exercise around any given reading (or listening) experience. I offered a jar with reading prompts;...
Explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs. Grab a copy of our Readers Manifesto! I'm Steve Chisnell, an educator for 35 years and an aggressive reader for 50---Let's read and write together and I'll let you in on a few things I've discovered and am still learning!