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 Literature and Politics, Good Horror, and Rough Attitudes
4 Oct 2025 Joining in Some Good Friction Reader, I'm excited and apprehensive! I recently put the announcement out to several of my online circles: I'm starting the early work on a new book, an important one for me, on my approach to reading, what I might better describe as an attitude: Frictional Reading. Yes, you've seen me writing about this concept in the past few newsletters, too. And while I've had a ton of pieces floating around me in the past several years, between Waywords bringing...
On Nurturing Literacy, Community, and Democracy
21 Sept 2025 Engagements on the Ground, but Slowly Reader, I've been wrestling a bit with an anxiety to move quickly, to respond as actively as the siege of news and propaganda can produce posts. As some would have it--and I would not argue--the nature of democracy is at stake, globally. And as I have said before, a lot of what we read is far outside our range to affect. So I ask this rejoinder question: In our communities, aren't the stakes always exactly this? Apathy and disengagement have...
On Fights and Rights, Friction and Nixon
7 Sept 2025 Friction Ahead Reader, I've been thinking a lot about friction lately: friction as a posture against the speed and "flow" of culture, friction as a cognitive stance of inquiry and challenge in our reading, friction as reading strategy for discovery of meaning, in our discussion, in the work of classrooms and of teachers, in the demands of institutions. I just finished reading Valuable Friction by business strategist Robert Rose who I was fortunate to meet and hear speak at a...
On Hideous Bargains and Diminishing Literacies
17 August 2025 Resources for Reading Reader, Now that I've got a few entries in place on the Education portion of the Waywords website, I can continue that process and start moving on to other kinds of offerings, like Reading Intensives and the long-awaited Teachers Guide to Unwoven, with my true appreciation for those who have waited. [And with that, another reminder that--until that Teachers Edition is published, the main offering of it---all of the poetic supplements, annotations, and...
On Fantasy, New Offers, and Artists at the Crossroads
3 August 2025 Education Platform Opening Reader, At last (though pretty close to on schedule for me!) the Waywords website has begun to open its Education section. Right now, it is a separate weekly blog which places most of the concepts from Literary Nomads Season 5 into tighter packages, offering a free download related to the talk. The first series is on the basic critical reading process I have promoted: Notice-Significance-Pattern-Coherence, which is based largely on Reader-Response...
On Land Acknowledgements and More Discomfiture
20 July 2025 Land Acknowledgements & Inadequacies Reader, I've been puzzling more than a bit over indigenous land acknowledgements as I move to position myself as an ally for global and marginalized voices and narratives, a necessary part of the Waywords mission and part of the Reader's Manifesto. So let's be real for a minute. Waywords Studio is in Michigan, the state itself an Ojibwe word for "great lake." Hundreds of towns, lakes, and Detroit-made automobiles are similarly named. I have...
On the Heat, Cranky Readings, and Slow Down to Read
6 July 2025 A C+ for My Automations Skill Reader, For those curious, as my automations fire off (or fail to), I've put together a short list of platforms and reviews for their ease and reliability. If anyone knows simpler or more effective methods, let me know, but my budget does not allow for another paid service! YouTube - Easy to schedule; hugely reliable Pinterest - 30-day scheduling limit; clumsy pin builds with no editing after scheduling; very reliable publishing Tumblr - Easy to...
On Anarchy, Automation, and Acknowledging the Aberrant
6 June 2025 A Test of Automation Mastery Reader, I'm going to travel in the next several weeks to a few places around Canada and the US in part to research and produce some material in anticipation of Season 7 of Literary Nomads: Literary Tourism & Anne of Green Gables. This will be the first time I've stepped away from the studio with the expectation that my productivity will continue "without me," and I'll be testing my ability to automate everything far out in advance. My hope is that none...
On New Journeys, Simplified Belief, and Free Stuff
25 May 2025 Closing One Season, Anticipating Another Reader, When I first conceived of the texts I would make as "base camps" for Literary Nomads, I remember reminding myself not to get too married to the order and concepts I would touch upon: it's a lesson I learned from teaching, too. I could compel classrooms in certain directions to meet curricular calendars, but the best learning always happened when I let them steer us by curiosity. Already, Nomads has turned in directions I had not...
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...
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!