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 Monsters, Red Shirts, and Wet Books
22 Mar 2026 Reader, Finding the Conversations As this week's podcast explored some of the arguments pro-medical experimentation regardless of risk and sacrifice, I fell upon a rhetorical strategy that disturbed me. In making their pleas, crusader-tech advocates would first argue a seemingly significant question ["What is the measure of sovereign humanity?" "How much technology can we load into a human body before it becomes cyborg?" "How much medical manipulation of reproduction might render...
On Reflections and Writers Conferences
8 March 2026 All Things AWP . . . Reader, Anticipations After last summer's CEX conference, one designed mostly around podcasting and other content creation and entrepreneurs, I was ready instead for a meeting of authors, people more dedicated to the craft of writing than the hustle of "selling" and lead magnets and engagement statistics. Yeah, I learned things there, and yes, I even left with the idea for my next book (Frictional Reading), but they weren't "my people." But authors,...
On Divestment and Re-Investment in the Meaningful
22 Feb 2026 Shifting Resources and Slowing Down Reader, Ditching Audible I know my consumerism is directly related to my politics. It's easy to neglect this, inconvenient to remember. Even so, I have carefully examined companies that actively contribute to agendas and ideologies which work against my own ambition for our communities: ecologically, educationally, and in human rights. Apps get deleted, investments get re-arranged (or pension fund investments lobbied), insurances and credit...
On Gender, Genre, and Generativity
8 Feb 2026 Fallibility, Inefficiencies, and Virtue Reader, Surely, I said, taking my website operations offline for a couple of days while I work on the RSS feed error (one that derailed the podcast for a week)---surely, no one would really notice. Then came the two emails from folks wanting to download some resources and couldn't make the payment system work. Ahhh... I feel like I should learn something from this, but I can't imagine what it is, but perhaps only: Shrug and move on. Maybe...
On Anne, Africa, and Antrobus
25 Jan 2026 Literary Pilgrimages Reader, Looking a bit forward, I'm starting to outline the next podcast Journey #7, on Literary Tourism. A bit odd as a topic, but maybe refreshing and lighter for the summer after a heavy dose of Le Guin's ethics and agency dilemmas. And as a running example, I'm looking at uncovering Prince Edward Island's Anne of Green Gables phenomenon--along with a few short side trails. And that's where you might come in! I'm outlining what looks like a 12-14 episode...
On Pretense, Prophecy, and the Absence of Poetry
11 Jan 2026 2025, We Hardly Believed You Reader, Big plans for 2025 were (expectedly, predictably, unavoidably, resignedly) deferred and revised. As I said, some two dozen newsletters ago, I stand irresolute. And it's a good thing. While I did not manage to bring back Legacy yet or move forward much on some of my current writing projects, and while some of my content production was downright paused, I did in August discover a (maybe "the") book idea that will define much of what I'm about...
On Ships, Stories, and Writing Into the Wind
28 Dec 2025 Casting Off as Philosophy Reader, Have you heard of Neurath's Boat as a philosophical analogy? I just came across it in my reading of Gila Sher's epistemology. It's similar to the Ship of Theseus but with a lot of different applications. Rather than write overmuch here about its creator's original use, here's the metaphor to play with. You (or you and a crew) set off on your ship on a quest to "know" or understand something. As you journey, a leak develops in your ship of tools...
On Bad Books, Bad Robots, and Bad Form
14 Dec 2025 Writing All Our Voices Reader, I've been playing with the approach to my upcoming book, Frictional Reading, and I'm already convinced that the book needs to not only describe the reading attitude I am advocating but to demonstrate it. That is, I need to build some friction into the text and its reading that reveals, too, the frictions of its writing. For instance, I cannot pretend that I am single-minded and single-purposed in my approach: doubts, challenges, new questions and...
On Tranquility, Banality, and Toppling My Language Comfort
30 Nov 2025 Stripping Away Our Confidence Reader, So I've been reading like a mad fool in preparation for my next book, and occasionally I come across concepts that catch my attention. This past week, it was the problem of post-colonial literatures, that writers from the Global South are perpetually challenged to present their stories (and the local meanings from them) into a package we call English--that is, if they expect them to find an audience. Chinua Achebe a long time ago talked about...
On Forge Fire, Free Gifts, and Cruel Forests
16 Nov 2025 From Heat to Hilt Reader, Despite having so many irons in my production fire, it is, after all, a single fire, and since I both kindled it and kept it hot, is it any wonder that they all begin to fit a singular temper? that they seem to work toward a broader vision? And while I am always suspicious of singular (too-focused) purpose, something which too closely resembles a Jules Verne villain (perhaps Robur), still, defining (and redefining and revisiting and revisioning) is...
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!