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 Brazilian Writers, Thinkers, Teachers
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17 May 2026 Reader, Reading Paulo FreireIf 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 must always set about growing as humans, and that involves uncovering and developing our own curiosity, in guiding our own paths to learning and knowing where we perceive "social, political, and economic contradictions, and take action against the oppressive elements of reality." “All education is with a purpose and that purpose can only be political, for we either educate to liberate or we educate to dominate.”
(Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
Some are put off by an educator that seems to lean so heavily on politics (though in the developing world, this seems a fairly given posture), but this would also be a misreading of him, when we understand that his teaching ethics are founded in humility, tolerance, joy, and love. Unapologetically. And while Southern and Western education systems are quite different in their conditions, the West (i.e. the American school system in particular) has been far too unsettled by the questions he raises. We might begin, for instance, in the US school system's absolute reliance on standardized testing and the ideology of learning it advocates. Of course, there's another issue in reading the powerful challenges from this Brazilian educator and philosopher. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, while brief, is quite dense and full of thicker abstractions. Many a well-meaning teacher have waded in only to find themselves overwhelmed. And while I can assure you the book is well worth the effort (my recent read is my fourth through the complete book), I admit it is real effort. But there are easier options to discover his thinking, to read him in a more "personal" tone. For teachers, I can recommend Teachers as Cultural Workers, a series of "letters" written to teachers about the realities of their profession. More, I would definitely recommend his final work, A Pedagogy of Freedom, which summarizes much of his thinking across his years in very approachable language. They're enough to make us question and challenge ourselves, which is most of the point, I think. For non-teachers, get a smattering of smaller doses of his ideas from the Paulo Freire Reader, a well-selected collection of essays and excerpts from his books. I've recently had the pleasure of recently completing all four of these titles again, this time with a particular eye towards his questions of how. That is, if you are a teacher looking for practical methods, Freire is definitely not your guy, but this is exactly why he should be read. Because, as I argued with my own colleagues for so many years, teaching is by no means neutral. We are engaged in our own ideological work on young people, and recognizing this is the first and critical step to liberating them to think for themselves in acts of critical inquiry and freedom. Looking for something more rooted in American culture? Try bell hooks and her Teaching to Transgress. Have you read his stuff? Let me know what you think!
Literary Nomads: "Writing Back: Guerilla Texts, BTS, and Marvin Gaye"I had a great time finally getting a small chance to talk about BTS, but here in particular its 2017 hit "Spring Day," which layers Le Guin's Omelas story atop the tragedy of the Sewol Ferry which despicably killed over 300 people, including 250 students. And why talk about it now? Because BTS, like Marvin Gaye with his "What's Going On?" each employ a strategy I recommend to those who want to "write back" to the world's absurdity and injustices: radical honesty, much as David Foster Wallace might recommend in his New Sincerity. Put simply, we must be willing to risk being called "cringe." The world is full of enough critics and celebrities and politicians and meme-makers (and podcasters) who build their disingenuousness on snark. Maybe our best tactic is to write ourselves into unexpected places; and the "guerilla" tactic is as much about where our writing appears as what it says. Nothing wrong with a little disruption of the system which has placed so many in spaces of anxiety and danger. Or, you know, we can just go ahead and keep the Omelas Summer Festival going while the child in the basement closet suffers. Episodes ahead:
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Calendar: Moments for MeditationSo many opportunities to reflect and honor the ideas and people around us!
Blackhawk's Re-FramingRead-Along Guide My video reflection on Chapter 1 of 12 of his Rediscovery of America is out and I define Blackhawk's largest concept for white thinkers on history: indigenous agency, the audacious concept that humans everywhere are humans who choose for themselves.
Book RecommendationDaytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá (2011) A graphic novel for adults, this Brazilian story---stories?---revolves around one man and his many life-altering choices. Well, altering except that at the end of every chapter, he dies. Oh, you say, it's that old time-traveling cliche or some weird adventure loop that Tom Cruise might star in. But no, it's not these, at all. Gratefully and refreshingly and even frustratingly, Daytripper is taking us somewhere else, and its themes are worth the contemplation and the personal re-configuring we might do after. Isn’t it strange how we always seem to remember the trivial things from our daily lives... yet we so often forget the most important ones?
“So, what do you do for a living?'
'Why do you ask?'
'I don't know. I just met you and I'd like to know you better. Who you are, what you want -- your dreams.'
'My job won't tell you who I am. And especially not what I want.”
Too few graphic novels make better use of their medium. A contemplative (and sometimes jarring) read that best not be put off too long.
International Booker Announced May 19!How many of the six finalists will you read? We've been waiting (or at least I have and about 200 million other readers) for the selection of this year's Booker Prize winner, who will be named this Tuesday, so I think I'll just put in a bid for my favorite right here. No, I haven't read all six (yet), but I've been really happy with the choices so far, and that's rarely the case. I'll also mention that this year, all six finalists name their translator on the front cover, which is a remarkable change from the past: as Daisy Rockwell taught me in her work translating Hindi and Urdu works (I met her through Shree's mesmerizing Tomb of Sand), the undertaking rivals the authorship itself, at times. I wrote earlier about Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and its strong tonal and theme shifts between two different translations. So my choice---keeping with my apparent Brazilian theme this round---is Ana Paula Maia's On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan. I will likely write about it more length later, but it's a grim little story which is both absurdly comedic and darkly violent, and somewhere beneath all of it men are lost to history and story and bureaucratic ineptitude and visceral violence. It may be too similar to other things she's written, a bit too familiar in premise for all that, but nonetheless it's hugely (unmercifully) memorable. But I'm sure I'm wrong. The favorite is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, a more traditionally-plotted story of a 1940s "non-political" film director caught in a choice to make movies for the Nazis or not. It's a plot right out of history (see my Literary Nomads episodes on Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou). I haven't read Kehlmann, yet, but look forward to finding it! Thinking of a vocabulary exercise I gave my students with Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed: "...he was looking ahead to the esculent, a dead horse in the snow. . . ."
Finishing up this season's Literary Nomads Journey with Le Guin this week so I can turn at last to the summer "lightness" of touring with Anne of Green Gables. What are you reading this week which is for pure pleasure? Are you sure? Steve What's Still Ahead?
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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!