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 Gender, Genre, and Generativity
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8 Feb 2026 Fallibility, Inefficiencies, and VirtueReader, 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 it's my own imagination that is misapprehending the world: I imagine some teachers with all of their assignment bins and lesson plans just ducks in a row, bold and rested enough to have a clean IG account (but my lived experience along my colleagues speaks differently); I imagine sharp ad campaigns from companies who have their acts together and work collaboratively and efficiently (but my years as a tech writer belie this); I imagine mass numbers of reactionary politicals organized to stopgap cries of protest (but my understanding of bots and the reactionaries themselves prove it isn't so). And what's really at work here except also my ideology, my expectation that flawless work flow and efficiency of production are some kind of ideal that is both worth realizing and can be realized? And when AI content threatens to suffocate, why would I dare try to compete with its efficiency, mimic the machine? So perhaps the shrug is not a sufficient response to a diversion, a breakdown, a creative turn, a slow week, a failure or misstep. Maybe it's what I should embrace, the awkward and unwieldy reality of being human. This week I have a "theme" of thinking in other frameworks. Enjoy!
Literary Nomads: Words from Nigeria Pt. 3: Emezi’s Pet & Hunters for TruthIndigenous storyteller and activist Simon Ortiz warned us some years ago: culture is not a "museum" artifact, not something limp or dead, mummified or preserved in glass. It is, of course, dynamic and diverse, always changing. I described it a couple of episodes ago as "porous," absorbing what it encounters and responding. So when Akwaeke Emezi calls themself a living spirit child, an ogbanje [oh-(g)BAHN-jay], our museum mentalities are likely to scoff. Spirit belief, after all, is part of "primitive" cultures. When they describe themself as non-binary and transgender, we get closer to understanding, because these are terms we know. When they say that an ogbanje living within one is itself a trauma, a non-mortal (trans)gender(less) being trapped inside a sexualized body, we may find a bit of insight. I bring this up not only because Emezi is doing important literary work to push against our Western traditional expectations, but they are doing it with our English language. English becomes a part of the cultures it colonizes; but writers trans-culturally respond back through that language, re-imaging and re-forming their own cultures. This is true in Nigeria, the larger African continent, amongst indigenous American writers, and elsewhere. If we're brave enough, we might even learn new ways of thinking from them, those which may help us escape moralities based on utility and transaction. Episodes ahead:
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Calendar: Winter Interminably ContinuesAnd curses upon groundhogs and on those who abide them!
Three HaigaBook ReviewBad Indians Book Club by Patty Krawec (2025) Speaking of re-imagining our cultures, let me double down on a brief recommendation I made in November. If you've been looking for a path into indigenous literatures, let me recommend this acclaimed read by Krawec, a personal and collaborative tour of contemporary thinking and scholarship about native writing. Yes, you'll hear a bit about giants like Momaday, Silko, Deloria, and Erdrich, but more, discover entire genres of writing too often ignored but significant here: memoir and history, of course, but also science, horror, nature writing, women's work, and speculative fiction. It's about re-framing what we read; this book is a guide to understanding what these writers are about and how to approach them. It's also a creative work which reconfigures the classic myth of Deer Woman. Don't miss, too, the original Bad Indians podcast that has been re-mastered with the novel's release! (Search your podcast app or, if you must, follow the Spotify link!)
Why Are We Still Using Dewey Decimal?To put it simply, our method of organizing knowledge has been locked in a user-unfriendly way for 150 years now (1876), well past the age of retirement. We simply don't think and research in these ways any longer. More, any writing and topics that were non-Western, writing from the Other, were thrown together into the late 900s as after-thoughts, literally marginalizing other ways of organizing (and imagining) our thought. Recently, a New Zealand library is trying a different method based on the Māori way of categorizing. What might we come to learn?
And How Else Can We Imagine Keeping Knowledge Alive and Available?I just discovered The Uncensored Library, the largest collection of articles and books online. And, excitingly, it is stored inside a video game. The Uncensored Library has built its structure and its reserve of censored material from writers and journalists all over the world (in both English and their original languages) into the very coding of Minecraft. That is, to find and somehow "censor" the books here, one would literally have to take the game apart. As popular as it currently is (and has been since 2009), that isn't likely to happen soon. Assembled and maintained by Reporters Without Borders.
A week of reading Freire and anthropology ahead of me. It's deep winter now: keeping it academically warm. 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!