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 Hideous Bargains and Diminishing Literacies
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17 August 2025 Resources for ReadingReader, 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 guides---remain free to download on the site!] So far, I have published a 5-part reading on the Notice-Significance-Pattern-Coherence approach to reading for meaning, a pattern built largely from the phenomenological principles of Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser, but with some more practical applications than I suspect either would approve of! Today, too, a quick dip into reading spaces and reading routines. As teachers and students head back to school, it's important to remember that most none of us (!) have a healthy reading routine or space established. And there are plenty of good reasons for it; all the more reason to consciously work to produce them. I look forward to seeing what else we can make. Upcoming Posts:
I welcome your feedback and ideas! What are you looking for? What do you or students need that you can't find? Literary Nomads: Le Guin Pt. 1: The Hideous BargainThe story of Omelas is so recognizable to many readers that we don't imagine that it can speak much more to us than we've already seen. But I have found it interesting that our presentation of the tale always meets head-on, rather unsurprisingly, with the chief question Le Guin poses: "Would I stay or walk away?" Not only does this question on its own gloss over much of the quandary's own substance, but most of our responses--rather than meet Le Guin on her own terms--actually work to avoid confronting the topic. We are willing to bend in dozens of obscure directions, to argue with the utopia before us, to seek alternative answers. This may be a solid debate tactic, but it avoids the rules of utopian literature and allegory: meet the text on its own terms. But isn't that what the best utopia and dystopia has always done: ask us to meet ourselves in the places we least want to visit?
Up ahead:
Arendt in Africa We might suspect that imperialism's reign in Africa is fertile ground for the devolving nation-state to find its way to catastrophic antisemitism. And while the story of South Africa indeed has its share of ostracizing and race-thinking, this is not where the real psychosis flourished. Instead, we will find this in the "pan" movements (Slavic and German) back in Europe. Africa instead offers us critical attitudes and policies for the administration of catastrophe: a certain lawlessness, rootlessness, and a bureaucratic mindset that distances the decision-maker from authorship, what the Brits will take from Kipling and call the "white man's burden." Join in on the reading! Yes, we're half way through, now, but that only means that you can follow my videos and guides at a leisurely pace! Find more here:
Diminishing as Theme The simple form of the Diminishing Poem wouldn't sate me on its own, so I went hybrid on it, combining it with the sonnet form to create a metaphor for our collective twilight. Too Soon the Fall Ahead Mary Shelley's birthday for August 30, hence Frankenstein Day! Read some comics, and let's kick off the fall with heavy advocacy for literacy everywhere. Some Recommendations Early Recommendation from My Reading: Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (2003, 2015)Solnit's book is anything but naive; but she boldly suggests that we are victims of our own narrative black holes, both misunderstanding and simply missing what our stories are and how they work, often in the shadows, to produce change. A necessary reminder. “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."
Education Without Oversight?If you are outside of the education field, you may not know what questions school districts now have without a federal agency equipped to fulfill its promises. Here is a quick overview worth the listen. "So you're referring there to things like civil rights complaints. If funding for the department were to go away, or, you know, if there were a significant change, say that money going to block grants to the states instead, what would that look like for your schools?"
I'll be away to a professional conference this next week, so responses to emails and the like may be somewhat delayed. But I promised to come back with all kinds of new stuff I learned! 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!