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 Horror, Power, Story, and the Too-Thin Differences Between Them
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20 Sept 2026 Reader, Story is terrifyingHave you read Kenneth Burke, yet? Well, I guess I don't expect him to be everyone's go-to favorite, but despite his often obscure style and sometimes obtuse references, he was fairly formative for my thinking. (It helps that I had the opportunity in my grad school years to speak with him.) Like many of the early modern era thinkers on language, he understood that not only isn't our language neutral, but neither is what it produces, which is basically all of culture: law, ritual, identity, . . . our realities. What we read and hear, even if "factual," is always filtered through the words/ideologies we've already internalized. What we reproduce/create in response is transformed. In brief, we might best understand our lives as self-authored stories, dramas, which we are only vaguely conscious of writing. It's not that we ever work to "persuade" others of an idea, but that we first narrate our shared identities.
Linda Blair's pea-green vomit in The Exorcist . . . was the first example that came to mind as I wrote this (and is now a common cultural moment we unwisely share).
I've never shaken this as a monumental explanation towards much of what we're up to as readers, but the implications of it always overwhelmed. I mean, if I was raised with particular stories, how are they still working on me, co-authoring my unconscious choices? More, as a writer, what am I ever up to but working towards that shaping of others? For others to see the world as I do: not a plea but an outright entry into the human barnyard of scrapping about with words? This doesn't mean that my memory of Linda Blair's pea-green vomit in The Exorcist has misshapen me, I guess, but it does mean that this was the first example that came to mind as I wrote this (and is now in yours as a common cultural moment we unwisely share). You're welcome for the underscoring. And it means, too, that the less conscious we are of the work all story does on us--or perhaps the less conscious we are of the storified work culture does on us--the more vulnerable we are to its effects. A complicated way to say we need to think about our reading more, that thinking isn't a task but a survival strategy and purpose-creator. We create our own story-driven purposes or have them storied upon us.
“Story was more crucial to our evolution than our opposable thumbs, because all opposable thumbs did was let us hang on. It was story that told us what to hang on to." Lisa Cron, “Wired for Story,” TEDxFurmanU (2014) Literary Nomads: Dark MontgomeryThere is no question that most read the Anne books because they serve as some kind of retreat, some simple fantasy of idealism apart from our own drudgery. I've heard it (too often) said that this is the function or reading: a retreat or escape, an entertainment, a diversion. Those who have been with me a bit know that this function of story is probably its smallest purpose. The latest episode of "Dark Montgomery" makes quite a different case, for instance. Rather than a mere 'mindless retreat' for its author, the Anne books served Montgomery as a testament to her independence despite. Despite her dominating grandparents (who kept her cloistered in their home for most of her first 29 years), despite a gossiping town that might be scandalized she dare write, despite a male-dominated publishing business which ever sought to pirate her creativity, despite lawyers who urged her to surrender. In brief, I argue that Anne saved Lucy Maud's life. The thoughtless reading of Anne (or any work) as mere "escapism" misses one of the most critical concepts of why we write and of why reading is vital. But it is on this very thoughtless conception of Anne that Prince Edward Island purposed its tour economy. Anne's PEI is not the real PEI; Anne's life was an idealized space of rule-breaking for a young girl who dared. Lucy Maud's was quite different, apart from her creation. But National Parks Canada appropriated properties, displaced families, and built a fantasy-PEI on top of it, feeding our meager and thoughtless consumption of Anne as fantasy-escape. All the while, that same industry plasters the distinction between Anne and author over, painting "Anne" on Lucy Maud's spaces, celebrating the author with raspberry cordials. It's in no one's interests (except, of course, our own) that we dare think more richly about what we read, that we ask harder questions of what is said and where the story exists. Of, in brief, reading frictionally. The choice is to believe PEI's openly sold fiction that everything around Anne/Lucy Maud was beauty and simplicity, an idealized cupcake of life. Or we can recognize the strength and struggles of a woman who dared, who demanded in faltering resilient steps, that she retain her dignity, receive respect. So, despite one listener's worries I would "ruin Anne," 'Dark Montgomery' demonstrates a more significant argument for the power of story.
Calendar: September Sweeps OutWhich of these will you mark with an action?
Blackhawk: The Re-Discovery of America - Chapter 9: Collapse and Total War: The Indigenous West & the U.S. Civil WarThe key finding for me in reading Blackhawk has been how easily my historical focus (decades of schooling and mainstream history writing) has been misdirected. Of course, I learned that one of the points of division leading to the US Civil War was territorial expansion, but after that tidbit, all attention was eastward again. I did not ever recognize that in the drive to build rival economies and later fund a war, we essentially declared war on the remaining tribal nations and built the mechanisms for our modern governance. And, of course, we would use these same mechanisms soon afterwards in Mexico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
Book RecommendationThe Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle (1936) Cree Métis author McNickle was never purposefully on my reading lists (and likely not yours), so it was a wonderful surprise to find this on my bookshelf (with who knows what origin story?). This is, in short, a remarkable read. In brief, a younger and estranged son of a mixed marriage returns home to find himself caught up in the local people and family need. The joy of the story is McNickle's characters, each driven by complex political and personal conflicts, by sudden choices with long-reaching consequences, by a mountain range called "The Mountains of the Surrounded," which breathes protection but also reeks of historical inevitability. I don't want this book to wander far from its home here--I dare not loan it!--and so must begin gifting other copies to friends. It's that good. "The sky was overladen with stars. If you looked closely there were stars in the grass as well--dew turned to ice on the tips of grass blades."
"Now in old age she looked upon a chaotic world—so many things dead, so many words for which she knew no meaning; her son's developing into creatures such had never lived in her childhood (a son might steal horses but a mother was respected): the fires of hell slashing the gloom of a summer evening . . . and she could not understand the ruin that had overtaken her. What had come about since that day of the planting of the cross? How was it that when one day was like another there should be, at the end of many days, a world of confusion and dread and emptiness? "
“Why couldn't just one of his sons have the sense and the courage to make himself a new way of life! He rolled away from the glow of light, but still the voices reached him. What were they saying? Why didn't they talk to him?”
Following Up on the Screen-Time Nonsense I have long been an advocate (and once innovator) of technology use in the classroom, and my experience leading teachers through the Covid online teaching ordeal taught me pretty clearly how beneficial tech tools could be. But of course, they all required the one thing that schools refused: changing the model for teaching. This was a change that has been decades overdue in any event. And yet. And yet, in a massive banner-waving claim to education purity, states and districts across the country have declared themselves even less relevant to current literacy trends by banning screens outright. And, as I have maintained, this was a decision based far more on classroom management than on actual pedagogy. Here, because my (very righteous) bias is evident, is a brief article from educator Lisa Nielson who correctly resists the claims about tech studies and digs into what they really say. Worth the five minutes so we can arm ourselves with rejoinders and resistance.
Have been working on ideas for the Waywords Studio "table" when I make public appearances at readings, fairs, and such. What ideas do you have for me? What do you wish a writer had at their exhibit table which is almost never there? Let me know! 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!