On Lies, Ecology, and Expendables

3 May 2026

Reader,

Who's Lying?

Lessons from a Waywords Table

Recently I had the opportunity to create a table display that featured my works and Waywords in general. The audience was small, the event very local, but I thought it might be interesting to offer all of you a taste of what I did.

Primarily, I wanted to model various approaches to frictional reading in different interactions, each an exercise around any given reading (or listening) experience.

I offered a jar with reading prompts; a copy of Unwoven with invitations to write in its margins; then, of course, handouts and sign-ups. The goal: to provoke interaction, to touch something, pick something up, write back, etc. The more we physically act, even in a small way, the larger the commitment. That was the idea, anyway.

“Where did the poem's description feel different from your own experience of the world? Who’s lying?” [Sample prompt.]

What I liked about the prompts is how they set up a larger question. With the "Who's Lying" prompt, I'm not accusing an author of fraud. Instead, as we approach it, it demands other questions like these:

Is the author simplifying a complex truth for the sake of a particular effect or point?
Is the speaker lying to protect themselves from an experience they cannot face?
Is the reader (you) lying to yourself because the text is rubbing against a "personal truth" you aren't ready to change yet?

But we cannot experience any of these options (and all are valuable) without first calling into question the description we are hearing. It's not exactly an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for reading (maybe an ATA--Ask the Text Anything), but it's close. Until we ask, inquire, demonstrate some curiosity, we cannot discover.

Fortunately for us all, curiosity seems to be fairly innate; it's just been incomparable subdued, domesticated, repressed by so much of what we experience: schools for rote or standardized learning, multimedia streaming and purchasing which demand constant consumption without reflection, careers of labor that answer only to hierarchy and bureaucracy, complaint culture, and the like. Who's Lying?

I'm talking about imagination, of course. Yes. It's why readers so often wonder about the imaginations of writers, presuming they have none themselves. (I sometimes wonder about the imaginations of writers for very different reasons. Is that too cheeky?)

Readers require imagination. They require it to engage what they read and hear. And when that imagination inevitably meets the text, new meanings are born. My answer to the modernist koan: "If a poem is left alone in the woods and there is no one around to read it, does it have a meaning?" No.

And this, of course, has little to do with the cliched "I can picture the writer's scene in my head" nonsense. Readers must make use of the text else it is lost in the ephemera of experience. And that means investing, interacting, inquiring, inhabiting.

So here's one to carry around with you to see what happens. I'll give you three words. You go through your next days meeting texts until you find one that all three words "fit," whatever that means. Ready?

Unflinching
Haunted
Tangled

Let me know what you find!

The reading which answers all three . . .

Literary Nomads: "Roman Plow, Sovereign Tree: Seneca and Zhuangzi"

[Never make a calendar promise, I keep re-learning. Never. ]

But we move ahead, this time with a heady meet-up between the Roman West and the Chinese East. Is it better to bend our lives to utility, serving in our duty as virtue to find happiness? Or are we better to form our lives around some kind of radical uselessness, avoiding the utilitarian corruption or moral choices and justice completely?

And do we have to choose, exactly?

I don't pretend to offer answers, not even my own, yet, but I'm more than happy to ask the questions, and who knew that even the film franchise The Expendables fits our framing? The problem we keep meeting with the Omelas child: if our lives of privilege depend upon suffering (they seem to), and we fail to act to correct it, what's really happening here?

Fortunately, somewhere within both Stoicism and wuwei are moments of flexibility, of choice: and now we ask about our methods of arriving at responses.

And suddenly, our long Omelas journey sees an end ahead. Journey 7 (Literary Tourism and Anne of Green Gables) begins June 12!

Episodes ahead:

6.34 (5/8): The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts
6.35 (5/15): Writing Back: Guerilla Texts and BTS (yes, them!)
6.36 (5/22): Mailbags and Listeners, What I Get Wrong: Intimidation & Interpretation
6.37 (5/29) Nomadic Departures: What in the Omelas?

(I may place two episodes in one week to end on 5/22)

Have a question or comment about what we're talking about? Use that mailbag and let me know!

Literary Nomads Mailbag

Literary Nomads

From Unwoven: The Teaching Guide (forthcoming)

...We wind up compromising and hoping that our students leave us at least knowing what a sonnet is or that a limerick is a "low form" of poetry. How can we get them from identification and perhaps comprehension to some higher level of understanding and analysis?

First, I recommend an informal audit of our teaching practices. When approaching poetry, how much time do we spend with our students discussing figurative language and general comprehension of poems vs. investigations into structure? And since that percentage on structure is often so low (though structure permeates our languaging and thus all of our writing and all of our thinking), our first act is to make conscious and deliberate choices ourselves to introduce it to classrooms, perhaps with this very claim, that we ourselves find it a challenging and too often forgotten element of meaning-making.

Second, lean on the inquiry approach, an asking of questions by you and your students, which presupposes a structural choice has a meaningful impact on meaning. Resist with all your strength any explanations that suggest merely a writer's "personal preference" or "they did it for emphasis," which is not a meaning but a shallow catch-all dismissal of thinking. It may be—it may often be early on—that an inquiry leads to a blind spot or a dead end, at least initially in the examination of a poem. Let that be okay. If you're feeling cheeky, suggest that a lot of poetic interpretation creates a state of aporia, the seeming end of an inquiry, where there appear no further steps which may be taken to reach clarity. Remind yourself and the students that uncertainty itself is not a failure but a place for reflection and exploration.

. . . It's not the terms for poetry which are essential; and it's certainly not the clarity of singular meaning for a poem: it's the process for reading and meaning-making which we are engaged in. In my experience, structure talk is an effective avenue towards realizing these ideas about reading itself.

Doubtless such a claim frustrates some of us. "Why, that's the very reason I don't talk or teach structure, because so much of it is inaccessible!" . . . First, I suppose this objection means that it is inaccessible quickly enough for the time we give it. And second that, like any other skill we teach, scaffolding is important. Unwoven and this Guide are designed with this in mind. Some types of inquiry into structure are very accessible for most all students, some less so.

Calendar: The Outdoors Awaits!

Dew drops sparkle on green grass in morning light

Get out there, those of us in the Midwest! But don't let the outdoors distract you from all the moments we might consider these next couple of weeks!

May: Mental Health Awareness Month
May: Jewish-American History Month
May: Asian-Pacific Heritage Month
May 4: Start of Teacher Appreciation Week
May 4: Start of MMIWG Action Week https://www.niwrc.org/mmiwr-awareness
May 5: National Cartoonists Day
May 5: MMIWG Awareness Day (wear red)
May 5: Cinco de Mayo
May 10: Mothers Day
May 12: National Limerick Day
May 15: International Family Day
May 15: Nakba Day - https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/
May 16: National Biographer's Day
May 17: World Baking Day
May 18: Buddha Day!

Not the Best Spring

original poetry

You trust your blood-and-berry wrongs
To soften at last like birdsong. . .

Skunks in love; how to dispose of?

Leave out some apples as a treat.

Be careful, too, lest they excrete!

‘What else you do, do wear some gloves,

And find a cage to impose “unlove.”

Now drive them far, but be discreet:

Skunks in love.

Read "Four April Rondels"

Book Recommendation

Miraculum Monstrum by Kathline Carr (2017)

It's difficult to describe the experience of reading Carr's hybrid-genre eco-fable. Yes, it's the science of biology and environment, but yes, a deep reflection on the function of art, but no and yes, a surreal tale of a woman who transforms into something new in response to---, but yes also an artistic installation, but also one which is supplemented/overshadowed by a memoir writer who attempted historical perspective, but also still yet a visual collage of experimental and draft artistic works themselves.

What results is truly dizzying but deeply tragic, perhaps for its protagonist, but also for all of us. What fear do we carry which is most deep, most profound, most revelatory? Carr's work is pretty fearless, and for this stunning.

Fig. 2.4. Alive/cutting, 2013. Photograph transfer on hospital sheet, 7 in. x 20 in.

leather straps against her arms uncoiled feathers

spring from the bone meat, this feather of undaunted blood water

arches. She sees in the dark, the morphine drip

the song birds whose songs are stolen for research, migratory birds who are funneled and disoriented disoriented, where is their gyroscope

My bookshelf collection is fighting my efforts to downsize. This will undoubtably figure in Journey 8 of Literary Nomads.

Get it here

*Caution: I have no idea how well an ebook version will translate. Color, format, and visuals are critical to its effect.

Time for My Manifesto

Reading for Pleasure Numbers Decline

In a new study (unfortunately produced by the interested HarperCollins), the number of young people who read books for pleasure has declined against those who read for utility---or, more precisely, for "drill & kill" literacy goals, testing services, etc.

But there is good news, too. Despite the politics-(not pedagogy)-driven antics, kids are finding books less uncool, and are finding more and more books to read from their own social media streams.

How did Pink Floyd say it? "Hey, teacher! . . . "

"Removing pressure and making reading a social activity could encourage children to pick up a book more often, researchers said. The report also claimed being read to throughout childhood has a significant impact on a child’s reading habits."

No kidding.

Read the Article

And now to the out-of-doors on this beautiful day. I've still got a fair amount of spring yard clean-up to do! When you take a break from yours, find something to read.

Steve

What's Still Ahead?