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 Nurturing Literacy, Community, and Democracy
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21 Sept 2025 Engagements on the Ground, but SlowlyReader, I've been wrestling a bit with an anxiety to move quickly, to respond as actively as the siege of news and propaganda can produce posts. As some would have it--and I would not argue--the nature of democracy is at stake, globally. And as I have said before, a lot of what we read is far outside our range to affect. So I ask this rejoinder question: In our communities, aren't the stakes always exactly this? Apathy and disengagement have a price, and action has consequence: all carry our responsibility. In other words, as members of communities large and small, how we spend our time matters. And that means not always visceral reaction, the knee kick from our doctor's hammer, but a measured, thoughtful response that nurtures community while stubbornly defending against intolerance. If we seem particularly vulnerable at this moment, it is about bad actors in our communities, but it may also be our own complacency to developing their resilience. Let's not wait for January resolutions to reflect on what we are doing. We can decide now. Some things I have committed to, with Waywords being only a parallel project. In most every way, each is a key approach to defense of democracy.
What are your commitments? Where and how will you support the communities you live in? Drop me a line and let me know.
Literary Nomads: Le Guin: What I Carry With MeAs we walk away from Omelas, we can't help but do a bit more than Le Guin's characters do: we carry the experience, unable (and refusing) to set it aside. How else do we keep literature significant but to pause and reflect, to ask ourselves questions about why it matters for us. This past week's episode does that for me, arguing for utility against anti-utility, some questions for traction, friction, as we move to find new texts which respond. The next three weeks of Literary Nomads is a quick journey-pause for house-keeping: more specifically, I'm dropping three episodes which answer the "How To Use" questions folks have had about the podcast. These will serve to introduce new listeners to Literary Nomads, but also to cement my promises to make each episode a place where everyone will learn something new. Have a question about what we're talking about? Don't forget the mailbag!
Up ahead:
ARENDT UPDATE: Totalitarianism: A Classless Society Some difficult reading as we move into Arendt's final section of the massive history of Western attitudes and circumstances which led to the catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s. In Chapter 10, Arendt outlines the psychology of both mob and elite in their affinity for totalitarian governance, a kind of "breath of honesty" in its crime and lies over a past era of corruption painted with virtue even while it ground up everything in its imperialist hunger for acquisition. Classless, the disenfranchised are hardly unintelligent or apathetic: they are "furious," and the astute leader guides that anger toward a cause and purpose: wreck it. All of it. Join in on the reading! Yes, we're over half way through, now, but that only means that you can follow my videos and guides at a leisurely pace! Find more here:
Of Passing Autumns and Political Moments Calendar: The Fall is Full We close out National Literacy Month and National Library Card Sign-up Month, so we can appreciate these last days of summer with a few extra reads!
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Some Recommendations Early Recommendation from My Reading:Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 by Salman Rushdie (2021) Ever a provocateur, I can't help but admire Rushdie's foundational reasoning for his absolute defense of free speech, his love of story as a root of our existence, and his willingness to stretch his own imagination. In this wide-ranging collection, he explores a lot of powerful writers and philosophizes on the nature of truth as we meet it through story. “Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them." "Originality is dangerous."
Ripping At Our BiasesFor reasons recently, I've been thinking about this opinion piece on the term "world literature"--not only the term's inherent bias towards the West but how we English-speakers institutionally end up representing it. For Waywords it's a struggle, as I have chosen to focus on works in English or in translation to English. This is a due mostly to my own limited skill set, but my excuses don't mean that a broader systemic reconciliation is not itself due. (The article has been translated from the German.) "That is not only a sign of ignorance, but also betrays a good deal of arrogance and hubris: anyone who marginalises literatures beyond the West in this way is demonstrating, at the very least, that they do not take them seriously and consider them to be less important than Western works. ...
This is due, in some part, to the way books are handled when they are actually published."
Unwoven - Teaching Guide preview excerptAs the Teaching Guide comes together, I thought I would offer bits and pieces in these coming weeks of previews for it. Yes, the 250+ pages of the original supplements will be there as printed pages ready for copiers and the like, but new to these are another 50+ pages of discussion of approaches, overviews of how poetic structure works, and many of my strategies to present it to students, leaning most heavily on inquiry models and stretching interpretation into those regions of uncertainty. Much more ahead, but here is the second excerpt I'm dropping (the first was to the Street Team newsletter subscribers for their extra work on bringing this to you, with my sincere thanks).
Lots of stuff today! We move forward: let me know how I can help you with your own projects. And if you want to get even further behind the scenes of Waywords, get more previews and opportunities to participate, join the Waywords Street Team, an additional newsletter in the "between weeks" of this one. Go to your Preferences or Update Your Profile (at the bottom of this email) to change your options! 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!