5 January 2025

In Practice

The challenge is ever quantity vs quality, but I keep fighting myself to hold to some different words altogether: words like consistency, habitude, routine. What will I do each day?

No matter what we produce this calendar year, let's promise ourselves something close to these latter ideas. It's not that the writing and reading we do must always be extraordinary, but that it happens, regularly, in the now.

The second promise we might make is to do something with what we write or read. This needn't be publishing with Macmillan, but it might mean pausing to learn from what we've created, sharing it with a friend or (better) stranger, in talking about our thinking around our reading. It might be writing a review if for no other purpose than to organize our thinking about it, or it might be feeding our notes to something like Google's NotebookLM for an upcoming project.

It might be joining a reading group and a writing group (both separately excellent ideas) to make spaces for that work, and it might be--dare it be--publishing our work ourselves online through a website or blog, video or audio app.

It is--in not small ways--the doing which makes our literature into thoughtful action, into dialogue and engagement, into encouragements that support others doing the same. Discourse over reactionary memes.

In this sense, even our reflective talk over a friend's poem is in some ways a political act, a modeling of communities we desire to build.

Hints of Ahead: A Different Sort of Play

Not all of us are as geeky about language theory as I am, I get that. Not all of us are eager to wade hip deep into Derrida, dive into Deleuze, or finagle the phenomenology of Fish or Husserl.

I confess my obsession. So I ask myself, How can I find avenues for others to enjoy the ideas of language "play" (a disruption of the presence, of the status quo) without demanding they first read Barthes and Burke, Bakhtin and Foucault?

For me, there is a 'significance' here, related at its 'center' to what Waywords is about. Perhaps through my own compositional and structural play.

Literary Nomads

The Unwoven book launch in September had three brief interview excerpts around the book. But the full interviews weren't available until now. Here is the interview with Dr. Jessica Manuel. Among other topics, we discuss the similarities between haiku and sonnet, the role of ZaniLa rhyme, the importance of uncertainty, and the layering of meaning.

Interview with Jessica Manuel Listen Now

Some of My Reading Tools

I read a fair amount these days; it's a privilege I relish and one too long postponed while I was a classroom teacher.

But reading thoughtfully, retaining, employing what I've learned--these all require some support. Most of us know already what we like for reading: I'm a ballpoint pen person more than a highlighter, etc. But there are a few other tools which make my reading richer. No endorsements or promotions here, just my preferences!

A decent annotation app for electronic texts. Most e-readers have some kind of highlight tool now, but these are so limited and they store the highlights with the hardware. I use the app Flexcil for annotating PDFs on my tablet wherever I can--I can store a clean copy of one covered in my scribbling. I can also take notes on blank sheets, etc.

A solid voice note-taking app. Many still use Keep or One-Note, but I have found both of these awkward in their translation accuracy. If an idea strikes me (or a quotation I read is important), I want it to be accurate and available. I've been using an app called VoiceNotes which has so far done a good job not only in accuracy, but in organizing my different notes and topics, using AI for patterns and trends, etc.

My go-to app for keeping track of what I've read, with an algorithm I trust is StoryGraph. It doesn't use my data in ways that offend, and the community there is growing. It's also 10x easier on the eye than Goodreads and has far more options and filters.

Accessing online texts. For e-texts, Scribd and Everand have proven decent investments for me, but I also use Serial Reader, which sends to your device a 15 minute read of a book each day and is convenient for a phone screen: perfect for those parking lot waits, etc.

Keeping the Costs Down. I tend to download PDFs for books I will annotate and keep, listen to books that are more escapist adventures, and purchase used books which I will keep on my shelf or later place in my Little Free Library. And finally my public library with its exceptional network to all of our state universities is an absolute tool which I will defend to the end!

What Are Your Tools?

I'm always looking for more tools or better ones to keep and organize my thinking about what I read! Let me know what you are using!

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Review: Postcolonial Love Poem (2020) Poetry, Indigenous, Mojave, Surreal by Natalie Diaz ​ A powerful blend of flesh and politics, of the impotencies of poverty and the power of earth, a museum tour of word, myth, and breath. ​ Read the Review

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Early Recommendation from My Reading:

If Romeo & Juliet's Tybalt wielded a samurai sword in 1980s New York, what the result?

A daring graphic novel of hip-hop and dreams, with bold graphics but still enough Shakespeare dialogue to hold to its roots, Ron Wimberly's Prince of Cats is satisfying and mesmerizing. Wimberly fully understands the formalist constraints and inside these lies a hip-hop revisioning of an old story.

Look for the 2016 version, re-inked and reprinted without cuts.

Prince of Cats by Ron Wimberly (2012/2016)

​Seek it out or find copies here.​

“If we lean into this way of thinking, the game [is] being in dialogue with the way things are now, . . . about the overlapping issues of social justice, identity politics, geopolitics and sustainability, and the curriculum can be a starting point for them.”

Jeffrey Boakye lays out some approaches to engaging the literary canon without provoking the sensitive culture wars which set off controversy. But nothing is value-free; and that's the point.

Sometimes some aggressive fiction exorcises the soul . . .

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What will we produce in 2025? It matters.

Steve

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What's Ahead?

• Long-form fiction
• Preview: Unwoven Teachers Guide
• Reflection: Muses or Misconceptions
• A role for "escapist" literature
• Wanderings near and obscure in Nomads
• What I've learned from audiobook production
• Navigating the pedagogy of democracy

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Time to settle in.

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Mennonite Thieleman van Braght composes the massive work Martyrs Mirror, 1660, which tells the stories of Christian martyrs, mostly anabaptists, who held to their tenets of non-resistance. At over 1000 dense pages, it's one of the largest books of its time. (Image from the 256' Behalt cyclorama at The Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center in Millersburg, Ohio.)

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