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On Stepping Forward, Street Action, and Gratitude
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24 November 2024 Stepping Forward . . .Hey, everyone! As I wrote to the Waywords Street Team last week, the Mission for Waywords has always been one of engagement. Critical literacy becomes increasingly vital in communities polarized or isolated, globalized or caffeinated. Growing such literacy–and with it, ideals of democracy, inquiry, dialogue, tolerance, and peace–is the mission of Waywords Studio. We read the world to develop our skill with language, our efficacy in engaging it, in writing back to it. Our paths will wander, acts of essai and bricolage, connecting points for discovery. Students grow these skills; educators open the ways; litterateurs celebrate them. (About) And while I've always known that building critical literacy is my goal, my personal "Five Year Plan" to launch Waywords (something akin to a Khrushchev Plan but ideally more successful) anticipated this "engagement" portion as a final brick. But here I am entering Year 4 of that plan and re-thinking. To that end, I've begun by adding a page to Waywords called "Engagement." There you will find the beginnings of a growing list of spaces where we (learners, educators, writers, readers) can find the support and opportunities to become actively invested in the evolving global political-cultural narratives. And so I call on you to start, you who support Waywords in its two more years of "Beta Mode:" look over the page, find something you didn't know about and check it out. And then offer me other spaces I haven't yet considered. Readers and writers, we have little choice but to step forward. Thanks.
Ideally, what appears here is free or low cost, globally applicable, and a space which works for constructive individual support. The Waywords Street Team
Right now, this subgroup of the newsletter (Words & Ways) receives updates in the weeks between: Bywords and Watchwords. So far, it has been more behind-the-scenes stuff and my goals for Waywords and its projects. Most issues have a specific call for input or advice or action on specific programs. As we move forward, though, the Street Team will not only have opportunities to support/promote Waywords more directly (many assisted me in producing Unwoven), but co-design some of these "engagement" opportunities. What exactly this will look like is still forming for me; but at the very least I want to offer the chance for us to share each other's resources and thinking in our own works. We are all busy people. My goal is not to add to anyone's work, but to create avenues to support them, to encourage our own writing, speaking, and reading into sometimes difficult spaces. If you are interested in joining the Street Team, just update your email preferences to this newsletter to include it (below or at the button above)! I suspect it will become a surprise for all of us. Early Recommendation from My Reading:Soldier's poetry is not often beautiful or Euro-traditional. Evocative, demanding, struggling, this is an extraordinary collection of words, in English and sometimes--necessarily--in Lakotan, that unpack the "conveniences" of the 'American gloss' over Indian experience. The book finds its climax in the title work, a multi-page chant/prose/ pronouncement built upon the legalese which occupies US treaty language, the preamble presumption of "Whereas." Politics, silences, and a charged poignancy which asks ever, "How can I convince you?" The Chronicle of Higher Education: Golden Age“I retired from teaching, but I didn’t retire from the thing that I’ve always loved to do.”
Gratitude for our ability to ask, to write, to challenge. So thankful for your support of my work and our thinking together! Steve What's Ahead?
A Season of Gratitude - Let's Use It Well |
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!