Explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs. Grab a copy of our Readers Manifesto! I'm Steve Chisnell, an educator for 35 years and an aggressive reader for 50---Let's read and write together and I'll let you in on a few things I've discovered and am still learning!
On Terror, Tactics, and Timbuktu
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18 Oct 2026 Reader, 13 Days of Halloween 2026Of course, long readers of this newsletter knew that I would start here, with tomorrow's opening on thirteen horrifying review days of writing and film around bibliographic horror. And I know, too, that not everyone here is the fan of good (and often bad) horror that I am. The horror genre deserves its own careful articulation for its literary/readerly merit, one I haven't done completely even yet, but I can only promise that reflecting on our attraction to the terrific and awesome, the cosmic and the unnatural, has not been neglected: in fact, Literary Nomads Season 8 will command a sliver of that time as we address the notion of the monstrous in literature. ... And so, too, bibliographic horror: that tale which revolves around books and the act of reading, around the notion of words themselves, for we have long understood language as a tool of power, and that power is barely (if ever) in our control. The book is its own Frankenstein's monster, the word its own doorway between different ways of comprehension. What conflict or tragedy has not in some way rooted itself in language and story? . . .the Americana of old-school Halloween has passed on to the too-nurturing 'Trunk-or-Treat' and costume parades. Too, I've reflected on my prior years addressing this 13 Days event, with fast-paced jarring-image videos designed to grab the TikTok-minded attention span. This was, obviously, a mistake, and one which runs completely contrary to my own declarations for more frictional reading. Therefore, this year and following, I am slowing down a bit in these video reviews, still offering some images and key quotations from them, but also linking them to subthemes of bibliographic horror (deadly fragments, secret codes, the flesh as text, etc.) and also a single frictional question a more careful reader or viewer might proceed from in their reading or viewing. Not too substantive, even still, but a taste of how we might better appreciate each work, no matter what Goodreads or Rotten Tomatoes says of them. And so, with little further explanation, 13 films and 13 titles (novels and short tales) of horror (with perhaps a bonus pair on Nov 1). Maybe I'll review one of your favorites or offer you a title or two you haven't yet met. If you have other titles to recommend, please do! Closer to Halloween, I'll also drop a reading of a horrifying poem and perhaps a short story of my own. The trick-or-treaters have long ago given up patrolling our otherwise Norman Rockwell-style neighborhood; the Americana of old-school Halloween has passed on to the too-nurturing Trunk-or-Treat and costume parades. What can I say? This is all I've got left! (Well, no, I'll be physically in full retreat that weekend, because we horror geeks find ways to go scare ourselves, a practice that requires no psych degree to understand.) Want to see where Waywords horror has been in the past? Find past year reviews, original horror stories, and more on this (almost) secret page!
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here." Shakespeare, The Tempest (I.ii) Literary Nomads: Waypoint - "Min"I close our discussion of Lucy Maud Montgomery's life with a reading of her 1903 short story, "Min." After learning so much about the challenges she faced throughout her long life and writing career, we may be tempted to consider it wholly tragic. As I argued last week, to ignore her life story, to dismiss her books as escapes, or to see her legacy as tragic . . . all these misrepresent what we might gain from working to reconcile the many facets of her struggles. Like Harding's "Darkling Thrush" heard at winter's gates, we are left with some irreconcilables. The real violence we do to Montgomery, of course, is flattening out her story, turning it into some PEI postcard, cropping out its humanity; and little Anne of the Green Gables house is somehow made a fictive synonym of her author. Perhaps "Min," written while Lucy Maud was trapped caring for her aging grandmother in Cavendish while writing her stories on stray scraps of paper, offers a bit of testimony. But we're not done with Anne, even now: we have more readings of those red pigtails ahead. The good news is that we can, at last it seems, turn to some lighter fare on our literary tourist explorations, and I'll be exploring another type of travel: book tourism, pilgrimages to the towns and cities that build their identities around the book itself: certainly towns like the Welsh Hay-on-Wye and New York's Hobart Village, but also a remote village in Norway, or South Korea's Paju Book City. Most important to our visit, though, will be a seemingly unlikely stop: Timbuktu.
Calendar: Spooky Season!October's horror is a preview of a month of writing!
*NaNoWriMo was a non-profit from 1999-2025 that disbanded after several controversies (AI positions, community moderators, and finances--DuckDuckGo that for more). But the tradition continues in the broader writing community, and support for writing can be found on https://nano2.org/ . Blackhawk: The ReDiscovery of America - Chapter 12 & Post-ReadingWinding up the discussion of Blackhawk doesn't mean at all, of course, that our re-thinking of the American story can now "move on" to the next book on our list. Blackhawk's goal from the start has been for all of us--especially we white folks and we who have been US-publicly-schooled--to literally re-organize our own conception of ourselves as Americans, to reconcile our mythologized identities to those of a long history of complex encounter. Because history has always been about encounter, about different cultures of individuals with the agency of choice, meeting and making these choices. Nothing has changed. We're still individuals now, choosing to continue living the 1/2-stories of packaged ideology or accounting for ourselves as inheritors of something far more challenging to face. And act upon. ReDiscovery of America Glossary now available!And with that, the complete and thematically-indexed Glossary and Transcript collection is now available as a PDF from Waywords Studio, 90 pages of terms, cross-references to Blackhawk along with quotations and explanations, and indicators of how each term necessarily re-frames the thinking of those only familiar with indigenous cultures. From now to the beginning of November, I have discounted this download for you to a single dollar! My appreciation for your interest and promise to pick up Blackhawk's text soon and give it a full read!
Book RecommendationBambi by Felix Salten (1923) Okay, I know you're wondering why. And maybe like nearly all of us somewhere raised on the Disney flick, we believe we understand the story--well, basically. We know old Walt made a few changes, we tragically reminisce around (spoiler) mom's death, and then we remember the majestic scene of Bambi as "Forest Prince" at the end. What else do we need to know? To begin with, Salten did not write this book for children at all. One must wonder what he had in mind. More, my copy was a whopping 290+ pages of (admittedly larger font) text. To say there have been "omissions" is understated. And then, of course, the idea that author Salten, an Austrian Jew (born Siegmund Salzmann), had a particular allegory in mind. . . . Well, I discovered a short series of essays I had written alongside my students about the film's impression on me as a child and how these now related to popular culture (at the time folks like 50 Cent, Charlie Sheen, and Miley Cyrus): I often wrote with them to demonstrate different practices like research, ways of thinking, draft revisions, and the like. I called them "Bambi in Boyland," and they are recent additions on the Waywords essay blog. I've since imagined adding two more essays to this series now, one a closer reading of Salten's work, and then a closing synthesis work (all forthcoming). But there ya go. So Salten's story. Yes, dark, but also philosophical, captured in ways that children can inhale but only adults can breathe. It is nature at its most heartless, at times. But it also Him, the presence of seemingly arbitrary and senseless violence appearing at any moment. It's hard, as an adult reader, not to gasp at moments from the parallels, rendered in such at times mysterious strokes. No Thumper, no Flower the skunk, but plenty of lessons. And a worthy couple of hours reading. "'The most dreadful part of all,' the old stag answered, 'is that the dogs believe what the hound just said. They believe it, they pass their lives in fear, they hate Him and themselves and yet they'd die for His sake.'"
“A robin perched on the branch of the apple tree, his feathers ruffled, his red chest blazing.
'No need to look so down in the mouth,' he chirruped. 'Things'll get worse before they get better.'
'I don't know what it is about that tree,' Geno grumbled, 'that makes everything that sits in it talk in proverbs.'
'It's easier than thinking,' the robin stated.”
“Don't lose your head," screamed the pheasant. And at the same time his voice broke in a whistling gasp and, spreading his wings, he flew up with a loud whir. Bambi watched how he flew straight up, directly between the trees, beating his wings. The dark metallic blue and greenish-brown markings on his body gleamed like gold. His long tail feathers swept proudly behind him. A short crash like thunder sounded sharply. The pheasant suddenly crumpled up in mid-flight.”
“Yes, life was hard and full of danger. Let it bring whatever it wants, he would learn somehow to bear all of it.”
Where to Start with Anne Carson? Everything I've picked up by Anne Carson in recent years has been a provocation and a delight, a mesmerism and an assault, a wizardry with language but more, something almost subterranean. It isn't that Carson's words are merely conjurations, but that what they draw up comes from somewhere else, and that somehow this somewhere has been the secret subject all along. Yes, our newest Nobel winner for Literature is deserving (as so many many writers are, though will likely---Murakami---never receive it). She's at once a broad and tangentially-deep thinker. So when poet Fiona Sampson offers an article on where to start, I went in to make sure there was nothing critical I had missed (of course there is!). Here are recommendations for titles I've read and loved: Nox, Float, Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, all excellent choices (though some hard and very expensive to find). And still more. Make your list now. If you haven't met Carson's work before, you can't go wrong with anything on Sampson's list!
This fall has felt rushed to me, somehow---or rather, I've felt rushed inside of it. So unusually, I'm looking forward to the excuse of an enclosing November/December where my studio tech works, the bathroom toilet works, and I can even give some belated attention to forlorn houseplants. And to some of the heavier reading I've put off this summer: I've got the newest from S. King and M. Danielewski, and some of the oldest from Fanon and Said on the list. What's on your TBR? Steve What's Still Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
Explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs. Grab a copy of our Readers Manifesto! I'm Steve Chisnell, an educator for 35 years and an aggressive reader for 50---Let's read and write together and I'll let you in on a few things I've discovered and am still learning!