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 Themes, Carpe, & Movement
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27 April 2025 Some CoherenceReader, May promises to be a frantic month for me as I do double-duty to prepare materials in order to take most of June off for a special "travel project:" details soon enough! As you probably understand by now, 'work flow' is the great bugaboo around here: what gets done first, what requires small tinkering, what can I get off the table now, how can I get more out of each read and write? And perhaps it is the nature of the (insert your favorite adjective here) climate, but I have sensed several projects cohering around some key themes. I'll bet you can spot the pattern, too! Arendt ReflectionsMy video reflections on Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism have kicked in, with a new video to drop just about every other Tuesday, a series which will last about 30 weeks of reading. It's hardly too late to join in on the reading! We'll be doing about 25 pages each week. Find more here:
A Reader's ManifestoThe initial draft of A Reader's Manifesto is up and ready for anyone to comment, question, revise, or challenge. I welcome any and all who follow Waywords to participate, with a goal of completing a more "public" living/open document by Sept. 2025. My hope is to capture several elements essential to a principled ethic of reading adaptable by any, with specific strategies and engagements to follow. This will also form an essential component to what I consider the Waywords Studio mission.
Local EngagementsSince initiating my Book Challenge preparedness advocacy here in Waterford, I've had great success at my public library, having participated actively alongside the library board to revise both the Book Acquisition policy and the Citizen Request for Review process. It's great to have such a responsive and thoughtful Director in our branch. My success with our schools is, unsurprisingly, slower to arrive, with great spans of silence from their central administrators. They seem to respond (by phone, never "in writing") only when I threaten to make my concerns more public, not a transactional relationship that is healthy or productive. But I'm not close to quitting, having met some folks from the state-level Library of Michigan and our county-level intermediate schools along the way as allies and research support. The schools now have all the tools they need to enact legal protections quickly. Once again, it's become my turn to push them.
Reading/Reviewing to a ThemeMuch of my reading this year has already directed my thinking (of course) and I've been most moved by several recent reads:
Ahead in this theme are these titles:
If you'd like to do any "buddy reads" or something more collaborative on any of these, let me know! (I plan to do de Tocqueville similarly to Arendt.)
Literary Nomads and ChoiceAs I slam Horace and praise Star Trek fans (who would dare write such a thing?), write back in verse and prose, turn over irony and how--somehow--we have reversed the very conceptions of Epicureanism, Literary Nomads is doubling-down on carpe diem, a "plucking" or "harvesting" of the moments we have and what we choose to do with them which might render them meaningful. And surprise! As we move forward in this examination or essai, it has little to do with YOLO purchases or incense and isolating presentisms. But it does have to do with our choices.
Up ahead:
Would love a question from you for the podcast, too!
Yup. That pattern tends to hold together, more and more . . . ! Departure & Breath Into May May is Jewish-American Heritage Month, Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Mental Health Awareness Month! Also: *Dracula Daily is an emailing of the Stoker novel in small pieces, each a letter or diary entry delivered on the day of the novel's events, so you end up reading Dracula in "real time" from May to November: it's a different experience of narrative tension! Sign up for the free subscription: https://draculadaily.substack.com/ Some RecommendationsEarly Recommendation from My Reading: Eye Level (2018) by Jenny XieXie's poetry of displacement is at once unease and familiarity. She moves through global geographies, but it is the locations which shift, flashes of identity, with a composure and irony which mesmerizes. I've grown lean from eating only the past.
Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill.
"Is This River Alive?" by Robert MacfarlaneIf you haven't met Macfarlane's excellent work, it's time with, perhaps his new book. He's an environmentalist yes, but also a philosopher of language, poet, contemplator--he's a joy to read. In English, we “it” rivers, trees, mountains and creatures: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human people. In English, pronouns for natural features are “which” or “that”: the river that flows; the forest that grows. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow. In English, we refer to a river in the singular, but “river” is one of the great group nouns, containing multitudes. In English, there is no verb “to river”. But what could be more of a verb than a river?
What's your theme? How can we enact it? 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!