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!
On Hideous Bargains and Diminishing Literacies
17 August 2025 Resources for Reading Reader, Now that I've got a few entries in place on the Education portion of the Waywords website, I can continue that process and start moving on to other kinds of offerings, like Reading Intensives and the long-awaited Teachers Guide to Unwoven, with my true appreciation for those who have waited. [And with that, another reminder that--until that Teachers Edition is published, the main offering of it---all of the poetic supplements, annotations, and...
On Fantasy, New Offers, and Artists at the Crossroads
3 August 2025 Education Platform Opening Reader, At last (though pretty close to on schedule for me!) the Waywords website has begun to open its Education section. Right now, it is a separate weekly blog which places most of the concepts from Literary Nomads Season 5 into tighter packages, offering a free download related to the talk. The first series is on the basic critical reading process I have promoted: Notice-Significance-Pattern-Coherence, which is based largely on Reader-Response...
On Land Acknowledgements and More Discomfiture
20 July 2025 Land Acknowledgements & Inadequacies Reader, I've been puzzling more than a bit over indigenous land acknowledgements as I move to position myself as an ally for global and marginalized voices and narratives, a necessary part of the Waywords mission and part of the Reader's Manifesto. So let's be real for a minute. Waywords Studio is in Michigan, the state itself an Ojibwe word for "great lake." Hundreds of towns, lakes, and Detroit-made automobiles are similarly named. I have...
On the Heat, Cranky Readings, and Slow Down to Read
6 July 2025 A C+ for My Automations Skill Reader, For those curious, as my automations fire off (or fail to), I've put together a short list of platforms and reviews for their ease and reliability. If anyone knows simpler or more effective methods, let me know, but my budget does not allow for another paid service! YouTube - Easy to schedule; hugely reliable Pinterest - 30-day scheduling limit; clumsy pin builds with no editing after scheduling; very reliable publishing Tumblr - Easy to...
On Anarchy, Automation, and Acknowledging the Aberrant
6 June 2025 A Test of Automation Mastery Reader, I'm going to travel in the next several weeks to a few places around Canada and the US in part to research and produce some material in anticipation of Season 7 of Literary Nomads: Literary Tourism & Anne of Green Gables. This will be the first time I've stepped away from the studio with the expectation that my productivity will continue "without me," and I'll be testing my ability to automate everything far out in advance. My hope is that none...
On New Journeys, Simplified Belief, and Free Stuff
25 May 2025 Closing One Season, Anticipating Another Reader, When I first conceived of the texts I would make as "base camps" for Literary Nomads, I remember reminding myself not to get too married to the order and concepts I would touch upon: it's a lesson I learned from teaching, too. I could compel classrooms in certain directions to meet curricular calendars, but the best learning always happened when I let them steer us by curiosity. Already, Nomads has turned in directions I had not...
On Bellow's Tears, Shedding Straws, and Misreading
11 May 2025 Responsible Readers Writing Back Reader, The job is huge, not the least because we ourselves fall so easily to contributing. The rhetorical "strategies" of communities seem determined towards simple division, scraped down and packaged into semi-coherent shouts of opposition packaged as shareable memes or barely-suppressed acts of rage. Medical wranglings, immigration policies, foreign affairs, the US Constitution, legal proceedings, and personal mores are whittled on demand: "Give...
A Recipe for a Literary Nomads Podcast Episode
4 May 2024 What Goes Into a Podcast Episode? Partly staged, partly the natural Waywords chaos (full scale image linked to pic) Reader, A newsletter about time, partly to offer you all a glimpse behind the scenes of producing some of the Waywords content, and partly to sketch out for myself my pattern: perhaps we'll spot something interesting! One Episode of Literary Nomads I already know that I do more prep than many podcasts, mostly before recording in reading and research and "curricular"...
On Themes, Carpe, & Movement
27 April 2025 Some Coherence Reader, 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)...
On Dis-Reading, Manifestos, and Killer Rabbits
13 April 2025 A Manifesto Forming Reader, I've offered ideas of writing back, talking out, projecting our thinking into the world. Behind all of that, of course, is some broader thinking on what reading is probably for. I'm not talking about the rather pedantic reasons so often given by "employment literacy" advocates or the worthy but solitary self-enrichment activities of most of us. What's been forming for some time (and I mean years or decades) involves some scary words when attached to...
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!