Waywords
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Waywords produces a web of programs and media designed to improve our thinking in democratic action, in critical literacy, in global understanding. We provoke, inspire, and wrestle with the ambiguities and richness of human thinking, from times modern to ancient.
While offering serious educational support for those who want it, Waywords entertains and engages with surprising takes on a wide range of global topics, from Western social trends to modern mythological thinking.
Criticism & Reviews
The Waywords podcasts and blog explore the workings of global literatures, language, and mythology through a social-epistemic rhetoric. Book reviews explore a wide range of genre, era, and region.
Fiction & Verse
Original prose includes verse, short fiction, work from the ImageMaker cosmogony, the Sam & Nadi English learners series, published collections like Unwoven, and audio drama.
Teaching & Learning
Programs to support students in lifelong literacy training, Advanced Placement® Literature, IB® Theory of Knowledge, philosophy, composition and critical reading, and English language learning.
Is All Art Political? The Great Societies, Pt. 1: Metropolis
It seems everything is politics these days. But at least can’t we keep art pure? You know, art for art’s sake? I offer my thoughts on the topic while we examine the classic silent film, Metropolis (1927).
“Pet” by Akwaeke Emezi
This YA story is at once a serious look at repressed trauma (personal and societal) and a sensitive examination of diversity and compassion. A wonderful introduction to community and responsibility.
True Horror: Le Guin, Poe, Cavarero, Bataille, and Arendt
We finish our side trail on the implications of Poe’s horror by stepping more deeply into our own capacity to violence, reaching finally to Le Guin’s own direction: look to our modern political scene and the impulse to annihilation.
“The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt
Those looking for quick takeaways about totalitarian regimes, especially in our current climate, are disappointed that Arendt hasn’t offered the complexity of the issue in bullet points. But of course, the complex and nuanced and even contradictory history of the world isn’t built that way.
“Hardears” by Matthew Clarke
Clarke’s original Caribbean hybrid of history and myth is an act of art and decolonialization, of imagination and resistance to the mainstream, though not wholly penetrable to audiences beyond the island culture.
“Omeros” by Derek Walcott
Walcott’s epic poetic work is at once a refiguring of Homer and the colonial history of St. Lucia, of the indigenous everywhere, of the myths which mark poet and people. An extraordinary layering of all.
Poe: Horror, Pathology, and the Necessity of Care
We say Poe has influence the genre of horror, but have we really considered what that influence has revealed to us across the generations? What happens when we tell stories of a culture that has abandoned its moral foundations?
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce
If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera
Kundera’s near masterpiece is compelling story, hypnotic characters and interactions, a profound theme, and . . . something else more elusive still.
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