Waywords Studio
Wanderings on Literature and Language
Waywords
Unwoven Audiobook Available!
Print, ebook, and now audiobook can be found here, along with hundreds of pages of supplements!
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“Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.”
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.
“Education is Freedom” – Nine Answers
For years, my entire pedagogical philosophy has been captured on my automobile license plate. Let me explain. . . .
“Selected Poems” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Hard-lived and ironically-distanced nostalgia, bleak pleas against violence and horror, Yevtushenko’s early collection (his first to be translated to English) makes for fascinating immersion.
Writing Back 2: Getting Over Our Essay Anxiety
It’s time for the end of our carpe diem journey, and we celebrate with a congratulatory essay! Hey, why so glum?
“Forest of Noise” by Mosab Abu Toha
Toha’s poetry from Palestine is less political than of experience, of the dread and sorrow equally that his words will also fade into silence.
To His Bold Master
A prequel response to the Andrew Marvell poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” our silent young lady nowhere in evidence. . . .
Ch 1: Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Reflections on Chapter 1: And a growing Reading Guide for Arendt’s enormous history of 20th century totalitarianism, and what we might need to know from it.
“Huda F Are You?” by Huda Fahmy
First of a larger series and a web comic, Fahmy’s adventures of a young Muslim girl making her way through school are laughable, relatable, and still grounded enough in prejudice and self-advocacy to be important for young readers.
Bellow Seizes Our Day
Sure we can philosophize, but what happens when we put carpe diem to the test in the modern world of capital?
“Rifqa” by Mohammed El-Kurd
This is not easy reading, but poetry’s role is not comfort but truth-telling, the articulation of what we often can not accept in prose. Rifqa is late and powerful, but its title, homage to grandmother and symbol of long resistance, speaks to how long we have turned away.
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