Waywords Studio
Wanderings on Literature and Language
Waywords
our studio
“Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”
Angela Carter
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.
What I Get Wrong: Intimidation & Interpretation
Is our intellectual exercise just an expensive lifestyle brand that keeps our hands clean? In this raw, self-interrogating mailbag episode, we turn the lens inward for a vulnerability audit of our own political battles and pedagogical failures. Let's...
Ode on a Pre-Cambrian Spine
Ekphrastic poetry, but if we look at the reverse side of our art . . .
Writing Back: Guerilla Texts, BTS, and Gaye
Is that blank page paralyzing your activism? Is your irony a mask for your complicity? We’re using William James and David Foster Wallace to interrogate the "sneer trap" of modern irony. From Marvin Gaye’s soulful protests to BTS’s radical solidarity...
The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts
Is your reading just an "escape"?? Your favorite "escape" read might be a gated community for your conscience. Today, we interrogate the "Catharsis Commodity" and ask if our reading habits are just another layer of the Hideous Bargain. Explore the...
Roman Plow, Sovereign Tree: Seneca and Zhuangzi
Can Stoicism answer our dilemma? Is the suffering child a product of a world that demands every second and every soul be "useful" to the state? By comparing the "Roman Plow" of duty to the "Sovereign Tree" of uselessness, we ask if our participation in...
Four April Rondels
Well, four kinds of rondel, and another cycle of spring detritus. . . .
Ned Blackhawk: The Rediscovery of America
Reflections and a growing glossary for Blackhawk’s award-winning 2023 history, and what we might need to know from it.
The Original Omelas: The Case of the Animals vs. Man
And when the child cannot speak for itself? Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy. We unsettle the habitus of human exceptionalism to ask: would we...
The Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain
We've turned the basement into a casino! A man who turns to fortune-telling to assuage his conscience. A society that chooses its victims through a lottery. Does "mathematical fairness" absolve the citizens of Omelas, or does it simply creates a more...
Subscribe & Discover
Programs for students, teachers, and devotees to literature
Community