Waywords Studio
Wanderings on Literature and Language
Waywords

our studio
“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.
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 2
What did Marvell know and how did he use it? We look at the sexism in the poem and discover how this provocation is hardly unique in the carpe diem tradition.
“Paradise” by Toni Morrison
The seeming conceit of the novel–Who killed a group of women living just outside of their small town and why?–is answered as Morrison would: by layering relationships and histories atop one another while relating the stories of individual perspectives.
Whirling Still
A winter estrangement. Contraction, expansion and opening, drafts from the darkness too close.
“Following the Brush” by John Elder
Elder’s travelogue from the 1990s is a worthy enough introduction to some of the traditional aspects of Japanese society, though it barely reaches outside tradition nor offers much reflection for the year he spent there with his family.
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 1
What do we do with–how do we read–can we make us of–a classic and famous metaphysical poem which is also misogynistic?
Early Tolkien Criticism – 5 Books
Early critical reviews and writings on Tolkien range from safe takes on the new fantasy form to vapid praise, and from hyper-focused examinations of the name Bifur to broader post-structuralist analyses. Here’s a few from my shelf and their value today.
Not My Text! Irony and Ducking Accountability
We consider who is accountable for the text: author, character, or reader, and how writers build a narrative distance in texts to allow irony and meaning to operate (and shirking a bit of accountability).
“Decline and Fall” by Evelyn Waugh
Absurd and comedic satire on British “appearances” and class with plenty of lowkey digs at other topics along the way. Unfortunately, 100 years later, we are reminded that not all “humor” ages equally well.
The Sestina and Me
I reflect on the completion of my wintry fingertrap sestina, “Whirling Still.”
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