Literary Nomads

  What happens to a real, working community when a fictional landscape is physically constructed on top of it? We discover the socio-economic friction behind literary travel, contrasting the magical ideals of Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo with the unpaved streets of Aracataca, Colombia. Behind the “front stage” of tourist attractions are bulldozers, evictions, and even […]

  Why do we drive thousands of miles just to touch the wooden beams of an author’s birthplace? From Poe’s Baltimore to PEI and Waywords’s own Waterford, MI, we consider what it takes to build a literary destination and how this works to undermine the very real need for we travelers to cross the threshold […]

  Who carries the weight of our leisure? Some readings from the past by thoughtful and resilient women! Take in some early writing of place and circumstance, journals and reflections which reflect the jarring collisions between our travel expectations and the realities we meet. More, we learn that an adaptable attitude and skeptical eye are […]

  Did your horse throw ya, buddy? We investigate what we hope to achieve by literary travel . . . and why our packing cannot prepare us for it! While the global tourism industry spends billions to shape our eager expectations, what is it that we’re actually so anxious to see? And whatever it is, […]

Welcome to the summer trailhead! Join Journey 7 of Literary Nomads as we explore the secrets of literary tourism and travel writing. Discover how authors like L.M. Montgomery constructed the identity of Prince Edward Island, unpack the cultural legacy of Anne of Green Gables, and learn how to look past the postcard illusions of modern […]

  We are left on the precipice of a severe, unavoidable aporia: when the Empire can absorb and commercialize our very language of protest, the only true ethical act of agency is to stop performing the script, reject the easy answer, and step directly out into the unimaginable dark . We challenge the profound hypocrisy […]

  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 try and bridge the gap between literary theory and civic praxis, how public school teachers, students, […]

  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 after the Sewol Ferry tragedy, we consider how “New Sincerity” and “Guerilla Texts” can […]

  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 change the story’s ending because we couldn’t handle our own complicity? Discover the original […]

  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 sophisticated illusion of justice? Today it’s the dark philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges’s […]

  10 April 2026 Waypoint - “The Fortune Teller” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is perhaps the greatest writer of Brazil. In “The Fortune-Teller,” a secret affair driven by anonymous threats pushes a committed skeptic toward a dingy attic and a deck of cards. It is a study in […]

  The “Hideous Bargain” is no longer just about one child’s pain . . . We investigate the “Euclidean Mind” that seeks to flatten our messy humanity into a spreadsheet of “mathematically infallible happiness.”  Unsettle the sterile peace of the OneState and the rigid hierarchy of Flatland to ask: Is your imagination a gift, or […]

The “Hideous Bargain” moves from metaphor to the operating table. In this episode, we let loose the bonds of metaphor in Le Guin’s “Omelas” and meet the visceral reality of clinical labor. We examine how the “Sanitization of Language” allows societies—from the United Federation of Planets to modern biotechnology markets—to rebrand human suffering as a […]

The Omelas basement has a physical address in America: the prison-industrial complex.  This week, we use the lens of Toni Morrison’s literary criticism to interrogate the 13th Amendment and the ‘Hideous Bargain” of mass incarceration. If the basement is built into our laws, can we ever truly ‘walk away’? We analyze Toni Morrison’s book Playing […]

What happens to the story when the ‘object’ of our sympathy looks back and refuses the role we’ve written for them? The allegory of the ‘Suffering Child’ is a powerful challenge, but it creates its own blind spots: it can turn a living history into a static prop. This week, we use Tommy Orange’s Wandering […]

Your Interpretation is Colonial. When we turn Zen into a pop-culture vibe or a totem pole into a corporate metaphor, we aren't learning; we're committing interpretative violence.

Akwaeke Emezi demonstrates how Nigeria’s contemporary writers turn our conceptual realities around. They offer a YA novel that doesn’t condescend, but more, one which shows that we should not “walk away” from Omelas, but perhaps “Stay and Hunt.” This is also the final of three episodes which offers a broader look at the history and […]

Why have so few read Soyinka? And can we find hope through his cynical dramas? I admit I am a victim of the myth-making around me which has made Soyinka and other African writers largely invisible. Let’s see why. Episode 6.24 – Words from Nigeria Pt 2: Soyinka’s Tiger & Brother Jero African writers named […]

  What sort of literature is this, anyway? Today we introduce some approaches to Nigerian literature, offer a bevy of African writers, and explore how one of Nigeria’s most powerful authors can write her own modest letter to humanity. Also, we learn about hostile architecture from one of our listeners. Episode 6.23 – Words from […]

  And what if nobody listens? Yes, entering our calls for justice into public space carries no small amount of anxiety. And the poster-child for being unheard, the Trojan princess and priestess Cassandra, may–if we read our mythology carefully–provide us some clues to our purpose and goals in writing as anti-epic heroes, wielding language as […]

  26 Dec 2025 Episode 6.21 – Writing Back: Letters to Humanity A different sort of New Year Resolution, moving us from personal improvement to public advocacy! Let’s write an essay of address, framing our passions into a perspective that would make Le Guin proud! Texts from this episode: Nazim Hikmet: Letters to Taranta-Babu, 1935 […]

  19 Dec 2025 Episode 6.20 – The Great Societies: Lowry’s The Giver Another thorny utopia, Lowry’s Community practices a different kind of strategy to the Hideous Bargain: ethical evasion, a too tempting strategy for all of us. Political? Yes. But also a YA fantasy vision of what some of the latest writers and thinkers […]

  12 Dec 2025 Episode 6.19 – The Great Societies, Pt 2: Metropolis & The Ways of Meaning We finish our discussion of the silent film Metropolis and answer our question of art and politics by examining the text, context, and reader meaning-making. Discussed in the episode: A definition of Context: with / accompanying / […]

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).

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.

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?

There really isn't that much to say about Poe, is there? He's just creepy. But wait. What if we could explain the supposed madness in all these stories?

Another Halloween treat from Poe, a reading of this lesser-known tale. And follow the podcast for some ways to think about it and "The Tell-Tale Heart"!

This story, a quintessential Poe classic, is perfect not only for its conception of the psychology of horror, but for our larger discussion in Le Guin's Journey 6. 

What is this podcast? I recommend you start here, with this introduction to Literary Nomads and get a taste of what the larger series offers!

What is this podcast? I recommend you start here, with this introduction to Literary Nomads and get a taste of what the larger series offers!

What is this podcast? I recommend you start here, with this introduction to Literary Nomads and get a taste of what the larger series offers!

Now that we've wrestled in and with Omelas for a bit, what questions remain for us to take forward on our journey? We're walking away from Omelas, but let's have an idea where we're going.

Listeners offer their questions from narrator trust to activism to teaching controversy. I rant--or respond--back.

Can we pull this utopia dilemma together? Or will we add even more levels of complication?

Sure, the Omelas dilemma is tough, but at least we have our narrator as ally, right? Right? Perhaps the real horror in Omelas has less to do with the child at its center.

Is this story really about that suffering child? Or is it more about how we wall its suffering out, then invite it back in?

At last we settle in to think about Le Guin's Omelas story and set aside some common approaches to it. The first of several parts.

Let's niche down into a small sub-genre of fantasy and explore our desire for it, the classic utopia!

Riddle: What do Beowulf, Palmolive dish liquid, and Sarah Maas have in common? Hint: Ursula K. Le Guin knows! 

What do a children's story and horror film have in common? Maybe our Suffering Child question, with very different approaches to it.

This is getting challenging. What are we to do with the Suffering Child question? And on which form of suffering do I plant my flag of resistance? Dostoevsky and Langston Hughes both offer clues.

Still another famous writer has posed the Le Guin question, and he did it in one of Russia's most famous novels, The Brothers Karamazov. Here it is.

Le Guin leans on an essay by William James, but what does that have to do with all our garden talk? It's about our blind spots and our privilege.

Speaking of links back to Andrew Marvell's poetry--weren't we?--we expose some of our misapprehensions about nature, leisure, and work. And we read Marvell's poem "The Garden" while we think green thoughts about it.

What does it mean to embrace "Other"? And how might we understand carpe diem if we truly had "world enough and time?" Le Guin shows us in her famous science fiction short story.

Where we've been and where we're going, and we take a pause in a museum gallery, too!

Looking ahead at Season 6: Ursula K. Le Guin's story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and all the wrestling we do with dilemmas of ethics.

We finish a carpe diem journey and I reflect back on what I've learned, what I believe, and where we are going next.

It's time for the end of our carpe diem journey, and we celebrate with a congratulatory essay! Hey, why so glum?