Literary Nomads

A rarely met short story by Montgomery, and a bit darker than her Anne books.

Resources:

Waypoint –

Reading of “Min,” by Lucy Maud Montgomery

(pdf of this work)

Skeptical Pilgrim Challenges: 

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/literary-tourism/

CHAPTERS

00:00      Intro
00:52      Title: “Min”
01:06      Reading: “Min” (1903)
31:17      Outro

===

Tr...

What is the real story behind the creator of Anne of Green Gables?

In the close of this two-part examination of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life, we examine how her idealized fiction was neither passive memory nor simple escapism, but a defiant “evensong,” an act of economic, spiritual, and even artistic sovereignty launched from within a deep winter darkness.

Resources:

What if Anne of Green Gables wasn’t just an escapist daydream, but a calculated strategy that saved its author’s life?

Today we find the divide between L.M. Montgomery’s sunlit public fiction and her claustrophobic domestic reality. From hidden kitchen-table writing under an autocratic grandfather to a decade-long legal battle against a predatory Boston publisher, we explore how her idyllic landscapes served as a fortress of psychological survival and an engine for economic sovereignty.

Resources:

Hey, everyone!

Thanks for your patience during this unexpected episode delay! A few tech challenges while I upgraded my studio this summer put me a few weeks behind.

But this little announcement proves that I’m back up and running, so we’ll continue our Literary Tourism journey very soon, and I’ll likely drop a few episodes closer together to make up for our lost late summer. 

Next we dig into author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own life to see how our little Anne of Green Gables may have mirrored it! Spoiler: We’re cal...

How does the map overwrite the physical territory it claims to represent?

Today we look at literary simulations, from the bedroom of Victor Hugo to the Orlando welter of parks and rides. Guided by the semiotics of Umberto Eco, the simulation theory of Jean Baudrillard, and the urban critiques of Sam Jacob, we investigate the social construction of experience environments and what creates our preference for them over the raw experience.

Resources:

How do we navigate the space between the curated tourism experience and the raw concrete of the world beneath it?

We investigate the “imaginative geographies” we project onto other lands, examining how Italo Calvino’s semiotic cities, Arthur Conan Doyle’s romanticized London, and Mathieu Kassovitz’s brutalist Paris reveal the ethical tensions of the traveler’s gaze. We look into our habit of cropping out infrastructure and ask whether reading the raw city makes us better travelers or something worse. Bloomsday in Dublin and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital are also considered.

Resources:

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 a violent army. We learn about the history of PEI National Park expropriations, the 1928 Banana Massacre, and how to critically read tourist destinations beyond the gift shop facade.

Resources:

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 from the literary into the physical. Is there a way to thwart the hucksters of simulations? Perhaps!

Resources:

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 essential tools.

Readings from:

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, how likely are we to find it? In this first of two parts, we ask if what we pack in anticipation is to better guarantee our success or to ward us from disappointment. As an example, we read an excerpt from Isa...

What’s the difference between being a passive tourist and a wayfarer?

Follow the 17th-century footsteps of Matsuo Basho to interrogate the gap between curated tourist destinations  and the open-ended, ego-stripping realities of true travel. By contrasting the lush, internal landscapes of L.M. Montgomery with the skeletal prose of classical Japanese travel sketches, we ask: Can we ever truly encounter a sovereign landscape, or do our books merely wrap the earth in a comforting postcard illusion?

Along the way, we look at the haiku in its haibun form and use Martin Heidegger’s clas...

Are we consuming an authentic place, or are we willingly participating in a beautifully staged performance designed around our own expectations?

In this opening episode of Journey 7, we begin our exploration of literary tourism. When we travel to the places that inspired our favorite books, whose landscape are we actually stepping into? Today. we cross the eight-mile concrete expanse onto Prince Edward Island to investigate the massive, multi-million dollar infrastructure designed to capitalize on Anne of Green Gables. Along the way, we unpack our collective urge to buy raspberry cordials and straw hats.

Al...

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 historic landmarks.

Episode 7.00 –

Literary Tourism Trailer : Anne of Green Gables

Reading Highlights Ahead:

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 of our own reading habits, and confront the uncomfortable idea that our graduate seminars, book clubs, and elite cultural critiques often function as a highly managed form of otium—a beautifully curated performative space that we purchase with company-backed grants to feel vir...

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, and lifelong readers can navigate the intimidation of administrative bureaucracy, fight censorship, and reclaim accountability. Let’s get past passive book consumption and embrace “Writing Back” to structurally alter our local communities.

Episode 6.36 –

What I Get Wrong...

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 unsettle the status quo and physically alter the world.

Episode 6.35 –

Writing Back: Guerilla Texts, BTS, and Gaye

Readings & Resources:

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 ethics of reading and the “Empathy Trap” in this look at the arguments of Suzanne Keen and Louise Rosenblatt.

We expand the “Hideous Bargain” to include the very act of consuming this podcast and the literature it discusses. We ask if we are truly “walking away” from the bargain, or if we are merely co-authoring the c...

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 the “Achievement Society” is actually what pays for global injustice and inequity.

Compare Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life with the Zhuangzi in this reflection on Stoicism vs. Daoism. Learn why “uselessness” is a survival strategy against the “Extraction Economy” and how Cincinnatus’s Roman Plow creates a utilitarian trap. Oh, and how...

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 Omelas in “The Case of the Animals versus Man.” It’s early Iraq and modern ethics, Peter Singer’s speciesism, Haraway’s companion species, and the colonizing “thingification” of nature. Was Le Guin’s story about animal rights? Or, are...

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 “The Lottery in Babylon” and Machado de Assis’s “The Fortune-Teller.” How do we use fate, destiny, and algorithms to justify systemic inequality and sacrifice, unsettling our modern reliance on “chance” to explain the suffering of others?  

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 how easily we trade our reason for a comfortable prophecy, and a reminder that the future rarely negotiates with the stories we tell ourselves. As a setting for our discussion on the role of chance, fate, and destiny against moral accountability, we might...

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 a disease the state is currently curing?.

An interrogation of the “Iron Cage” of rationality and the death of imagination in a social order of mathematical logic. We negotiate the intersection of Weberian sociology and Zamyatin’s thermodynamic dialectic—Energy vs. Entropy—to re-story the...

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 “sacred honor” or a “net gain”.

“We explore the “clinical labor” of Star Trek and Never Let Me Go. We re-story the “Redshirt” trope through the lens of necropolitics and the ethical extractions of the modern bioeconomy.

Episode 6.29 –

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 in the Dark and the prison-industrial complex through the documentary film 13th. We discuss the ‘Architecture of the Dungeon,’ and the ‘Hideous Bargain’ of American systemic racism.  We discuss how ‘white silence’ sustains the Omelas basement and why dismantling the ‘Utopia Il...

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 Stars to break that Omelas mirror. We explore the ‘Sovereign Center’—a reality where trauma is not a relic in a basement, but an active, intergenerational authorship that demands a more strenuous engagement than simply ‘walking away.’

We also consider the lega...

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. 

Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman and Simon Ortiz’s “Towards a National Indian Literature” confront the “Bureaucracy of Erasure.” We ditch the linear “vanishing Indian” myth for the Torus—a non-linear, sovereign loop of survival where the ghosts of the past still speak in the official transcripts of the present. Along the way, we learn about MMIWR (see below) and the 1953 Termination Act (House Concurrent Resolu...

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 newer trends in Nigerian literature along with recommendations for reading. Part 1 discussed Dear Ijeawele by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Part 2 explored Wole Soyinka’s play, The Trials of Brother Jero.

Episode 6.25 –

Words from Nigeria 3 - Emezi’s Pet...

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 in this episode and some of the most rewarding reads:

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 Nigeria Pt 1: Adichie and the Literary Manifesto

African writers from this episode and some of the most rewarding reads:

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 our weapons.

Episode 6.22 –

Cassandra: Uncertain Steps

Texts from this episode:

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/l...

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:

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/le-guin-omelas/

CHAPTERS<...

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 believe we’re doing already.

Texts from this episode:

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/projec...

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:

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/le-guin-omelas/

CHAPTERS

00:00     Art Against the Emperor
04:37     Intro Theme
05:12     Reading the Text: Architecture pf Exploitation
15:38 ...

5 Dec 2025

Episode 6.18 –

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).

In the process, we discuss an indigenous protest against American Art, the nature of ideology, an opening definition of a Great Society, and the four areas of inquiry we must pursue to answer the question, “Is All Art Political...

28 Nov 2025

Episode 6.17 –

True Horror: Le Guin, Poe, Cavarero, Bataille, and Arendt

NOTE: While nothing explicit or graphic is named in this episode, it does touch upon difficult and challenging psychological topics, so it is not recommended for those sensitive to violence and war.

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. From Poe’s violence...

21 Nov 2025

Episode 6.16 –

Poe: Horror, Pathology, and the Necessity for Care

*NOTE: While nothing explicit or graphic is named in this episode, it does touch upon difficult and challenging psychological topics, so it is not recommended for those sensitive to violence and war.

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? In this episode, I reflect on the...

7 Nov 2025

Episode 6.15 –

The “Hideous Heart:” Poe’s Aesthetic of Accountability

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?  We look at the narrators of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of Perversity,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Along the way we consult several of his essays of the aesthetic, of literary craft, in order to understand what he may be up to.

Poe’s Works Discussed:<...

31 October 2025

Waypoint - “The Imp of Perversity” (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe

https://waywordsstudio.com

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords-podcast/

Another Halloween treat from Poe, a reading of this lesser-known tale which bears some comparison to “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

American pioneer of many literary traditions including the Gothic tradition, detective fiction, and science fiction, Poe was also a literary critic who well understood the goals of his art, to articulate the truth of beauty, focused on a single particular notion or idea.

Chapters

00:00 ...

28 October 2025

Waypoint - “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

https://waywordsstudio.com

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords-podcast/

American pioneer of many literary traditions including the Gothic tradition, detective fiction, and science fiction, Poe was also a literary critic who well understood the goals of his art, to articulate the truth of beauty, focused on a single particular notion or idea. 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 Journ...

10 Oct 2025

Episode 0.3 - Literary Nomads for Teachers

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!

And, to be sure I’ve sold you, we’ll offer some fresh approaches to the most-taught poem in the US, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Listen and find out how we’re doing a different kind of reading and learning from everybody else. And you know why? “That’s just the way it is.”

Bru...