This is the full slate of programs offered by Waywords Studio, specializing in literary podcasts whether audio fiction or criticism. Go to WaywordsStudio.com to Follow or Subscribe to individual programs.
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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: Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, 1999. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, 1986.
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: Calvino
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: García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hund
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: Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1969. MacLeod, Nicola E. Literary Fiction Tourism: Understandi
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: Dorothy Wordsworth – “The Highland Hut” from Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803 Mary Seacole – Chapter III from Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 1857 Sei Shōnagon – “182. The House Had a Spac
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 Isabella Bird’s 1879 travelogue, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. And we hear from philosopher
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 classic distinction
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
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: Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Anne of Green Gables Series, personal Journals, The Haunted Wood, The Alpine Path, Among the Shadows Journals of Dorothy Wordswo
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 virtuous
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. Episod
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: Gaye, Marvin. "What's Going On." What's Going On, 1971. BTS. "Spring Day." You Never Walk Alone, 2017. YouTube, https://yout
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 child’s abuse through passive, fri
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 The Expe
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 animal rights linked
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? Episode 6.31 - Tyrann
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 find few better examples. Chapters 0
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
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 - Utopia’s Sp
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 disma
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 legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boardin
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 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 & Hunters f
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: Soyinka, Wole: The Trials of Brother Jero, Kongi's Harvest, The Lion and the Jewel, A Play of Giants Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, The Anthills of Savannah Cole, Teju: Open City, Known and Strange Things Emezi, Akwaeke: P
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: Achebe, Chinua (Nigeria): Things Fall Apart, The Anthills of Savannah, Arrow of God, Hopes and Impediments Adeyemi, Tomi (Nigeria): Children of Blood a
