Waywords Studio Full Slate

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

  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...