Literary Nomads

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?

Sure we can philosophize, but what happens when we put carpe diem to the test in the modern world of capital?

What is required of us to find the power and meaning in art? in poetry? Is it related to carpe diem? And does it give us any guidance in how to approach meaningful lives?

How far away are we from the original meaning of carpe diem? And does it matter?

Can some fan-fiction teach us more about carpe diem than a classic Roman poet?

Can an ancient Roman poet illuminate the concept of carpe diem? Perhaps, but then again . . .

Writing back to authors and their works is essential to the literary culture; it also helps us answer our essential questions. Let's do some of that, then!