Show overview
Podcasts | Waywords Studio has published 12 episodes during 2026. That works out to roughly 8 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a fortnightly cadence.
Episodes typically run thirty-five to sixty minutes — most land between 37 min and 47 min — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. None of the episodes are flagged explicit by the publisher. It is catalogued as a EN-US-language Education show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed yesterday, with 12 episodes already out so far this year. Published by Steve Chisnell.
From the publisher
Wanderings On Literature and Language
Latest Episodes
Writing Back: Guerilla Texts, BTS, and Gaye
The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts
Roman Plow, Sovereign Tree: Seneca and Zhuangzi
The Original Omelas: The Case of the Animals vs. Man
The Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain
Waypoint – “The Fortune Teller”
Failures of Imagination: We and Flatland
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 […]
Utopia’s Spare Parts: Star Trek & Ishiguro
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 Architecture of the Dungeon: Toni Morrison and the 13th Amendment
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 […]
Wandering Stars: Tommy Orange and the Sovereign Center
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 […]
S6 Ep 73The Bureaucracy of Erasure: Erdrich’s The Night Watchman
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.
Words from Nigeria 3 – Emezi’s Pet & Hunters for Truth
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 […]