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PODCAST

Literary Nomads

Join me, Steve Chisnell, as we find and lose meaning across modern and classic tales, through ancient and distant verse, atop everything in our many cultures which might be read. For teachers, students, and lovers of reading, we will discover new paths to understanding!

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All Episodes

34:04

Ghost in the Garden – Dark Montgomery Pt. 1

Literary Nomads ·

2026/09/22

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, […]

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33:25

Author Footprints Pt. 2 – The Aracataca Paradox

Literary Nomads ·

2026/07/25

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 […]

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31:16

Author Footprints Pt. 1 – Aura & Reliquary

Literary Nomads ·

2026/07/17

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 […]

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31:01

Packing Lists Pt. 2 – Stalwart Women

Literary Nomads ·

2026/07/10

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 […]

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29:27

Packing Lists Pt. 1: Dreams and Dirt

Literary Nomads ·

2026/07/03

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, […]

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29:27

Grand Tours Pt 2: Bat on the Narrow Road

Literary Nomads ·

2026/06/26

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: […]

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34:10

Grand Tours Pt 1: The Postcard Illusion

Literary Nomads ·

2026/06/20

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 […]

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35:51

Writing Back: Guerilla Texts, BTS, and Gaye

Literary Nomads ·

2026/05/16

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 […]

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38:38

The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts

Literary Nomads ·

2026/05/11

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 […]

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49:26

Utopia’s Spare Parts: Star Trek & Ishiguro

Literary Nomads ·

2026/03/21

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 […]

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38:21

Words from Nigeria Pt 1: Adichie and the Literary...

Literary Nomads ·

2026/01/16

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 […]

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54:05

Is All Art Political? The Great Societies, Pt. 1:...

Literary Nomads ·

2025/12/05

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).

en-US

52:51

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

Literary Nomads ·

2025/11/28

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.

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51:25

Poe: Horror, Pathology, and the Necessity of Care

Literary Nomads ·

2025/11/21

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?

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21:19

Waypoint – “The Imp of Perversity”

Literary Nomads ·

2025/10/31

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"!

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19:17

Waypoint – “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Literary Nomads ·

2025/10/28

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.

en-US

56:03

Literary Nomads for Teachers

Literary Nomads ·

2025/10/11

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!

en-US

48:17

Literary Nomads for Readers

Literary Nomads ·

2025/09/26

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!

en-US

55:08

Le Guin Part 5: Q&A

Literary Nomads ·

2025/09/12

Listeners offer their questions from narrator trust to activism to teaching controversy. I rant--or respond--back.

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1:10:07

Le Guin Part 4: The Ones Who Stay – N. K. Jemisin

Literary Nomads ·

2025/09/05

Can we pull this utopia dilemma together? Or will we add even more levels of complication?

en-US

40 results

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