Literary Nomads

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!

Episodes

October 11, 2025 56 mins
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!
Mark as Played
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!
Mark as Played
September 26, 2025 48 mins
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!
Mark as Played
September 19, 2025 39 mins
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.
Mark as Played
September 12, 2025 55 mins
Listeners offer their questions from narrator trust to activism to teaching controversy. I rant--or respond--back.
Mark as Played
Can we pull this utopia dilemma together? Or will we add even more levels of complication?
Mark as Played
August 30, 2025 41 mins
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.
Mark as Played
August 23, 2025 45 mins
Is this story really about that suffering child? Or is it more about how we wall its suffering out, then invite it back in?
Mark as Played
August 15, 2025 50 mins
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.
Mark as Played
Let's niche down into a small sub-genre of fantasy and explore our desire for it, the classic utopia!
Mark as Played
August 1, 2025 47 mins
Riddle: What do Beowulf, Palmolive dish liquid, and Sarah Maas have in common? Hint: Ursula K. Le Guin knows! 
Mark as Played
What do a children's story and horror film have in common? Maybe our Suffering Child question, with very different approaches to it.
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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.
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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.
Mark as Played
June 27, 2025 38 mins
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.
Mark as Played
June 20, 2025 48 mins
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.
Mark as Played
June 13, 2025 52 mins
Where we've been and where we're going, and we take a pause in a museum gallery, too!
Mark as Played
May 30, 2025 4 mins
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.
Mark as Played
May 23, 2025 45 mins
We finish a carpe diem journey and I reflect back on what I've learned, what I believe, and where we are going next.
Mark as Played

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