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

The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts

May 11, 2026 • 38 mins
  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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Roman Plow, Sovereign Tree: Seneca and Zhuangzi

May 1, 2026 • 43 mins
  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 “Sovereign Tree” of uselessness, we ask if our participation in the “Achievement Society” is actually what pays for global injustice […]
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The Original Omelas: The Case of the Animals vs. Man

April 21, 2026 • 46 mins
  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 human exceptionalism to ask: would we change the story’s ending because we couldn’t handle our own complicity? Discover the original […]
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The Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain

April 14, 2026 • 37 mins
  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 citizens of Omelas, or does it simply creates a more sophisticated illusion of justice? Today it’s the dark philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges’s […]
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Waypoint – “The Fortune Teller”

April 10, 2026 • 26 mins
  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 driven by anonymous threats pushes a committed skeptic toward a dingy attic and a deck of cards. It is a study in […]
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Failures of Imagination: We and Flatland

April 3, 2026 • 56 mins
  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 […]
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Utopia’s Spare Parts: Star Trek & Ishiguro

March 21, 2026 • 49 mins
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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The Architecture of the Dungeon: Toni Morrison and the 13th Amendment

March 1, 2026 • 42 mins
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 […]
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Wandering Stars: Tommy Orange and the Sovereign Center

February 21, 2026 • 30 mins
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 […]
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The Bureaucracy of Erasure: Erdrich’s The Night Watchman

February 13, 2026 • 51 mins
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.
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Words from Nigeria 3 – Emezi’s Pet & Hunters for Truth

January 30, 2026 • 37 mins
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 […]
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Words from Nigeria Pt 2: Soyinka’s Tiger & Brother Jero

January 23, 2026 • 40 mins
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 […]
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Words from Nigeria Pt 1: Adichie and the Literary Manifesto

January 16, 2026 • 38 mins
  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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Cassandra: Uncertain Steps

January 9, 2026 • 36 mins
  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 […]
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Writing Back: Letters to Humanity

December 26, 2025 • 38 mins
  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 […]
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The Great Societies: Lowry’s “The Giver”

December 19, 2025 • 38 mins
  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 […]
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The Great Societies, Pt 2: Metropolis & The Ways of Meaning

December 12, 2025 • 50 mins
  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 / […]
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Is All Art Political? The Great Societies, Pt. 1: Metropolis

December 5, 2025 • 54 mins
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).
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True Horror: Le Guin, Poe, Cavarero, Bataille, and Arendt

November 28, 2025 • 52 mins
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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Poe: Horror, Pathology, and the Necessity of Care

November 21, 2025 • 51 mins
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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