This site is less a blog than a thinking space.
Here I write as Jim Nowakowski — observer, reader, citizen, and lifelong questioner. These pages hold my personal reflections on literature, culture, politics, history, language, and the uneasy intersections between them. Some pieces are analytical, some speculative, some simply forms of intellectual wandering. Some extremely personal. All are rooted in a belief that how we tell stories — and how we choose to interpret them — shapes how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit.
If Reading with Jimmy is a guided literary series for classical literature, this site is the room across the hall — where ideas and personal reflections reside – not the classical literature and analysis you’ll find on www.readingwithjimmy.com. Here are essays, journal entries, literary criticism, short fiction, poetry, and commentary that reflect both my interests and the continuity (and disruption) of my life.
This is not a platform for performance or persuasion. It is a place for self examination. Mine. And yours.
You may agree with what I write here. You may not. Response is always welcome, but it doesn’t matter if you agree or not. What matters most is that it stimulates your thinking. As Camus said, “It’s not the argument’s truth that matters; it’s that the argument makes you think.”
— Jim Nowakowski