The term “sovereign wayfarer” was coined by Martin Luschei in his eponymous book on Walker Percy, one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century and certainly the one most closely associated with New Orleans.
Luschei's book examines how Percy's work draws on existentialist philosophy to explore the modern alienation many of us experience—the ways that "everydayness," inauthenticity, and abstraction trap us in unawareness and false roles. Recovering from that alienation involves ordeal (which shatters routine and restores genuine perception), rotation (novelty that reconnects a person with the experience of living in the world), repetition (self-discovery through reflection), and intersubjectivity (authentic encounter with others and their ideas). Someone becomes a "sovereign wayfarer" by moving through one or more of these forms of openness to reclaim authentic selfhood and genuine connection with others.
“Okay, fine,” you may be thinking, “but what does any of this have to do with writing?" Here are four ways of answering that question:
1) Learning to write well is genuinely hard. It forces you to sit with confusion, to discover that what you thought you understood you can't actually explain, and to push through that discomfort. That friction is exactly the kind of productive struggle that wakes a person up.
2) Good writing requires you to inhabit perspectives outside your own. When you are pushed to argue a position you haven't considered, or to describe an experience from another angle, you are reconnecting with the world as something larger and stranger than your assumptions about it.
3) Writing is thinking made visible. When you draft, revise, and return to your own words, you are examining your own thoughts closely enough that you begin to discover what you actually believe, and who you actually are.
4) Every piece of writing is an attempt to reach another mind. Learning to write well means learning to genuinely consider your reader—to treat them as a real person with their own intelligence and experience. That discipline, practiced deeply, is training in the same fundamental skill as authentic human encounter: the willingness to be truly understood, and to truly understand.
Although students will gain a solid understanding of grammar (the engine of all good prose), it's important to remember that writing, at its best, is not a technical skill. It is a practice of becoming more fully present to yourself and to others—which is precisely what The Sovereign Wayfarer exists to cultivate.
