Quotidiana.org is Back! –Patrick Madden

 If you want to stick around a moment more, here’s a little story about how the site came to be, and a recommendation:

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, I took a class on the History and Theory of the Essay. Our main text for the course was a thousand-page coursepack of photocopied essays that I had to get at a local bookstore, paying for the copies and waiting in the rhythmic clicking and chemical aroma while the pages ran off. I got a terrible headache. I grant that I could have taken a walk around the block instead, and I paid far less than if I’d been required to buy all the books containing those essays, but the real zinger was when I flipped through the packet and noticed that some pages were cut off or blurred where the binding had kept the books rounded, and other pages were marred with thick swaths of ink on one or more sides of the tiny text. Though I recognized the great value in reading and teaching essays by Great Dead Essayists, especially as a counter to the dominant culture-of-the-new, I vowed that I would never subject my students to such physiological, financial, aesthetic, and utilitarian torture. I would provide them with clean, free copies of their assigned readings.

Once I began professing in earnest, I chose numerous texts from the public domain (as of this writing, anything published before 1930), hoping to give students a sense of where our genre came from. At first, I linked to existing texts online, then I began copying texts to my own website to gather them in one place. Students seemed to appreciate the convenience and the exposure. When Joey Franklin came around looking for something to do to stay out of trouble, we hatched the idea of expanding the offerings and collecting both known and obscure essays, especially essays by people in underrepresented groups. With some research money from BYU and Joey’s eager and diligent research, we established Quotidiana.org in 2006.

Since then, lots of people have used the site, sometimes over 10,000 unique visitors per month. Teachers confirm my initial vision: that they like being able to assign early examples to orient students, and they appreciate that everything is free and unmarred by blurs and ink smudges.

Before you go, I’ll recommend one of my favorite essays and tell you a little bit why. In late 1892, Boston poet and postmistress Louise Imogen Guiney was pickpocketed on her way home. She lost a considerable sum of money, which she’d been planning to use for Christmas presents and to repay a friend. When she wrote to that friend, she was “in a melancholy mood,” but when she wrote the essay “On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket,” she was utterly joyous at the thief’s trick to escape. I won’t spoil it for you, or your students. I find that my students love the essay, largely because Guiney is such an amiable character, in her self-deprecation, her jaunty, interruptive prose style (she refuses to edit out a phrase that she means one way but realizes could be taken another way), and her humorous conversation with Marcus Aurelius. To me, this is one of many examples of how Quotidiana.org can be used to get people excited about essaying. So give it, or any of the other hundreds of essays, a shot.

Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020),  Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010). He co-edited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015) and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán (2012). He has received a Howard Foundation Fellowship and two Fulbright Fellowships. He is co-editor of the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press, co-editor of the literary journal Fourth Genre, and vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference.