Quotidiana on Writing Essays

Last week or so, I wrote about the personal essay. Take a look at Quotidiana, Patrick Madden's website on classical essays and writing essays. He teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and is no slouch in the department of published essays. The site opens on a page of classical essays with a search engine and listings by last name, period in which an essay was written by name, and strangest of all, women.

You can also listen to interviews performed by Madden's students with published writers and read contemporary essays. From those essays the viewer could assemble a list of publications that accept essays. Many of them have links to the publications. The site contains lots of useful links for someone interested in this kind of writing and pursuing self education.

Quotidiana is a quirky website, definitely in need of an introduction and explanation of what's there, maybe why, and how it works. For example, cryptic navigation links labeled "EAE" and "BEC" provide no clue about their destinations. Behind one of them is an apparently private forum at a different website. Granted, if you dig deep enough, you'll find that the website was developed as a teaching aid for BYU students, but because Madden has made it publicly available on the Internet, other viewers could benefit from a little more direction.