Venue: Quotidiana

I recently discovered a website called Quotidiana that hosts a bunch of public-domain essays in an easy to browse format. It is run by a guy who teaches essay writing at BYU and who wanted to have a central online repository for the stuff he assigned to students and for his teaching portfolio.

It's got some interviews (some audio, some written) with contemporary essayists, but, as it says on the site, the most important content is:

an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current "creative nonfiction" trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not.

Having a degree in creative nonfiction, I take issue with the site-author's upturned nose there, but it's a great set of stuff here from Seneca to Mark Twain to Jerome K. Jerome (the hilariously named author of Three Men in a Boat) and a ton of people I've never heard of.

In my next post, I will take a look at G.K. Chesterton's On Lying in Bed, which is listed as one of the most popular essays on Quotidiana. (Right above "On Laziness.")

Cairo Tunnel: Amanda Fields

Brevity magazine is an online publication that publishes only nonfiction of 750 words or fewer.

Another friend of mine, the excellent writer Amanda Fields, has a piece called Cairo Tunnel in Brevity's 30th issue about riding the subway in Cairo in a crowded "women's only" car. It begins:

I nudge through the turnstile, putting the stiff yellow ticket in my pocket and crossing a footbridge to the other side of the tracks, where I head toward the cluster of women on the platform. It’s rush hour. Morning salutations compete with beehive intensity. I scoot forward and back. Soon, the Metro barrels up, and the women’s car, painted with a red stick-lady in a triangle skirt, sighs open.

As always I'm telling you about this essay because it's great, and part of the purpose of this blog is to present you, the reader, with essays. But I also really enjoyed Amanda's discussion of her writing process on the brevity blog. Amanda talks about how the word count limit made her cut, which usually (but not always) makes writing better. In her post, you'll see the gorgeous and disturbing nugget that she had to leave out, and you can judge whether that made the piece better or worse. You'll also see the difference in conveying the intensity of a moment, the way Amanda does in her essay, and stepping back to evaluate and discuss the moment, the way she does in the blog.

Amanda's blog on living and teaching in Cairo is available at http://www.bahgat-aly.blogspot.com.

Venues: "Modern Love" and "Lives"

I've fallen into the trap of wanting every post to be thoughtful and meaningful. But that's not the point of a blog. So in the interest of short, useful-but-not-epic posts, I wanted to highlight two weekly essay sources, both in the New York Times.

Modern Love
Romantic and family relationships. About 1800 words. Here's one I especially liked about dating someone who speaks a different native language than you.

Lives
The back page of the magazine. About 750 words. Here's one I especially liked about dealing with a family member's dementia through humor.

Regular Guys: Emily Freeman

Emily Freeman is a close friend of mine and a great writer of both fiction and nonfiction. One of my favorite of her essays is called Regular Guys and was published in June 2008 in the online Morning News, which publishes a lot of essays.

Excerpt:

While our friends pursued internships in air-conditioned city buildings, or lounged around their parents’ suburban pools, we stuck around Ann Arbor and spent our summer days hot and dirty, in mandated steel-toed boots.

Essay Endings and "Big Ideas"
(SPOILER ALERT: Read the essay before continuing.)

At the end of Regular Guys Emily writes: "I remember pushing my shovel along in a steady line, and the way that the grating rush of metal against cement was momentarily and beautifully punctuated by the contents of each room I passed. . . . It was like walking past a series of discrete but connected snapshots offering only a momentary flash of the sublime that was being created inside. And as one sound faded another began, but they never overlapped."

I asked Emily, did she consciously mean to say that she did not overlap with Drew / her type of woman did not overlap with his type of guy? Or did she cast around until something kind of seemed to fit without real "this is my message/Big Idea" intent?

She responded: I had that shoveling-past-the-practice rooms experience before I dated Drew (or after, I can't remember), and it was one of those moments that I thought was so magical and had to someday be written about (this was back when I wasn't really writing, just dreaming about writing and occasionally jotting down writing-worthy moments/ideas). As far as its meaning in the essay: it just kind of showed me its double-meaning, if that makes any sense. And I like that it works either as a statement on class or just as an observation of something beautiful.

You can read a short story of Emily's in Best New American Voices 2010. Keep an eye out for more of her work.