A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

From Billy Collins’ “Marginalia“

Marginalia says so much. I know what it means to fall in love with a book and leave egg salad stains the pages. I know what it means to write thoughts alongside passages in books and return, years later, to both the text and the conversation. I know what it means to leave a trail of paper scraps between book pages flagging the sections with most important commentary. When I was writing my dissertation, my dissertation chair would write “interesting” next to portions of my work that she thought needed more explanation. (Very helpful marginalia.) When grading papers, the stuff I write around the edges is an opportunity to talk with my students. My blog is marginalia, of sorts, too.

I know a few things for sure about marginalia. Beauty lives both in the text and in the margin. Marginalia is a conversation with ourselves, authors, students, and others. Sometimes marginalia feels like secrets shared amongst friends. In a digital world, marginalia can simply be posted commentary. We write through the margin. Writing through the margin is figure and ground. Writing through the margin is a way to create our own meaning of a text. Writing through the margin is a way to remember. Writing through the margin is a way to dream.