Dear Reader,

Here it is. Frodo's Notebook looking like it just spent six months with an html plastic surgeon.

This website is more than just another literary magazine embracing the opportunities of the Internet. Frodo's Notebook never could have existed without the Internet. Teenagers never have had the resources--financial or otherwise--to develop their own mass-audience publications, until now, with the advent of the Web. We hope and believe that we are exploring new territory: What does a legitimate literary quarterly written by teenagers around the world look like?

We take that word, "legitimate," seriously. Unlike, say, the word "shindig." What we mean is what we say in our introduction--teens all over the globe are authoring poems, essays, and stories that are more than just interesting specimens to be studied as anthropological data. They are turning out writing that is astounding in its depth of insight and literary mettle.

It's high time we take the creative writings of teenagers seriously on a mass scale. We're working hard to do that and to explore what such efforts entail. Here's a glance at how that is panning out for us right now.

• Wow-net: Frodo's Notebook is now a member of the Words Work Network, an offshoot of Web del Sol. This membership puts us in community and conversation with other online literary magazines which focus on teenagers, either in their editorial boards or authorship. Wow-net, as we call it, organizes anthologies, conferences, webcasts, chat sessions, and large-scale publicity campaigns that involve all its members.
• Fiction: Until this issue, Frodo's Notebook published only poetry and essays, along with a small and highly selective collection of "Other Writings." These literary misfits were experimental and well crafted prose pieces. Now, we've ditched the label "Others" and replaced it with "Fiction." Experimental pieces will be categorized as well as they can be, as either fiction, poetry, or essay. We are actively soliciting (in a way we never did before) submissions of short fiction for this section of the publication.
• Editorial Comment: Articles (significantly different from the creative essays we publish, which are more akin to poetry) are not literature, but they are important. We're expanding the Editorial Comment section of Frodo's Notebook to include more than just this Letter from the Editor. In this issue you'll see a Staff Member Editorial, which is a piece of commentary written by one of our editors (in this case, senior poetry editor Tina Dischinger), as well as two Selected Articles, which appear in other publications (in this case, The Atlantic Monthly and The Wilson Quarterly) and ought to be of particular interest to our readers. We are compiling a collection of articles by Guest Writers, which will run beginning in our Fall 2002 issue. These articles will be written by adults on themes, questions, and ideas surrounding and involving Frodo's Notebook. If you are an adult interested in writing one of these articles, query editors@frodosnotebook.com with your idea.
• Design: Our Director of Design and Technology, Timothy Rezendes, teamed up with art editor Julia Shields to create a more distinctive and crisp layout, coupled with original graphics and artwork. They did a kickin' job. We even now have our own logo, the diamond-shaped eye, which is resonant of many things--Lord of the Rings, the eye of the poet, the eye of the imagination, the eye into one's heart. Writing--both the process and the end result--helps us, above all, to see things.
• Archives: Writings which appeared in past issues are now more accessible than ever. You can now look up writings by author, by the issue in which they originally appeared, their genre, or their style/subject matter.

We've kicked our own butts to make these changes. It will be a long time until we've made enough modifications to be fully satisfied with what we've created (if we ever are), but for the time being we're pleased with what we've done. We trashed all previous versions of the site and rebuilt from the ground up, keeping only the actual writings.

I'll be frank: We check our email like fiends, and we'd love to hear from you. What do you think of the publication and the overhauled site? We're open to criticism, praise, questions, and comments. If we can help you out in any way, please don't hesitate to ask. See more information about contacting us, or write directly to me at my email address.

On a personal note, I turn 20 at the end of June, which will make me from this time hence and forevermore ineligible to publish fiction, poetry, or essays in Frodo's Notebook. I have no plans to actually leave, but it's a sort of good-bye, so I've chosen an essay that took me a year to hammer out to offer as a parting gift. It's entitled "Politic Football," and I think it brings to light a central and deep struggle in the lives of lots of teenage guys in America (at least many more than we realize). To what extent are we (and should we be) athletes, and to what extent is it just politics? I hardly think that politics are necessarily bad, but it's a question that I haven't been able to answer. I hope this essay will be more pragmatic than I usually prefer essays to be, validating the experience of guys I've never met and opening their friends' eyes to a tension they hadn't seen.

Under pressure from the new editorial board, I've donned the title "Redactor in Chief." Redactor means editor, only it's a richer word. Look it up in a good dictionary. Also, it's more fun and self-consciously pretentious. It almost sounds like something out of Jurassic Park.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Daniel J. Klotz
Redactor in Chief
Frodo's Notebook
dan@frodosnotebook.com