Dear Reader,

Sometimes, the Internet muddles our minds. But sometimes it makes things clearer. Joyce Carol Oates writes that in print culture, "One picks up a magazine, weighs it in the hand, it appears to be a thing, but in fact it isn't a thing at all. It's a symposium. A gathering. A party."

By contrast, a website does not deceive us by appearing to be a thing. It looks too dangerous just to be a benign object. This comes through in the words we use--there is a creative tension between the metaphor "site" and what I am actually looking at, electrons ethereally dancing in formation. A website is there, and it isn't.

In that way, we expect from the get-go that a website will be a happening place. We anticipate interaction and count on liveliness. And with that, we're drawn to websites that have the most engaging company and provocative voices. Maybe not at first, but sooner or later, we tire of mindless banter.

Cultural analyst George Barna points out in his recent book Real Teens that teenagers are especially interesting to hang out with in such a setting. "While their parents tend to focus on reconciling competing points of view," he writes, "young people are quite relaxed about the intellectual and emotional tensions that surround them. They are more likely to allow those competing elements to coexist without forcing a choice or developing a resolution."

This willingness to live in ironies, contradictions, and perplexities saturates the poetry and prose in Frodo's Notebook. It encourages us as readers to think for ourselves, to reach our own conclusions. But most of all, it invites and welcomes us. We are drawn, sometimes in spite of ourselves, into joining the quest for truth and beauty. At the very least, we feel like we have stumbled into a kicking conversation.

Stanley Kunitz addresses our mortality in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "The most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such a knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole--that is the consummation of the endeavor of art." I am consistently impressed with our contributors' willingness to tackle this tension. Whether the subject is suicide, murder, war, or the quiet death of a grandparent, the poetry, fiction, and essays we publish are written by compassionate teens struggling after wholeness. With well-crafted sentences, our contributors refute the stereotype that young people see themselves as immortal and unstoppable.

I am continually humbled to find myself in the midst of this symposium. Frodo's Notebook is so electric a gathering that what we do constantly spills over into other communities and venues.

For instance, contributor Gonca Esendemir, who at seventeen submitted "The Razor," a poignant poem about suicide, recently published a book of her poetry, entitled Flying With Broken Wings. (For more information, please visit her site at www.fwbw.com.)

Also, in November our editorial staff will present a workshop at the annual conference of the Pennsylvania School Press Association in Harrisburg. In February, we will, for the first time, award a high school writer with the Frodo's Notebook Essay Award in the Central Pennsylvania Scholastic Writing Awards.

There's more. This quarter's issue features the first non-English writing we have ever published (two poems in Spanish with their English translations). We have begun to invite adults to contribute to our upcoming series of guest articles, "Teens, Literature, and the Electronic Age." Watch for the first article to appear in April 2003.

Needless to say, we're thrilled. After all, as Oates observed, this is a party. And we're just beginning to pulverize the pinata.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

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