Dear Reader,

If you extend your arm, palm up, and lay a sheet of paper on your hand, you'll see the edges twitch, no matter how hard you try to keep your hand steady. This is as it should be. I know this not because medical science can explain it (your nervous system adjusting your hand multiple times each second to achieve a relatively stable position) but because the poet Theodore Roethke gives me the line, one of my favorite in all literature, "This shaking keeps me steady. I should know." Or, as Pearl Jam puts it in "Satan's Bed," "I shit and I shake, I will join the club."

This kind of line is drastically different from what we refer to when we say "I'll just jot you a line." If someone has jotted you a line, the question in your head is, "Where is he going with this?" We want the writer to get to the point, to take us from Point A, where we are now, to a definite Point B.

But in literature, when we say "line," we don't mean a line segment, we mean something stretching out into infinity. Robert Louis Stevenson opens his essay "The Lantern Bearers" with the line "These boys congregated every autumn about a certain Easterly fisher village where they tasted in a high degree the glory of existence." When we read a great line like that, we know that the chances of getting to a single point, to a simple Point B, are right out. If we are still interested, it is through questions like, "Where might he go with this? Where could he go with this?" We want possibility and infinity rather than practicality and finitude.

An irony here is that lines--the types of clauses, sentences, or pairs of sentences that grab our attention, frame our lives, and stay with us--almost always defy the conventional wisdom to "show rather than tell." Great literary lines almost always tell: "If you've never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame" (Counting Crows). Dick Allen, a recently retired professor whose new book of poetry I review (as the first of a new, regular Frodo's Notebook feature) in this issue, comments that "We've gone on too long about how poetry should 'show, rather than tell,' when actually many perhaps even most of our finest poems tell, make a judgment, are even didactic."

Right now Frodo's Notebook is growing and expanding at an unprecedented rate--we are turning long-term dreams into realities every day, and we are going in new directions we never thought we could go. How do we take a publication so deeply embedded and interested in the literary line and put it into sound bites, which could hardly be more different from great lines?

That's the challenge before us right now--how to explain what Frodo's Notebook is all about in 50 words or less to new readers and potential donors, as well as how to get such people to spend serious time with what is already in our pages, with the soul-stirring lines we have the privilege of publishing.

As of July 1, 2003, Frodo's Notebook (the online magazine) is now published by Frodo's Notebook, Inc., a nonprofit corporation in the state of Pennsylvania. That's big news for us, and the most important thing it means to you as a reader is that Frodo's Notebook is going to get better and better in the coming months and years (maybe even going into a print form as well), and that it will be around for a long time to come. If you want to learn more about this business side of things or are interested in making a donation to support our purpose and mission, please see Mark's Staff Member Editorial in this issue.

If you would like to receive occasional email updates from Frodo's Notebook (alerting you when new issues are posted and when other major news happens), sign up for our email newsletter on the homepage.

As always, we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions.

Thanks for reading,

Daniel Klotz

Sincerely,

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