Dear Reader,

Frodo's Notebook has taken another big step forward, and I'm exceptionally proud to share this issue with you. Timothy Rezendes, our volunteer designer, deserves all credit for the graceful new design of the site's main pages, which is fully compliant with the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium. (What I'm really saying is, if any pages don't look right on your computer, blame Internet Explorer, not us.) Our new tagline, "A Journal of Teens, Literature, and the Arts" reflects our honed vision of becoming required reading both for literate teens and for adults who work with, live with, or seek out teenagers--especially youth leaders, secondary teachers, college admissions counselors, college professors, parents, and literary agents.

In the pursuit of that vision, we've added two new features for Frodo's Notebook: Summations and weekly Selected Articles. Every quarter, Summations will bring you the latest and most interesting statistics and studies on teenagers, pulled from hundreds of diverse sources by our editors. And each week Selected Articles keeps you up on what's being said about teens in print as well as connected to the established literary world by picking out the most interesting and important articles available for free online. Keep an eye on this feature, because occasionally we will offer prizes to those who can recall key details from the previous week's selections.

In Februrary, we honored Theresa Staruch with the annual Frodo's Notebook Essay Award in the Central Pennsylvania Scholastic Writing Awards. She received a $75 gift certificate for books at Amazon.com, a copy of The Best American Essays 2003, and a year's subscription to The Atlantic. Her insightful and stark essay appears in this issue.

In addition, this issue's contributors are the first that will be asked to agree to a nonexclusive copyright permission licence. This license, developed with the capable help of Ryan Miller of Boston College and the guidance of Creative Commons, gives Frodo's Notebook the legal right to publish the writings we accept while still allowing our authors to retain full rights to their work, even to the extent of contributing it to the public domain.

In September, the editors and staff of Frodo's Notebook will hold a weekend-long retreat to further refine and expand our vision and goals for the journal. We will develop a strategic plan for the next two years, including annual fundraising campaigns. Since Frodo's Notebook, Inc. was recently granted tax-deductible nonprofit status by the IRS, we intend to include many more people in our cause by inviting them to invest financially in our work. An increased budget will allow us to reach an even larger audience, reward our writers more properly, and add more and better nonfiction articles by both teens (especially in opinion pieces) and adults (in our new and expanding "Editors & Critics" section).

It really is a pleasure to bring you the only online publication of teens and literature in the world run by a registered nonprofit organization. We hope you will appreciate the care we invest in making Frodo's Notebook the premier place for young writers to get published. We are sure you will benefit from our lack of an overt agenda: we judge every piece we publish on its artistic merits, not based on how well it might demonstrate something in a classroom or attract a paying target market of teenagers.

You'll see on our Contact page that we are now accepting and publishing letters to the editor. We'd love to hear your thoughts on Frodo's Notebook and the writing we publish.

Thanks for reading.


Sincerely,

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