To present a new magazine in this age of too many writers and too few readers implies a proud, or defiant, assertion of uniqueness. We had best explain at the outset therefore that Convivio is in no way unique. Its poems obey the laws of syntax, its stories begin and end, and its articles use straight line evidence and reasoning to achieve pungence and point. From type faces to poetic feet Convivi:o inheres to tradition. Still, explicitly because Convivio is not unique we launch it with a special sense of excitement. For although typical, what it typifies has broad and vaulting implications. In the past five years Moorhead State College has tripled in enrollment, in the meantime piling up an arsenal of new departments and staff. Our enrollment explosion has burst barriers in all directions, and students and faculty from everywhere blend together casually, but with the charged excitement that comes from the chance of finding new worlds at every coffee table. If we have our growing pains, there are ample compensations, among them a fresh wave of creativity and scholarship. A dozen people are writing here now for every one before, and the material in this volume is but a fraction of the material-much of it excellent-which we have had to decline. We know that Moorhead State College has no monopoly on this surge of change, that hundreds of colleges across the country share our hectic growth of the past few years. And we have come to learn that what nourishes this growth, and kindles it, is the interaction between new student body and faculty. Hence Convivio includes work by students and faculty to present as valid a cross section as possible of a small college in a state of rapid growth. (In later issues we hope to present student-faculty cross sections from other colleges whose development parallels our own.) Such a cross section, we feel, offers a two-pronged advantage: it can show us in narrow focus the broader picture of which we are a part; and it presents to readers elsewhere an image in depth of our college, but so typical an image that they may see themselves in part reflected in it. --The Editors