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
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