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Letter From the Editor

Editor’s Note

Every October, I aim to bring a tiny bit of spookiness to Stone Soup. We tend to think spooky means ghosts and witches—and there is one witch in this issue!—but it is also so many other, subtler things: shutters banging against the side of a house, a lone owl on a branch in a silent […]

Editor’s Note

“‘What’s the point of always wanting to do something more? It’s all going to disappear when we die, anyway. Why can’t I just be happy as I am?’” asks Simon, the main character in Phoebe Donovan’s story “Delay.” Simon is an adult, but he doesn’t (much to his mother’s chagrin) have a career or a […]

Editor’s Note

And the flies were dancing and buzzing, and joining in, and there was some sort of silent party with no music, because the only sounds were the birds and we wanted that. We never wanted it to stop, just wanted to stay, my mother and father with their wine, laughing, me, running, slipping in the […]

Editor’s Note

It is June. I feel like sighing with relief even writing those words. There is something about summer, even when you’re no longer in school, that just makes you relax. The heat makes everyone slow down, I guess—and people take vacation, which means the working world can’t move at its usual pace. Even though I […]

Editor’s Note

When was the last time you made a mistake? How did you react?  In the first story in this issue, “A Leopard’s Spots” by Juli Hiramatsu, the leopard May makes a terrible mistake: she breaks a promise to an old, old friend, doing something that can’t be undone. While May can’t undo her actions, or […]

Editor’s Note

This issue has two central threads running through it: cats and . . . sports. When I am working on an issue, I always look for both obvious thematic links—like subject matter, like cats!—and then also something less tangible and easy to describe, something maybe about the energy of the pieces that seems similar, or […]

Editor’s Note

Ah, spring! Or as Grace Zhuang writes in her poem “Spring” in this issue: Winds are running around Telling everyone the good news, “Spring is coming!” “Spring is coming!” That stanza captures the atmosphere I tried to create in this issue—one of lightness, whimsy, excitement, and happiness. The writing and art here bubbles (sometimes literally—as […]

Editor’s Note

A rainy day, a classroom, a special hill, Mars, Ancient Greece—this is an issue that celebrates place. The stories and much of the art—especially Delilah Prager’s landscape paintings and Jay Nimchonok’s photograph Northern Ontario—all provide a vivid sense of being in a specific place, whether that’s a dry, lifeless planet or an idyllic forest. I […]

Editor’s Note

The stories in this issue (one of which is a play!) span a range of styles and subjects—from an old-fashioned gothic ghost story to a political allegory that helps us better understand our own politically divided times, a war veteran reminiscing on a lost friend , and the brave revolutionary uprisings of the Arab Spring. […]

Editor’s Note

A radio that thinks but cannot move or speak to help the humans around it. Mice who struggle with money and social acceptance. A dragon condemned to a harsh life. This issue is a celebration of perspectives. Seeing from the point of view of an animal or an object, or even from the vantage point […]

Editor’s Note

This month, I would like to draw your attention to the art by Ashley Jun that you can find both on our cover and throughout the issue. Except for one digitally altered photograph (Trace, on page 35), all of Ashley’s artworks are abstract watercolors. Bloom, the cover image, is peaceful and uplifting—the colors remind me […]

Editor’s Note

Leaves turning red, orange, and yellow as they dry out and fall off the branches. Days getting shorter, the air turning cold. Like spring, fall is a season of transition. When we are in winter and summer, we are in them. But we are never truly in the transitional seasons; the weather is constantly shifting, […]