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 of a very unique person (as in “Rainbow”) reminds us of how limited our own perspective is, in the larger scheme. It also reminds us to treat others—people, animals, and things—with kindness and respect. Their lives may be different from ours, but they are still valuable. This issue is also a celebration of winter and the holidays. Every year, I hope for snow in December, and the past few years, it hasn’t always happened. Maybe our idea of winter and our image of the holidays will need to evolve as our climate continues to change. In the meantime, let’s hope for snow! Finally, in this longer-than-normal issue you’ll also find an excerpt from Born on the First of Two by Anya Geist, whose book I selected to publish as an editor’s pick in our 2020 Book Contest. I’m thrilled to announce that, as of December 1st, you can order Anya’s book at our store—amazon.com/stonesoup! Anya’s novel follows Maya as she journeys from the Land of the Clouds down to Earth, where she was born, and where she is convinced her destiny lies. Anya’s book gripped me from start to finish. It’s the perfect book to curl up on the sofa with on a cold, cold wet day. Wishing you the best this holiday season,
Letter From the Editor
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 of renewal, sunshine, and life. Monochrome, on the other hand, which I chose to pair with Meital Fried’s excellent, melancholy story “Mourning Dove”, captures the way I feel on my worst days: like the world is only black and white. Waterdrop also has a melancholy feel, but a softer one than Monochrome; it is blue, not black and white, and so conveys a feeling of blueness, which is closer to a rainy-day kind of sadness. Finally, I want to address a question you may have: what do we mean when we call art “abstract”? Abstract art is nonrepresentational, which means it is made of shapes, patterns, and colors rather than images of places, objects, or things. A painting that is obviously “of” something is not abstract. Ashley’s painting Bloom is not a painting “of” a flower; instead, she has the used title in concert with the colors and shapes to evoke the feeling and idea of the flower. This month, I challenge you to make some nonrepresentational art—this could mean writing a poem, play, or story that doesn’t make “sense,” or creating abstract works of art like Ashley. Till next time,
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, the temperature inching up or down. In these transitional seasons, I always find myself thinking about change and about time. Now we have devices everywhere that tell us the time—our computers, our phones, our smart watches, our microwaves, our ovens, and our cars. But before all those devices, and before clocks, there was the natural world—the seasons to tell us what time of year it is, and the sun and the moon to tell us what time of day or night. The art and writing in this issue encompass a range of topics and styles, but all of the pieces circle, in some way, these essential questions: How does time change us? How do we change in time? And how do we make sense of these changes over time? Enjoy the witching season!
Editor’s Note
After featuring long-form fiction in our summer issue, in this issue, I decided to focus on poetry and super short personal narratives. Although I love the way a good story can pull me in and away from the world, reading a novel can also be an exhausting experience—especially if you get caught up in marathon reading sessions as I do! One thing I love about shorter forms of writing is the way I can read them and return to the world feeling refreshed, as if I’ve just taken a brisk walk or had a drink of cool water on a hot day. I love to read a poem or a shorter narrative once through at a regular pace, and then reread it slower, and continue rereading and revisiting it at intervals. I have memorized some of my favorite poems and always find that their meaning seems to change (and expand!) over the years as my own experience grows and my perspective changes. Finally, I just want to note that many of the poems in this issue were submitted to our 2020 book contest as part of longer poetry manuscripts. Although we ultimately were not able to publish every manuscript we loved, we are thrilled to share some of this really excellent work with you! Enjoy the start of fall.
Editor’s Note
I am so excited to share two long-form works of fiction with you this summer! The first piece featured in this issue is Get Myself A Rocking Chair, a novella by Nora Heiskell that was submitted to our 2020 Book Contest. Nora seems to have an old soul; she writes with a wisdom and maturity well beyond her twelve years, in a voice tinged with nostalgia. Her writing is vivid and beautiful and moving, and the story pulls you in—you won’t be able to stop reading until you know what’s happened to Katrina. In this issue you’ll also find an excerpt from The Other Realm by Tristan Hui, the winner of our 2020 Book Contest, which you can preorder now at our store—it comes out on September 1st! Tristan’s novel tells the story of Azalea Morroe, and her epic journey across a haunted desert. It’s an adventure story with a huge heart that will also make you laugh! I hope you enjoy reading the first few chapters, and I’m so excited to share the full novel with you in September. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to submit to our 2021 Book Contest! This year, we will select one winning novel and one winning poetry manuscript, though we consider all entries for potential publication in the magazine. The contest closes on August 16, 2021.
Editor’s Note
We don’t often talk about politics in the print magazine of Stone Soup. This is in large part because we work so far ahead on each issue that any attempt to speak to current events will inevitably be outdated by the time the magazine arrives at your door. Instead, we publish more timely and topical submissions—about the pandemic, the election, Black Lives Matter, and more—on our blog. However, in this issue, you will read Cora Burch’s poems about her experience of the pandemic as well as one about President Trump, a poem she wrote before the storming of the capitol that now feels eerily prescient. You will also encounter Steven Cavros’s “The Sewer People,” a story about an imaginary society and government that forces us to think about our own—much like George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. I encourage you to try writing a poem or story that is about politics without being about our current politics. Finally, in these pages, you will find the final installment of Ariana Kralicek’s novella, The Trials and Tribulations of Swifty Appledoe. I hope reading about Swifty has put a smile on your face and maybe even inspired you try something new!
Editor’s Note
When I saw Emma Tian’s photograph Majesty (this month’s cover image), I immediately knew that it had to be on a cover—not only because it’s an excellent photograph but because its power lies partly in its size. It is a photograph that wants to overwhelm you, to make you aware of the weight of time and history, of the fleeting nature of civilization and the ongoingness of nature—of sky, tree, grass. Emma took this photograph in the inner courtyards of the Heidelberg Castle ruins in Germany, a castle that was originally built around the year 1225 and then destroyed and rebuilt multiple times before becoming a tourist attraction. So often, the photos we take as tourists are not artistic: they serve merely as records—“I went there, I saw this.” Emma’s photo, however, says so much more. It is beautiful, of course, but there is also something very eerie about it. Note the clouds in the sky, and especially the dark shadow in the upper right-hand corner: they suffuse the image with a sense of foreboding. The light is a bit strange, as well—too yellow— and something about the shadows the walls cast onto the grass feels “off”—like the light is coming from a place other than I expect. Take a walk around your neighborhood with a camera ready: can you take a photograph of a structure or place that makes you see it in a new, and timeless, way?
Editor’s Note
In her story “The Bright Yellow,” Ella Kate Starzyk describes a character whose world has turned completely yellow: people, food, streets, and stores—all yellow. Her mother takes her to the eye doctor: “After the eye exam, the doctor said I was colorblind, and the only color I could see was yellow. I had a yellow life after that.” It is a bizarre premise, and yet a perfect metaphor for the way perspective can alter, and determine, our experiences. When you wake up in a certain mood, suddenly everything you see is “colored” by that mood. This issue of Stone Soup explores perspective and asks: How does our perception shape our experience? The characters in these stories all undergo at least one perspective shift—and it is this shift that drives the action in these stories. These stories serve as a reminder that we are in control of our own narratives, not others. We get to decide whether to think of ourselves as “unique” or “weird,” whether to be a victim or an agent, happy or sad. It is an empowering but also scary thought; sometimes it’s easier to blame what’s out there in the world for our weaknesses than to take responsibility for them. These stories also remind us: Comparison is the thief of joy. Don’t let others steal your joy! Be yourself, unapologetically. And write a story, poem, or personal narrative about what that’s like. Happy reading!
Editor’s Note
I know March is winter still in most places, but I couldn’t wait to celebrate spring and all it symbolizes—new life and new beginnings. As I write this from the end of 2020, I don’t know what the winter will hold for all of us, but I feel sure that we will all be in need of many long, cleansing rains, big puddles to jump in, mud to squelch beneath our boots, tulip bulbs beginning to peek through the dirt, cherry blossoms, California poppies, rainbows, baby bunnies, fawns, songbird song, and everything else that comes with this wonderful season. Most of this issue is about spring—in a literal sense (spring is coming!) and also a metaphorical one. “Spring”—in the form of growth and new life—is coming after an emotional “winter.” Much of the writing in these pages tackles difficult experiences: divorce, fights with friends, moving, bullying, depression, and therapy. But what I love about these pieces is that the narrators are eventually able to see past their own feelings of isolation during these hard times, and to realize that these challenging experiences and difficult feelings are actually part of what connects us rather than keeps us apart. Enjoy the almost-spring!
Editor’s Note
One of the main defenses of literature today is that it makes you empathetic—that reading and writing help teach you how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes, in the case of a personal narrative, that “someone else” is even a different, earlier version of yourself. The writing in this issue explores many perspectives that vary greatly from our own—from villagers in the Ecuadorian jungle to the objects in our cabinets, that perhaps live secret lives; from stray village cats to the bear, king of the forest; from the people commemorated by a memorial (which perhaps they hate!) to mythical creatures. After reading this issue, perhaps you will feel inspired to explore your own environment and write your way into the perspective of something else that you find there—like your dog or a doll, an acorn or an apple, a deck of cards or a picture of a cow. Until next time,
Editor’s Note
One of the stories in this issue is called “A Place in the World,” and that phrase perfectly captures how I see the pieces in this issue cohering. How do you—do we, does anyone—find their place in the world? What happens if your place has already been determined or selected for you? What if you don’t like that place? What if your “place” is physical—but then you move? What if you feel like you have no place? These questions have been much on my mind lately as my family and I were displaced for several months because of the fires in our corner of California; they are all questions worth exploring in any medium, and I hope you will do so. I usually talk about the written works in these notes because most issues are built around the themes I find in the writing, and the artwork follows. But the art we publish, and especially the art in this issue, is simply incredible—imaginative, skillful, beautiful, surprising. For instance, in Mountain and Trees, the mountain seems to be floating—or perhaps it is a lake. The ambiguity is unsettling and gives the piece a mysterious, magical quality. Or in Music to my Ear, I love how the curves of the violin visually echo the curves of the inner ear. Though I don’t have the space to talk about each piece, please spend time looking carefully at all of the art in this issue, noticing what the pieces make you feel or think and why. Till next time,
Editor’s Note
My first day of English class, sophomore year of high school, I walked into a classroom dark except for a single candle flickering on my teacher’s desk. He stayed quiet, writing, as we all filtered into the room, nervously laughing and whispering to each other. Eventually, we took his cue and began to write too. This teacher, Mr. McGraw, soon became my favorite—because he gave us the freedom to explore language and literature in the ways that most inspired and invigorated us. In his class, I labored over poems, researched the Brontë sisters, and explored symbolism in The Scarlet Letter. I am still grateful for the space he gave me to learn and write how I wanted to. Teachers have a huge impact on our lives— hopefully in positive ways but also, frequently and unfortunately, in negative ways. Most of the stories and poems in this issue take the classroom as setting and subject, examining the ways that teachers and schools influence who we are and what we do. I hope you take this as an opportunity to reflect on the teachers who have nurtured your passions!
