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100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13


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Seasons

Winter, winter, coming clear, come outside, what do you hear? Wind whistles through the trees, a robin tweets, no more freeze. Spring has come as small as a hum, and too fast, summer is second to last, summer, summer, fall’s the last. Who knew the year could pass so fast? Winter, winter, coming fast, the old year’s in the past . . .


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Halloween Guilt

When neighbors leave Halloween candy unattended, how much is right to take? Every year on Halloween night, I spot something bewildering. I spot something that makes me audibly gasp, guffaw, or simply gawk. This year was no exception. The moment took place long into the night, catching me more off guard than usual. *          *          * Rewinding back to earlier during Halloween evening, I sat by the window watching the sun set. I had scarfed down dinner and pulled on my costume, only to wait for my mom to finish as well. “The candy will still be there in fifteen minutes,” my mom told me. That was easy for her to say. She was only a bystander in the game of gathering sweet treats from neighbors. I was a player. After enough pleas and other people going outside, we finally joined the parade. The golden glow of the sun waving “goodnight” kept my breathing even. In my mind, I had all night to collect sweets from around the neighborhood. I sauntered along the sidewalk, letting the giddy five- and six-year-olds sprint past, knowing they had to be in bed by nine o’clock. As darkness descended, I became those giddy kids running from door to door. The night was growing, and so was my desire for candy. I passed numerous empty houses as I traipsed down the unlit sidewalks. With each step I heard my boots scratching against the ground, creating a rhythmic thump-thump. The bag handles sank into my flesh, slowing me down. That didn’t stop me from going on. I half-skipped between doorsteps, my “Trick or treat!” bouncing as I spoke it. I powered through the night because within those dark alleys were the treasure troves of Halloween. Many of these dark houses were accompanied by bowls of candy. Attached to these bowls were signs saying “Please Take 1” (or “2,” if I was lucky). These directions posed a moral dilemma. As I dug through the bowls, I wondered, Do I follow my own goals, or obediently do as told? The devil on my right shoulder would respond, “Take as much as you want. Everyone else probably does that too. Besides, the homeowner won’t know.” The angel on the left argued, “Just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean you should. The homeowner just wants everyone to get the same amount of candy!” Perhaps I was influenced by the demonic costumes I had passed that night, but the devil got its way. These voices took me back to every time I was on the playground, thinking about sitting on top of the monkey bars or standing on the swings. Those same voices bantered, the devil winning. On the playground, the hawk eyes of my teacher had caused the dilemma. Getting caught was always a risk. Here, what risk did I have? There was no one to scold me for my actions, except for the angel, who was not surprised, just disappointed. Besides my mental angel, though, I could also envision the disappointed faces of potential parents who might have witnessed those crimes. I did not want to hear the bitterness laced into their scolding voices. Peekaboo My Pumpkin I kept pondering the situation as I dug through the bowl like a racoon, looking for York Peppermint Patties and looking past Twizzlers and lollipops. I could taste my mint-chocolate reward as the cubes of chocolate ran around my foraging hands. In my mind, I had to push the dirt away to find the diamonds. When leaving the scene of the crime, the angel pounded on the door of my mind, refusing to be shut away; after all, it was not wrong. As I contemplated, though, someone else’s angel might not have even had a say. I saw a young boy skipping towards a house with an unmanned candy bowl which I had just left. Will he do as told, or be self-serving like me? I wondered. I gaped at what he did next, though. With full confidence, he grabbed the entire bowl and in mere moments poured all the candy into his bag and dashed off. Immediately, I wondered if I should have done the same. Though the extra candy would be heavier, I could trade it with my brother to get what I treasured most. Now, rather than feeling slightly guilty for my actions, I wished I could have done what he did. I wished I’d had the nerve to do so without any mental quandaries. At the same time, I liked that my morals were strong enough to keep me from doing the same. By the time I left the cul-de-sac, I did not know whether I agreed with him or not, but I definitely could not have blamed him.


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Editor’s Note

Hello! I am beyond excited to introduce myself as the new editor of Stone Soup! I have been a fan of the magazine since I read it as a child, and I will never forget the feeling of wonder it gave me to discover that kids like me could be published authors. For many years, I worked as a children’s book editor at a major publisher, so it has been a fun challenge for me to turn my attention to work by children. I am so impressed with your submissions! This month, as befits the cooling weather, several of our pieces explore the longing for comfort—the historical story about a Jewish girl who searches for hope after being separated from her family by the Nazis; the widow who eases the pain of the loss of her husband through the creative process of embroidery; the orphan girl bringing what cheer she can to her aunt and uncle amidst the war in Ukraine; a poem called “Home.” Change is another theme authors explore this November. There’s a story about how animals deal with the extreme weather they suffer due to climate change. There are poems about changing seasons, changing friendship, a changing world. What changes have you experienced, and what comforts you through them?


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An Archeology of the Future

A Collection of Poems by Emma Catherine Hoff Winner of the 2022 Stone Soup Book Contest Available now at Barnes & Noble online and at Amazon. The Little Mermaid “The darkness isn’t as bad / as people think.” So ends the first poem in Emma Catherine Hoff’s numinous debut, An Archeology of the Future—before proceeding calmly, curiously into the dark. People weep in the streets. The snow closes its eyes. Birds scream, a question begs the world for its answer, everything is “frozen yet moving.” Hoff’s world, like ours, is ending, and yet this is not a tragedy: “there was peace for Earth / with no one there.” Walking the tightrope between humor and despair, rationality and absurdism, the sublime and the material, Hoff’s poems are elegant, wise, ageless. These are poems written against eternity. Advance Praise Like the Surrealists before her, Hoff can see into the emotional lives of the things we use every day, things we toss around carelessly. These poems bring them to life in a way that enriches all the lives around them, even the lives of the people we see in de Chirico paintings. Hoff is a great poet and these are poems that will truly move you. Her concerns are ageless. And she writes with a careful observing eye that makes even the imaginative moments feel palpably real.  If one of my friends had written this beautifully when I was starting out, I would have probably quit, and doffed my cap to her and said “you go on ahead” or more likely, “you’re already there.” — Matthew Rohrer, author of The Others When I read Emma Hoff for the first time years ago, I thought: She’s not from this planet. I thought: She does not remind me of other poets; she makes me forget them. I am tempted to use the words visionary, otherworldly, untimely, genius. I am tempted to say she flies above the earth. Let me say it this way. Hoff is related to Ovid, Blake, Rimbaud, Vallejo, Pessoa, Whitman, and Dickinson—not because she sounds like them (she doesn’t) but because she sees like them (indeed the verb “to see” appears on almost every page of this manuscript). Because her vision is prophetic, profound, and panoramic. Because she is unafraid to write about the grandest of topics—love, war, death, apocalypse, God, and eternity. Because she manages to write from places of knowing (“dirt is the only thing / we can become”) and unknowing (“Was the Minotaur / really / a monster?”). Because she writes about the past, present, and future all at once. Because just when you think you understand her poems, they change, shift, become-otherwise (“Please become / anew”). Because she is a master of craft and a musician of as-yet unheard music (“The lips play leapfrog with rain and hail and snow”). Emma Hoff is a rare poet. And one of my favorites. — Conner Bassett, author of Gad’s Book What I seek in poetry is the same thing astronomers seek: entire dark-dot planets hidden by lights too brilliant to see past. This is just what Emma Catherine Hoff delivers in An Archaeology of the Future. This collection is a garden of eurekas, a cavalcade of astonishments as, stanza by stanza, Hoff delivers the musings of a subtle intellect fed by a deep and abiding empathy for this world. The deftness of the prosody is only matched by its variety; influences range from the elegiac to the ekphrastic to the surreal to Black Mountain experiments in form, but all unified by a passionate yet quiet reverence and a love of language that would have made Auden sit up a little straighter. My urge, in fact, is to stop speaking generally and just quote to you from this wonder-stuffed collection. But there’s no need. Open it, and read for yourself. — Carlos Hernandez, NY Times bestselling author of Sal and Gabi Break the Universe Is there any form that Emma Hoff can’t undertake? Any fissure in the universe that she will fail to inspect and fracture further until she breaks into the realm of the hidden yet true? The delights to be uncovered in An Archeology of the Future strike me with awe, urgency, solace, and compassion. How daring, how beautiful, how extraordinary it is, in this moment of the world when our world feels so broken, that Mt. Parnassas is still at work, and Hoff is a voice so richly sowed. — Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life The poems of Emma Hoff in An Archeology of the Future contend with some of life’s most Delphic questions. The young poet engages with inscrutable subjects like regret, darkness, the end of the world, and does so with as much precision as she does a pear or an apricot. Hoff acknowledges both the complexity and the simplicity of human experience, and her poems encourage readers to accept a certain level of unknowing, to embrace it even. Hoff’s lens is wide and varied. She points to other artists, draws inspiration from the paintings of Henri Rousseau and René Magritte, the photography of Pedro Luis Raota, the poetry of Tomaž Šalamun. She reflects on the life of Bobby Hutton, political activist, Black Panther, and ultimately victim of the Oakland Police. These are not small ponderings; they dig into our history to dislodge meaning, beauty, and an archeology of the future, a future which will, no doubt, contain further brilliance from Emma Hoff. — Melinda Wilson, Co-curator of the Poor Mouth Reading Series in the Bronx


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Stone Soup Honor Roll: September/October 2023

Welcome to the Stone Soup Honor Roll! We receive hundreds of submissions every month by kids from around the world. Unfortunately, we can’t publish all the great work we receive. So we created the Stone Soup Honor Roll. We commend all of these talented writers and artists and encourage them to keep creating. – The Editors Scroll down to see all the names (alphabetical by section), including book reviewers and artists. ART Dylan Natelli, 10 Sol Smith, 13 MEMOIR Eleanor Bailey, 10 Julia Berisha, 11 Azariah Hoch, 12 Yanling Lin, 12 Julia Mirvois, 12 Vienna Yang, 11 Eleni Yozzo, 11 POETRY Daniela de Galbert, 11 Athena Evangelia, 11 Tanvi Iyer, 9 Jaslene Kwack, 13 Marcus Paek, 13 Angela Wang, 12 STORIES Ellen Booth, 11 Han-Ya Chen, 11 Brooke Frey, 12 Cooper Garcia, 11 Meleah Goldman, 13 Hazel Leiderman, 11 Andrew Li, 10 Payton Lubinski, 13 Zoë Schall, 10 Sol Smith, 13


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Cousins (Part III)

A trip to Hyacinth Cove brings the cousins closer By Emily This is the final installment of Emily Chang’s novella, which received honorable mention in our 2022 Book Contest. If you are a new subscriber, you can read the first two installments online in the May/ June and July/August issues.   Chapter 11: Why Laila Ran Away Just for Ice Cream The car windows were open, and a breeze from the lake was blowing in as we parked by the beach. The drive to the Hyacinth Cove lake had taken over half an hour. By the time we got there, I was tired already, and not just of Julien’s endless ukulele strumming. I stumbled out of the car and into the sunny parking lot, leaving the blue journal on the seat. My right leg had fallen asleep, and I shook it to get the feeling back in. Uncle Pierre opened the trunk, and we each took some beach chairs to bring to the lakeside. We’d parked a little distance away from the little cousins, and I could see them waving at us through their car’s back window. “We have to get the kayaks from their car since they have a roof rack and we don’t,” Julien explained as we walked across the crowded parking lot toward them. “I got the kayaks for my birthday.” “You mean, I bought them for your birthday, good sir,” Adrian said, stopping to give an elaborate bow. “Yeah, what you said.” Julien shifted the beach chairs he was holding and the ukulele he still had on his back. “Do you seriously need to bring the uke? We’ve heard enough of it today,” Adrian said, and received a kick on the heel from Julien in return. “Anyway, like I was saying,” Julien continued, “there are two seats in both boats. So Nicky, Aunt Illy, do you want to come and try them out with us?” I shrugged. “Maybe.” Kayaking might be a nice distraction, but I didn’t feel like a nice distraction. “Aunt Illy?” “I would like to,” she said. “The last time I went kayaking was a few years ago. And—oh, but actually, I’m not sure you’d want to risk having me in the boat with you.” “Why? What happened?” Adrian and Julien were both interested. “Well, I’m not the most graceful with a paddle,” Aunt Illy said. “I went with a friend, but let’s just say his right ear will never be quite the same again.” “You hit him in the ear with a paddle?” Adrian was incredulous. “Wow, not even Julien’s that clumsy.” “You’re one to talk, Mister Man Overboard,” Julien said. “Did I say I hit him with a paddle? Did I?” Aunt Illy’s expression was so comical that I did feel the urge to smile, even through my worry. “Adrian, you jump to conclusions. Though unfortunately, yes,” she sighed, “that was the right conclusion. But what about Laila? Are you two forgetting her?” “I don’t need to go,” Laila mumbled, and it seemed like the first time she’d spoken since the sapphire blue ordeal, since she’d been silent the whole car ride here. “I’ve been kayaking with you guys. Anyway, Adrian, you have . . . accidents.” Julien laughed loudly at that. “Exactly,” he said. “Your clumsiness rivals hitting anyone in the ear with a paddle, Mister Man Overboard. Maybe I shouldn’t trust you with my new kayaks.” “You mean the ones I bought for you, good sir,” Adrian said back. “Of course you will.” We got to where Tilly and Alex were waiting for us, next to their parents (who were maneuvering the folded tent out of the car) and my mom (who was holding the cooler with our lunches, and Rose’s removable car seat where she was sleeping). Julien and Adrian took the kayaks off the roof rack. “How old are you, Julien? I forgot,” Alex said, swinging a bucket full of sand toys around. “I’m seventeen,” Julien told him. “Oh.” Alex nodded. “Are you in college?” “Not yet. I’m still in high school right now.” “Did you already go to college?” “No, college is after high school. I haven’t been there yet,” Julien explained patiently. “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Tank.” “Tank who?” “You’re welcome!” Alex sang, swinging the bucket in circles again and accidentally hitting Tilly in the stomach. “Ow!” She stumbled backwards. “Alex, you are not under control,” Tilly said sternly, trying to grab the bucket from him. A small scuffle ensued, which Aunt Illy broke up yet again. Rose had just woken up and started to wail. My mom put down the car seat and the cooler to hold her instead. Then there was a thump and the sound of metal scratching pavement. I turned around to see the tent finally out of the minivan’s trunk, and Uncle Benjamin carrying it awkwardly. Aunt Carissa shut the trunk and picked up the car seat and cooler that were on the ground. “All right, crew!” Aunt Illy said. “We’re ready now. Onward!” All of us, carrying something, made our way to the lake beach. Lots of people had taken advantage of the weather today, and the beach was full of tents and towels and people. We walked a long distance to try and find a less crowded area to set up. We put down the beach chairs. Alex and Tilly immediately sat down in the sand and started digging together. Apparently, they’d been planning a grand sandcastle for a few days, though they were still discussing and debating heatedly. Laila came over, and Tilly made room for her on the ground while Alex started giving her orders. “Attention, large people in this family!” I heard Aunt Illy call. “Please assist the valiant in a wrestling match against the tent!” I was the fourth-shortest person in this family, but I figured they might need my help anyway. Adrian and Julien, who were about to launch their kayaks, turned and came back too. Uncle Benjamin was shouting instructions, and