Jane Levi

‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, 13, a work in colored pencil, ink and watercolor. A detail of ‘Parker’ is the cover of our September 2018 Science Issue. A Note from William Rubel I am so proud to be able to introduce to you Stone Soup’s Science and Science Fiction themed September issue. As always, to download the full issue and to read all of the contents you have to be a subscriber. Single copies of the print issue can be ordered from our online store. This issue marks the first anniversary of Editor Emma Wood’s first year with Stone Soup, and a continuation of the program of special themed issues that she initiated with her first issue last September, which was poetry. A huge thank you to Emma! The art in this issue is particularly fine. Emma commissioned illustrations for this issue, to complement our Science Fiction contest winners’ work. I’m going to write more about Emma, and our staff, and our plans for Stone Soup this school year in next week’s Newsletter. But, for today, I’d like to keep the focus of the Newsletter on this extraordinary September science issue. ‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, is the cover illustration. Look at the detail! This is classic science fiction in visual form. Real science—precise observation of nature—underpins the animal and plant forms. The bark on the trees is at once believably bark-like and exotic. The bird is clearly a bird—but not one living on earth today. Is it a throwback to the age of the dinosaurs, a future mutation, or something real as yet undiscovered? A real tour de force! This is what Emma wrote to introduce the issue: I’m thrilled to finally share the winners of our Science Fiction Contest with you, in this special Science Issue of the magazine. Each story is inventive, strange, suspenseful, and “scientific” in its own way. “Middlenames,” the winning story, imagines a society that assigns you a middle name—which determines your identity for life—at birth. “Young Eyes” explores the dangers of technology, while “Mystical Creatures of Blue Spout Bay” and “Sunk” take on the environment. This issue also features nonfiction writing on scientific topics—from the solar eclipse to organ transplants—as well as three poems that engage with scientific topics and ways of thinking. I hope this issue serves as a reminder that writing and literature don’t happen in vacuum; they aren’t separate from other subjects like algebra, physics, or biology. As you read, I want you to think about your largest, nonliterary passion. How can you engage it in your own writing? As always, send the results of your experiment to Stone Soup! This issue really challenges the boundaries we place on writing. Our own labels of fiction, science fiction, literature, science writing, etc. are conveniences. They are ways of packaging writing. And, of course, when you sit down with a book or a magazine article it is good to know that what you are reading is fiction or nonfiction, as that helps determine how you think about what you are reading. On the other hand, lots of great fiction writing and lots of great nonfiction writing cross genres. For example, while one of the most famous American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), is clearly a work of fiction about the hunt for a whale, large portions of the book are pure non-fiction. The inspiring French naturalist, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was a great scientist. And even more wonderfully, he was a great writer. Fabre wrote brilliant science about insects, and his texts are often woven through with personal observations. He uses descriptive language that is so elegant, eloquent, evocative, and beautiful that whole pages can transport you into the realm of poetry. And so, when you pick up Emma’s challenge to engage your largest non-literary passion in your writing, I encourage you to think outside the box; think outside the literary categories that you know about. You can write a novel that is also a work on marine science, or describe an ant colony in a way that fully draws us into that world. If you are someone for whom algebra opens up a beautiful world, then Emma is asking you how you might incorporate that algebraic way of seeing into something more literary, and in doing so help the rest of us who cannot see it to understand it and discover something new. So, pick up a pen and start writing! For many of us, the act of writing itself gets ideas flowing. Until next week Contests, submissions, and more There are two weeks left to submit material for two of our current calls for submissions. Recipes for our food issue, and entries for our concrete poetry contest should both be with us by September 15th. As ever, use the Submit button to send your work to us. Next week we will be telling you more about a brand new competition that we have been working on with MacKenzie Press: the Secret Kids contest. For this contest, we are looking for book-length work, and the prizes in several age categories include publication of your own book! Entries are due in January 2019, so you have time to polish your longer form entries. Look out for our more detailed email all about this contest, coming soon. Highlights from the past week online Visit the Stone Soup blog for thought leadership, reviews and more from our young bloggers, all age 13 and younger. There is new material throughout the week, every week. If you have something to say that you think our readers would be interested in, then please submit a sample blog entry. Don’t miss our young blogger and leader in our refugee campaign Sabrina Guo’s latest blog post. This week, Sabrina shares a summary and her reflections on a talk by Tara Abraham, Executive Director of Glamor Magazine’s The Girl Project, “Reflections on the Syrian Refugee Crisis.” Our sports blogger Leo T. Smith makes his predictions for the new NBA season. What do you think

Ken carefully picked up the fledgling in his palms, taking care not to cause it any more pain Illustrator Keysun Mokhtarzadeh, 12, for ‘The Forgotten Fort’ by Andrew Lee, 13. Published January/February 2009. A note from William Rubel Whew! What a week! I flew to London on Monday, arrived on Tuesday, and with my Stone Soup colleague, Jane Levi, went the next morning went to see a friend of ours who is a book collector. He collects early books on gardening—books from the 1500s to the 1800s. His wife collects early British detective fiction. Do any of you have book collections? Have you ever thought about making a specialized library of your own focusing on books of one subject? If you have a book collection and would like to tell others about it, write something up and submit it to the blog section of our online submission form. If you still remember, tell us about the first book you bought, which of your books mean the most to you, and what plans you have for your collection. The first book I recall buying is a Bible from 1771. It is a big old book. Several of the people who owned it before me signed it on a blank page at the front of the book. When I read it I am always aware that I am just the current person in a long chain of owners going back over two hundred years who have sat down with it. From our our book collector friend’s house, Jane and I went to Oxford where I had been invited to give a talk about the history of bread and where Jane and I were asked to present something on our project in Kenya that I have mentioned in a previous newsletter. We stayed at Christchurch college. This means, we ate breakfast in the hall used to film the meals for the Harry Potter movies. Yes, it’s true! We ate breakfast at Hogwarts and walked up the stairway where Dumbledore greeted Harry and the other students when they first came to the school! Those of you who are fans of Philip Pullman’s books, as I am, will also one day want to come to Oxford to be in the place where Lyra begins her adventures. Jordan College is an invention but is closely modeled on walled colleges, like Christchurch. In the evening, in the early morning hours, and in the fields that still exist within the Oxford City limits you can get a real feel for how an author takes a busy modern place and finds within it inspiration for a fantasy story of unparalleled depth. December Food Issue! I wrote about this last week—the deadline for the December food issue is coming up in a couple of weeks. What I want to say to those of you who have not yet started on this, is that it is both a writing and a cooking project. Yes, we are interested in recipes for foods you love, but to get the recipes published in the Stone Soup December issue there has to be a well written introduction. In cookbook language, the introduction to recipes is called the “headnote.” Last year, when I first put out the call for recipes I mentioned how I used to make a gingerbread house with my mother every December. We did that from when I was in elementary school through high school and even into my first year of college, just before she died. I have published a gingerbread recipe along with this very personal story of why it meant so much to me in a book called Celebrations. You can also read other personal and creative stories about recipes—the headnotes—in last December’s issue of Stone Soup. Other foods I remember cooking… Bread. When I was eleven my mother gave me a beautiful two-volume cookbook. One volume was about the history of American food and the other volume was recipes. I was very interested in the headnote for the recipe for Anadama bread. I made that bread, loved it, and was hooked. I have been making bread since I was eleven and for the last fifteen years researching and writing about bread is what I’ve done virtually every day. I write articles about bread, I write books about bread. And this interest really started when I was your age. From that same American Heritage Cookbook there is a recipe for eggnog. It is a very rich eggnog—eggs, of course, cream, and lots of alcohol for the adults. I started making the eggnog for my family’s holiday party when I was eleven or twelve. The headnote is a story. It can be a story about the dish you are making: why you like it; when you make it; what it reminds you of. Sometimes, cookbook authors also use headnotes to help people with a tricky part of a recipe. For example, if it has an ingredient that may not be easy to find, you might suggest an alternative in the headnote. Recipes for Stone Soup must have three elements: the headnote, the list of ingredients, and the instructions. The list of ingredients and instructions fall into the genre of technical writing. Your work for Stone Soup is also judged on the clarity of that technical writing. The way I test recipes (and the quality of my technical writing) is to get someone else to make the recipe just from reading what I wrote. If you get moving on this project this week you ought to have time to get a friend to test your recipe (and of course we will test it that way, too!). To write the technical part—the part about mixing the ingredients together—I want you to take notes as you are cooking. Then, when you work up the notes into a more final text, please visualize your hands—what are they doing? What are the steps? “Take a bowl, break two eggs into it, mix with a whisk, then…” The more you explain the gestures of cooking—like, “when mixed, set

The best part was that, within a week, I had made new friends Illustrator Aditi Laddha, 12 for ‘An Indian Monsoon’ by Sanjana Saxena, 11. Published January/February 2009. A note from William Rubel Apologies everyone! It is Sunday afternoon! Yikes! Where did the week go? It was a much-too-full week. On Wednesday, our gray tabby cat of thirteen years, Moxie, died of cancer as we petted him. We wrapped him in a beautiful cloth and buried him with his favourite catnip toy under an apple tree in the garden, and nailed up the name tag from his (hated!) collar to mark the spot. I also had a writing deadline of my own for a paper I am giving at a conference in Oxford, England, and too much more. We will be back on schedule next week. Back to this week: so many fabulous new blog posts—please go to the Newsletter’s blog section below and the blog section of our website. Your comments on blog posts and book reviews encourages our authors. I’d also appreciate it if you all listen to Justin Park’s composition for piano and oboe that we published this week. Composers amongst you—send us your work! If you play the piano or oboe, download the music, and get a musician friend to play it with you. The art today commemorates the fact that for a lot of you summer vacation is at its end and school is about to start again. My colleague, Jane Levi, selected this image (and story) inspired by the review written by Antara of the movie, “On the Way to School” that is about the many long journeys that children make to school in countries like Kenya, where my daughter and I were visiting earlier in the summer. In fact, we stayed in a small village that didn’t have a school of its own where children walked over an hour to school each way, making their own school day roughly eleven-and-a-half hours long—9 hours in school and two-and-a-half hours of walking. If you haven’t been to our Instagram account lately, please check it out, join us, and tell your friends. We have a series of photographs we are posting under the hash tag #whereIwrite. You can upload your photograph of yourself in your writing place on our online Submission form. This is the most recent Instagram post in that category from Sabrina Guo, a Stone Soup blogger and someone who is helping us set up our refugee project. The project that I suggest in this Newsletter is for those of you going back to school. I want you to write something short—something in the flash fiction tradition—let’s say 100 words. One impression about the first days in school this year. If you feel that you succeeded in capturing a face, an impression, a place, a sound, a conversation, a taste, a something that caught your attention in the first days of school then send it in to us for possible publication in Stone Soup. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at <ahref=”https://stonesoup.com/”>stonesoup.com! We are very happy to have published a couple of music blogs in the past 10 days, the first we’ve had in a while. We love to feature music made and performed by our readers and contributors, so check out these great new contributions, and think about sending us your own music sometime. Justin Park, 13, sent us his composition ‘Glocken der Fantasie’ for oboe and piano. You can see the Youtube recording of his performance of his piece, and also download the sheet music to try it for yourselves, at our website. Send us your own recordings of his music, too! Ula Pomian, 12, a regular contributor to the magazine (thank you, Ula!), sent us her Lullaby for a Badger, a piece for piano. You can listen to a recording of her playing it at our soundcloud site, using the link on our website. In keeping with our musical theme, this week we welcome Lin Lynn Tao, 13, to our Review section with her book review of Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan. In the same section, you can also read the latest review from the unstoppable Nina Vigil (thank you, Nina)! This week, especially for cat-lovers, read about (and find on Netflix) the movie Kedi, a Turkish film about the cats of Istanbul. And of course, as mentioned above, read Antata’s review of the inspired by the review written by Antara of the movie, “On the Way to School”. From Stone Soup January/February 2009 An Indian Monsoon By Sanjana Saxena, 11 Illustrated by Aditi Laddha, 12 “In a few minutes, we will be landing at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai. Please fasten your seat belts. Thank you for flying Air India and hope you have a wonderful stay in Mumbai,” the pilot’s voice echoed. As the plane descended under the clouds, I looked out of the window and got my first glimpse of Mumbai. My family had decided to return to India after living in the U.S. for twelve years. As I thought of white and fuzzy snow falling into my hands, a few scattered lights twinkled in an island of darkness. This was so different from Chicago. There the city had glowed like a Christmas tree! Coming out of the airplane, the first thing I noticed was the large number of people. Hundreds of baggage handlers, policemen, officials and many hangers-on were running back and forth like a swarm of bees. The air was also very hot and humid. My father had told me this happened because of the monsoon. He explained to me about these rising winds from the Arabian Sea that brought much relief from intense heat and were essential for Indian farmers. But this year, the monsoon was different. The city was facing its worst flooding in a century and as we drove to Pune (100 miles from Mumbai), our destination, I saw the havoc that the rains had caused. There was water everywhere, dogs