Stone Soup Editors

“Self-portrait” (acrylics) Alyssa Wu, 12 (Pleasanton, CA) Published in the September 2020 issue of Stone Soup A note from William Labor Day sale! 15% off Stone Soup print and digital subscriptions, as well as books—including our newly published Three Days till EOC by Abhi Sukhdial. Use the code LABORDAY20 at the checkout. Now that you are all back at school, we have a few administrative details to share on the new programs we began for lockdown and are continuing through the end of the year. Writing Workshop and Book Club The Writing Workshop resumes next week on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 9 a.m. PDT with a workshop on metaphor. The class is for students ages nine through fourteen. Our schedule from now on will be to run Book Club in that same slot on the last Saturday of each month and Writing Workshop on all the other Saturdays (apart from Thanksgiving weekend). Having run the programs for free since the spring, we will now be asking for a small fee for the classes from non-subscribers, which I am sure you will all understand. We will also need everyone to register via EventBrite. Once you have registered, you will receive joining details for the Zoom calls. All the details and registration links will be posted on the relevant page on our website, Stonesoup.com. We are scheduling the performance we’d discussed with the previous attendees for the last class in December. This public reading will include work from all the classes since March, as well as new work from the second season. Creativity Prompts and Flash Contests We thought that since you are going back to school, it would make sense to reduce the frequency of the creativity prompts and flash contests. We also need to make sure our small staff has enough time to complete the additional work that comes our way in the run up to the end of the year! Thus, the flash contest is now monthly—first week of the month—and we are sending out a weekly, rather than daily, report. We are preparing a questionnaire to get your opinions on various Stone Soup activities, including the flash contest and daily prompts. Refugee Project Laura Moran, the Refugee Project coordinator, has been corresponding with the Kakuma camp in Kenya for months. Kakuma is the largest refugee camp in the world, with nearly 200,000 residents. The camp is operated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We have just been approved as an educational organization authorized to work with the camp authorities. Thank you, Laura, for your persistence! We had a Zoom meeting this week with the UNHCR education officer, and several others at the Kakuma camp, including the headteacher of the girls primary school funded by Angelina Jolie. We are developing a program with that school initially, with the intention of expanding to other less well-funded schools over time. We will now be meeting with people at the Kakuma camp on a regular basis to develop our partnership. Jane Levi and I also met with our website designers on Thursday to discuss building out a section of the website for submissions from refugee students. This portion of the website will have its own identity within the larger Stone Soup website. We look forward to soon being able to share with you works from refugee students that have been sent to us over the last year. Sincere thanks to those of you who are supporting this project. Your donations are making this important work possible. William’s Weekend Project Kateri Escober Doran’s “Locked out of Kindergarten” and Alyssa Wu’s self-portrait are the two creative works featured in today’s newsletter. Both of these works are extraordinary. I hope you will spend some time with each. Alyssa’s self-portrait shows us a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, hair done up in a bun like a dancer and wearing a black top with a striking bird print. The black hair, black eyebrows, black eyes lined with black eye liner, black ear studs, and the black top gives this portrait a fantastic energy. The portrait projects itself in front of the vibrant green background. And the birds! A magnificent print, striking in its simplicity, and so effective. If you don’t feel confident drawing or painting, then use photography to develop your creative vision. Pick up your phone or camera. Dress yourself with a striking outfit. Then, either work photographing yourself in a mirror or work with with a mirror and your hands or work with your phone or camera to take a portrait of yourself. You can use a selfie mode and also photograph yourself in a mirror. “Locked out of Kindergarten” by Kateri Escober Doran was the winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest. I have just re-read this story. It is everything that Stone Soup is about. Congratulations to Kateri for this well-remembered and well-written evocation of being in kindergarten—not yet on the first rung of the ladder to life. After you read this story, which I hope you will do right now, I’d like you to close your eyes for a few minutes, let the memories flow, and at least start your own narrative about something that happened to you when you were much younger. Kateri offers insights into the thinking of a child much younger than she is. As writers, one of your tasks is to create characters who offer insights into human behavior and emotions. Try to get back to a memory of you when you were younger and thinking in ways that are different from how you think now. Besides recording a memory that is likely to grow less precise with time, this is good practice for creating characters that think differently than you. As always, if you are happy with what you create, please go to our website and send Emma Wood, our editor, what you have done. Stay safe. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #22 Flash Contest #22: Write a Story About a Unifying Place For our last in the current series of weekly flash