Stone Soup Editors

Perspective H20Caitlin Goh, 12 (Dallas, TX), published in Stone Soup March 2020 A note from Emma Do you know what was happening in the year you were born? I was born in the year 1988, and I had to look up what was going on in the world then. 1988, like 2020, was an election year in the US—George H.W. Bush won. There were numerous man-made and environmental disasters. The movie Big with Tom Hanks was released. The Soviet Union began to dissolve. The Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway. There was a Winter Olympics. NASA launched its shuttle Discovery into space for the first time. Many, many other things happened too. When I read through the lists I find online, it’s one disaster and political crisis after another. This is strangely comforting. So much is going on in the world right now, especially with the spread of COVID-19. Much feels uncertain for all of us. Looking at history is a reminder that history has always been one crisis after another. One day, we will look back and say, “Remember the self-quarantine in 2020?” This week, consider finding out what was happening in the year you were born. You can search online or you can ask a parent, older sibling, or relative. How was the world different? Maybe what you learn will inspire a story, poem, or artwork! Finally, I hope you will take the painting and poem included in this newsletter as a reminder to spend time outdoors during this hectic time. Simply looking at a tree waving gently in the wind or at a sky filled with cumulus clouds makes me feel calmer and happier. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Daniel talks about the powerful effects of grief in his review of the book Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. Learn about the main character’s struggle in coping with the deaths of family members and how she found ways to move forward. Why can’t we just make water? You might have wondered this before, especially with all the talk of clean water that has been happening lately. Well, it’s not so easy, Lucinda explains in her blog “The Science of Making Water.” Read Lucinda’s explanation of the chemistry, as well as some unfortunate historical examples. From Stone Soup February 2020 In My Liquid Tourmaline By Lauren Giglia, 11 (Irvine, CA) In this shimmering liquid tourmaline A teal and gold-breasted kingfisher whistles in the green pines As the lake’s cool breath whispers in my ear She speaks of laughing trout gliding in her belly Humans pouring acid in her veins And her tree friends she has lost I am wrapped in the scent of salt and sweetness As the freezing rush of cold water billows about my hand And the smooth trout wriggle across the lake Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.

Your Day to Shine (watercolor)Story Kummer, 12 (St. Louis, MO), published in Stone Soup March 2020 A note from William On behalf of the entire Stone Soup staff I’d like to thank all of you who read our newsletter for doing so. It really means a lot to us that so many of you take the time every weekend to check in with us. Thank you. Wow! What a painting! Story Kummer’s Your Day to Shine is the cover image for the March print issue.  For me, this painting is transfixing. Spend some time looking at it. Let yourself relax into the painting and, ideally, let yourself begin to daydream. Use the painting as the staring point for reverie. Dawn is about light. That is true whether it is a foggy dawn—which is very common where I live—or a glorious, radiant dawn like the one that Story memorializes in this painting. Dawn is also about promise. Everything is possible in the morning, when the day is young. What makes Story’s painting so effective is the power of its light and the strongly organized space, with the rolling hills, reminiscent of ocean swells, cut through with an undulating road. The road that will take us to our own shining destiny. Story depicts the sun itself at the center of the yellow-orange-red part of the rainbow spectrum. This is the power position pumping out the light that shifts monochrome night into multicolored day. It is the light that wakes the birds, that warms the air—setting the diurnal insects flying and releasing the rich smells of the day. This would be a powerful painting even without the tower, but for me the tower makes the work much more interesting. It introduces the potential for narrative. Are we setting out from the tower or walking toward it? Does the sun shine on our faces or on our backs? I want you to work with this idea that the new day is a day of infinite potential. You can do it with art or story. Think about what makes dawn the dawn. Choose a bright, glowing morning for your setting or something more subdued, like the foggy dawns so common where I live. Whether you create a drawing, painting, or photograph to be viewed or a story or poem to be read, create something that, like Story’s painting, says something about the new day being one where your viewer or reader will shine like a brilliant morning sun, even if in your work the real sun is obscured by a fog bank or an overcast sky. Now a different note: “William’s Journal,” the story featured in this newsletter, is about war. And its aftermath. Some say that all war is senseless. In this story, Eli Spaulding, the author, doesn’t tell us what the war was about. It is implied that the general, William, and the survivors who live in proximity to the battlefield were the “good guys,” but we don’t actually know anything about the why of this war and thus the suffering it caused. Which raises the question, does it matter? The protagonist’s father was driven insane by an awful battle, with severe consequences for his family, even long after the war ended. As Eli puts it, “He served as a ground soldier and when he came back, he was never the same.” If you have had relatives who have fought in a war, died there, or come back changed, then perhaps something from their story could form the kernel for something you write that might help you and your family process what happened to your loved one, or to those of you who didn’t go to war but still have to deal with very personal consequences. As always, if you love what you create, please use our submission form to upload it to Stone Soup so our editor, Emma Wood, can consider it for publication. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Shihoon writes about her dream on the blog this week: unification for Korea. In her words, “I want to get rid of the ceasefire line that is blocking the path from South Korea to North Korea. My dream is studying with the North Korea students and going on a trip to North Korea.” Another post from our resident science fiction expert, Marco. This week, Marco describes a few Cyberpunk derivatives. Want to learn about Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, and more? Click on the link above to read Marco’s post. From Stone Soup February 2020 William’s Journal By Eli Spaulding, 11 (Newark, DE) (Art by Sophia Torres, 12 (Chicago, IL)) “Still nothing?” asks Peter, his nose pointed down at me like a beak. He has an aura of disdain floating around him. Peter is never happy because he’s having a hard time with cancer, and the doctor said that his days are numbered. Leave me alone, I think to myself. I’ve been digging in this hot, dry dirt since five a.m. And I just want to go home. But I just say, “Yep, still nothing.” I have a job at a dig site to find clues from a battle in World War III. My father said that it was one of the bloodiest events in history. He served as a ground soldier and when he came back, he was never the same. He started taking drugs and gambling to buy more drugs. He sold our house to buy more, and we went into poverty. My mother ran away with me when he had sold almost everything we had. She got a job and raised me by herself. And now I have a job at a dig site studying the war that drove my dad insane. It has been a mystery for 18 years now what happened to the soldiers that were here. A storm came through and when it passed, all that was left was mud. The same mud that I am getting paid to dig through for the museum. “You

New York by Destan Cevher, 7 (New York, NY), published in Stone Soup February 2020 A note from Sarah When I saw Destan’s wonderful cityscape of New York from the February issue, I was reminded of the power of landscapes to depict a place so specifically, even if you’ve only been there a handful of times, or maybe not at all. Destan’s piece doesn’t include the classic New York landmarks that identify the city right away, but it does convey Destan’s interesting impression of the city through its composition and colors. I decided to make this newsletter more about images rather than words, so I’ve chosen a few pieces of art from the Stone Soup archives that also illustrate a place. Scroll down to see them, and visit the website if you’d like to see more.   Quays of the Seine by Monique Huck,13, from the September/October 1995 issue Yosemite by Michelle Bjerke, 10, from the March/April 1978 issue My Village by Maria Santay Juarez, 13, the cover of the May/June 2002 issue   Which Way Car Wash by Nicholas Taplitz, 13, from the November 2019 issue Of course, you don’t necessarily need to rely on the world around you to create art—it can be fun sometimes to imagine new worlds. But, sometimes what is in front of you is a good place to start. Try to describe your environment or represent it in an art piece, and please consider submitting your work to 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 Stonesoup.com! Daniel writes about “a shocking study” that shows that excessive cell phone use is . . . good for you?! Read “Phone Addiction is Strengthening Our Brain” for Daniel’s satirical take on our phone-obsessed world. Another travelogue from Vivaan on the blog! This time, he’s in Venice, Italy, a floating city where you take boats instead of buses. Read Vivaan’s account of his time in Venice, plus some history of the “magnificent” city. Try out a new game where you are a stem cell scientist and review it for the Stone Soup blog! Dish Life, a new, free game (“part Sims, part Tamagotchi”) was launched this week by researchers at Cambridge University. Dish Life is “a lab in your phone” designed as a fun way for young people to learn more about stem cells, and about what it’s really like to be a scientist working with a team in a lab. They want it to offer new ideas and tell new stories for imagining what a scientist does and looks like. We know that a lot of today’s Stone Soup readers are going to be tomorrow’s great scientists, and that you all appreciate a good story, so what do you think? Does Dish Life give you a new insight into the scientific life? Did it spark some new ideas in a subject area you didn’t know much about before? Is a game a good way to share this kind of information and build experience? The creators made a Youtube trailer where you, your family, and your teachers can find out more about the game, and there are preview versions for Android and iOS that you can download for free. So, if you decide to give it a try have something to say about it, why not write us a review? You can submit a review of Dish Life (or any other game!) to the blog category on our submission page. If we like it, we’ll publish it online. From Stone Soup February 2020 The Life of Beverly Henderson By Jamison Freis, 12 (Thousand Oaks, CA) (Illustrated by Destan Cevher, 7 (New York, NY)) I was born in 1950 and a few hours after I was born, my mom died—or so I was told. We were in Ketchum, Idaho. My name is Beverly Henderson. I am part Irish and the rest of me is all American. My father was disappointed when I was born because he wanted a boy. He put me in an orphanage. I never saw him again, but I have small pictures of him in my head. He was handsome, with brown hair, brown eyes, and tan skin. His skin was so smooth that it made butter feel rough. I lived with him for three years. At the orphanage, I went to a cheap school, and they fed us cold food, they had rats in the classroom, and I was one of the only girls. The only other girls were Lily and some other girl I never learned the name of. She was quiet as a mouse and graceful as a pigeon. Lily, however, was nice. She was nine years old at the time. Lily lived with a poor family, and she had one brother, two sisters, and her mom was pregnant with one more. …/MORE Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.