“Class, I would like you to meet Kenta.” Illustrator Gordon Su, 13, for “Conrad and Fate” by Nate Sheehan, 12. Published January/February 2015. A note from William Welcome back to school! If you are like my daughter, then you’ve just finished one of those incredibly long (and yet at the same time incredibly short) summer vacations. At the start, it seems you’ve got ages—and what a relief to not have school! By the end, it flew by, but even so school can’t start soon enough. Everyone here at Stone Soup wishes all of you a fabulous, successful, and creative school year. We are looking forward to seeing your creative work in the 2019/20 terms. The September issue was shipped this week, so subscribers to the print edition will be receiving it soon. (The digital version will be online on the first of the month, as usual.) If you want Stone Soup delivered to your door, then you have to subscribe, and there is no better time to do so than now, at the start of school. William’s weekend projects Art I’m really impressed with Gordon Su’s illustration, “Class, I would like you to meet Kenta.” What impresses me are the many gestures. It is clear that everyone isn’t exactly paying attention to the teacher. One boy is looking over at his friends, one of whom has his back to the teacher. Like a snapshot taken with a camera, the artist has captured a moment in time. For this project, make a drawing from memory of some place at school—a classroom, the cafeteria, the library—in which there are several people doing different things, looking in different directions, and carrying on different conversations. Or, make a drawing of family or friends at your house or in your yard who are at the same time together as a group, and doing individual things within the group. Writing The story “Conrad and Fate” is about prejudice based on a student’s ethnicity. This story, set in the late 1950s (when I was in elementary school) is about prejudice against Japanese people, something that was very strong in in the United States during and some time after World War II, which ended in 1945. Perhaps some of you have had personal experiences of prejudice of these kinds—I have. It has been 55 years since I was in middle school and bent down to pick a penny up off the concrete in front of a classroom only to discover it was glued down and that I was surrounded by a group of boys shouting “Jew!” and laughing. This memory is fresh, like it happened yesterday. This week, I want you to write a story from the viewpoint of a person who is thought of as “other,” like the Japanese boy in the story included in today’s newsletter. What does it feel like to be mocked, teased, excluded, or worse because you are not seen as a person by other students? This is a story, so show us what it feels like. Visit our website to read and follow the whole activity. As always, when you complete your story or any art you are happy with, send what you create to Stone Soup’s editor, Emma Wood, via our Submittable links. Until next time, Contest, partnership, and project news This week we are excited to tell you that the winning stories and the dramatized readings of the winners of our Podcast contest have been published! You can read all of the winning and placed stories on the blog, and hear winner Olivia Park’s “No Longer Blue” and Sabrina Guo’s honorable mention “Lilith’s Quest” in dramatized form by following the links in the blog section below, as well as on the contest winners’ announcement page. Thank you to our friends at By Kids, for Kids Story Time Podcast for this fun collaboration and their amazing work. It’s exciting to hear our writers’ stories in dramatic form. It gives them a whole new dimension. Have a listen and tell us what you think! In other contest news, our summer book-writing contest is now closed for entries, and the judging has begun! Congratulations to everyone who finished something to enter into this contest. It’s a real achievement to have written a long-form piece, and we cannot wait to read what you’ve written and announce the winners in late September. Finally—we always like to challenge you with a contest, and we will be publishing all the details of our next contest in early September. Watch this space! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! As mentioned above, this week we published the winners of our Climate Change Stories podcast contest on the blog. Olivia’s “No Longer Blue” won first place in the contest and examines the potential for people to exploit climate change for their own gain. Claire’s “The Dreamer” imagines a dystopian future in which climate change has changed all aspects of life on Earth. “A Splash of Water,” by Tara, tells the story of a girl accompanying her father on a climate change research trip. Gemma’s story, “Back in the Days,” also takes an interesting perspective, incorporating time travel. Sabrina’s story, “Lilith’s Quest,” explores climate change from the point of view of animals. Check out all the incredible winning stories on the blog, and leave a comment to let us know what you think. From Stone Soup January/February 2015 Conrad and Fate By Nate Sheehan, 12 Illustrated by Gordon Su, 13 PROLOGUE I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to move to America on July 17, 1956. My life was perfect in Japan. I had good friends. I had finally made the baseball team. Everything was perfect, but then I had to move to the US. The same country that fought a war against Japan. The same country where everybody who looks Japanese is an enemy. Learn a new language. Make new friends. So, basically I had to start over when everything had been perfect. “Perfect” was the only word going through
Saturday Newsletter: August 17, 2019
“Lilly knew it promised to be an amazing read.” Illustrator Tina Splann, 11 (Providence Village, TX) for “Words,” by Elia Smith, 10 (Santa Monica, CA). Published September/October 2014. A note from Jane Levi We know that our Stone Soup readers and authors are kids who love words! Every kind of word lover is represented in the world of Stone Soup: engaged readers, thoughtful reviewers, poets and storytellers, topical writers, and entertaining speakers and dramatists. This week’s writing selections from the current issue and the archive are focused on the power of words, in all their forms. From the July/August issue we are highlighting this week a review of The Book Thief, contributed to by Ananda Bhaduri (see below). Besides giving us an excellent example of a book review that makes you want to read the book for yourself, Ananda also got me thinking about the power of words. They can be used to manipulate and persuade as well as transmit information and develop learning. I’m sure you can think of examples in your own lives when particular words have had an impact larger than themselves. This book is a great reminder that the more we know about words (and the more words we know!), the better we can understand the truth of what others might be saying to us. In Elia Smith’s story “Words,” from the Stone Soup archives, a girl’s love of words helps her to engage with and enjoy a nursing home volunteering project. But words don’t just help to move the action forward. They provide the expression of the characters’ personalities, and they skillfully move us through the arc of the story. The hero, Lilly, is a girl of whom one might say, “She’s swallowed a dictionary,” which means that the story is richly peppered with splendiferous words. But one of my favorite things about the story is the way that in the end (and in contrast to the rest of the story) Lilly’s real feelings are best expressed in just a few, very simple words. It’s a lovely piece of writing that skillfully highlights the importance to writers of choosing just the right words to express emotion as well as meaning, and how to place them for maximum effect. There are so many ways to express a love of words, and the power of words, and so many ways to use those words to express ourselves and to enrich our experience of the world. When you have something you are proud of—a poem, a play, a story, a reading, a blog post idea—share it with us. We always want to know how you are playing with words. Until next time, Contest, partnership & project news We’re in the final days of our current contest: finish writing that book! Keep working on your entries for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. The extended deadline for entries is Aug. 21, so you still have a few days left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Do you know about light pollution? This week on the blog Thee Sim Ling, 12, gives us an overview of the phenomenon and what you can do about it. Continuing our interviews with former contributors, this week we talked with Grace McNamee, whose story “Pennsylvania” was originally published in Stone Soup in summer 2007 and was the featured story in our July 13 Newsletter. Grace now works as an assistant editor at Bloomsbury Publishing. Check out her answers here. Looking forward to next week on the blog We promised to publish the commended and winning stories in our recent Podcast contest on the website, and we’re excited to say that they will start appearing on the Blog next week. Check in through the week using this link to read all five brand-new stories on the theme of climate change. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Reviewed by Ananda Bhaduri, 13 (Guwahati, India) A snow-clad cemetery in Germany a few months before World War II. A girl cannot believe her brother has just died, as she and her mother witness the burial. A black book drops to the snow without the owner’s knowledge. The girl picks it up and clings to it. Her debut in the career of book thievery. Some hours later, the girl and her mother go their separate ways. The girl goes to her new parents. She does not know where her mother is going. Liesel Meminger (the aforementioned girl) is adopted by Hans and Rosa Hubermann of 33 Himmel Street. The Hubermanns are not rich. They decide to raise Liesel because they are getting an allowance for it. Despite this, Liesel could not have a better father than Hans Hubermann. Hans comes to Liesel’s room after her frequent nightmares and comforts her, or sometimes plays the accordion for her. The same cannot be said of Rosa. Though she loves Liesel, she is constantly addressing her as “pig,” often accompanied by a beating. Liesel soon adapts to life in Himmel Street, befriending Rudy Steiner, one of her neighbors. Liesel and Rudy play football with the other kids, go to school together, and also go on thieving adventures. (Their loot mostly consists of food and an occasional book.) It is Hans who discovers Liesel’s first stolen book. (She was lucky it wasn’t Rosa!) Liesel never learned how to read, and Hans has little education. Yet, they manage to finish the book, with Liesel learning how to read in the process. Perhaps these reading sessions develop a love for reading in Liesel. And perhaps this is the reason Liesel feels a compulsion to steal books. The narrator of The Book Thief is Death. What does Death have to do with a girl stealing books, you
Saturday Newsletter: August 10, 2019
“Tree Library,” watercolor by Li Lingfei, 10 (Shanghai, China). The cover of our July/August 2019 issue. A note from William Have you read our summer book review issue? Please subscribe. We offer print-and-digital combinations or digital only. Stone Soup is published monthly between September and June with a combined July/August issue, making 11 issues per year. This week’s newsletter illustration is also the lovely cover illustration for the combined summer 2019 special book review issue, “Tree Library.” The illustration is by Li Lingfei. Stone Soup fans will have noticed a few of her works appearing over the past couple of years. Editor Emma Wood has saved this one for a while—after all, what better cover could we have for an issue filled with reviews by our young writers? I had planned on writing about the age-old link between reading and writing and between being a writer and also a critical reader, but Emma beat me to it. Also a first in this summer 2019 issue, Emma has written a powerful essay about critical reading. I include here the opening of that essay. To read the full work, please follow the link to the current issue posted to our Stone Soup website. Emma writes: “In addition to being editor of Stone Soup, I am also a university instructor. When I teach creative writing, I like to tell my students that the most important part of the class is not writing but reading because reading will you teach you how to be a writer.“As you sit there, eagerly turning the page to find out what will happen next, you are also taking in sentence structures, vocabulary, pacing, and the many other features that make up a poem, a story, or a book. On top of this, you are learning about what kinds of books have already been written. If you want to be a writer, it is crucial to learn about the history of the genre in which you want to write. All writers build on the work of other writers . . .” Read the rest of the essay here. Many of you, like my own daughter, are beginning to move beyond books written for kids and young adults. I am so excited and pleased that Emma selected a review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for this issue. As many of you will know, Frankenstein is a morality tale about science and technology getting out of hand—about the unexpected consequences of revolutionary breakthroughs. The whole mess the world is in with Facebook, YouTube, the Internet in general, and “fake news” can be described as “a Frankenstein’s monster.” Something technological and scientific got out of hand, as with the storyline of Frankenstein, which Valentine Wulf reviews: the creator, Victor, runs away from what he has created, which makes everything so much worse. In many ways, the many creators of the Internet and the social networks that have become such a destabilizing force globally, like Victor, ran away from their creation, letting a monster develop from what had been good. Frankenstein was published 201 years ago! Like all great literature, it is great because it has something to say to every generation. This profoundly wise book, one of the most famous books of all time, was written by a young woman. Mary Shelley was 19 when she wrote this book and 20 when it was published. We have many Stone Soup writers who are exceedingly proficient at age 12 and 13. Read Valentine’s review, and read the book. If Frankenstein isn’t right for you this year, then check in with it next year. It was written by a teenager. If you ever run into anyone who tells you you need to be older to be a serious writer, just remember Mary Shelley and what she accomplished with her teenage imagination. William’s Weekend Project The project for today is simple. Go to the current issue. You can read four free articles in a month, or you can subscribe. So, please read Emma’s essay on critical reading and then at least three of the book reviews (or two book reviews and the one movie review or a poetry review–you get the idea, read three!). If you are a subscriber, then read the entire issue if you haven’t already. Then, predictably, I’d like you to write a review of your current favorite book or movie or poem. We normally publish reviews as part of the Stone Soupblogs. We are happy for one-off reviews and even happier when one of you commits to being a regular reviewer. Start with this one review—you will have good models to inspire you—and when it’s done, send it Stone Soup. Until next week, Contest and partnership news We’re in the final weeks for our current contest: finish writing that book! Keep working on your entries for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. The extended deadline for entries is Aug. 21, so you have more than two weeks left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Do you read for that transported sensation, where it seems you are in the book? Twelve-year-old Nina Vigil’s book review suggests that Dry, by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, evokes this type of feeling. Told from different perspectives and grappling with a (sadly) relatable problem, Dry gets heartily praised by Nina. Read her review here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Reviewed by Valentine Wulf, 13 (Seattle, WA) Before I begin this review, I want you to think of everything you think you know about Frankenstein. What comes to mind even when I think of Frankenstein is the classic depiction from the old horror movies. The insane doctor with a German accent screaming, “It’s alive!” as lightning lights up the sky and