Horse in Dreamland (oil pastel) by Tutu Lin, 13; published as the cover for Stone Soup November 2022 A note from Caleb Greetings! This week I have the pleasure of announcing our December 10 reading for Writing Workshop students: Blame the Squirrels, and Other Stories. The event is our first formal reading for Writing Workshop students in over a year. As a proctor for Conner’s workshop, I can’t wait to listen to the students I’ve gotten to know this session read their work, as well as have an opportunity to listen to the magnificent work of the students in William’s workshop. As writers, reading our work aloud is the culmination of hours and hours of effort, and there is no greater feeling than facilitating the measured silence of an audience and receiving raucous applause. So please, mark your calendars for 10 – 11:30 AM PST on December 10, and come out in support of our terrific writers—your presence goes a long way. The event is free to attend. I also wanted to talk briefly about the blog, namely in order to highlight the recent undertaking of one of our most prolific contributors, Emma Catherine Hoff. On top of having published multiple poems in Stone Soup magazine and numerous reviews and opinion pieces on the blog; on top of being one of our longest standing Writing Workshop students; and, on top of just being announced as a winner of our most recent Book Contest for her book of poems An Archeology of the Future (please scroll to see our winner in fiction, as well as the other finalists), Emma, 10, has created a podcast called Poetry Soup, in order to “share [her] love of poetry, and inspire others to read more of it.” She has already released two fantastic episodes, the first about John Ashbery’s sestina “The Painter”, and the second about the poem “The Keeper of the Sheep” by Fernando Pessoa, written under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Her third episode will go live either next week or the following, so make sure you take a visit to the Stone Soup blog, where these episodes exclusively air. Until next time, Announcing the 2022 Annual Book Contest Winners! We’re thrilled to announce the results of this year’s Stone Soup Annual Book Contest. It was a pleasure and an honor to read and consider all the manuscripts as well as incredibly difficult to select our two winners. We are excited to share more about the authors and their books in the coming months—stay tuned! ♦ Winners ♦ Poetry An Archeology of the Future, Emma Catherine Hoff, 10 Fiction The Handkerchief Woman, Lily Jessen, 14 ♦ Finalists ♦ Poetry REALITY IS HERE FOR YOU, Analise Braddock, 11 Imagination, Bethel Daniel, 12 Sunny Fitting Sangeeta, Raeha Khazanchi, 13 Simply Complicated, Madeline Male, 14 Scenes From Before, Pauline McAndrew, 14 Fiction Cousins, Emily Chang, 14 Let Me Go, Ariadne Civin, 13 Shattered Moon, Ivy Cordle, 13 Autumn Floods and Winter Fires, Nami Gajcowski, 12 In the Secret Cedar Woods, Elena Gil, 13 The Roaming Realm, Madeline Longoria, 14 Norcelia, Sabrina Lu, 14 These Words That I’ve Written, Jenna Reenders, 14 Maple of the Moss Folk, Kana Shackelford, 13 Overthrowing Antecessum, Isabella Washer, 13 Sparks, Eleanor Wernly, 11 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.
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #47: Excess (Revisited)
An update from our forty-seventh Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, October 29th Excess: more than necessary—exaggeration, extravagance, exuberance, abundance, unnecessary, overload, overkill, surplus, luxuriance, improvisation, unrestraint, ridiculous To kick off this week’s workshop, we began with four artworks—Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet, Peter Paul Rubens’ The Garden of Love, Jackson Pollock’s Convergence, and the Sistene Chapel—all of which illustrated, in one way or another, the theme of excess. While we technically defined “excess” as “more than necessary,” the purpose of this workshop was to show how sometimes excess is necessary in order to create the feeling of being overwhelmed or overpowered or repulsed, an idea perhaps best encapsulated in the work of Peter Paul Rubens: he emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. We explored two more of Rubens’s paintings: Daniel in the Lion’s Den and The Tiger Hunt. Once we finished looking at these paintings, we looked at the art of contemporary Australian sculptor Ron Mueck. We looked at a few of his hyperrealistic, larger than life works in order to demonstrate how something almost “too real” becomes grotesque. Following our discussion of Mueck, we looked at examples of Baroque architecture, a style associated with ornamental excess as is the case with St Peter’s Basilica and La Sagrada Familia. We also discussed a piece of Postmodern architecture, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, a “non-functional” building more characteristic of a dream or a work of science fiction than reality. The last section of the Writing Workshop was devoted to examples of excess in writing as we looked at an excerpt from Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (exaggeration, hyperbole), Lewis Carroll’s The Jabberwocky (pleasure in its own silly sound making), and, finally, an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy (functional resistance to grammar, repetition of the word “and”). The Challenge: Write as much as you can, as fast you can, without worrying about making sense; write excessively. The Participants: Benedetta, Savi, Anushka, Ella, Tate, Robert, Samantha, Alice, Russell, Josh
Congratulations to our Book Contest 2022 Winners!
We’re thrilled to announce the results of this year’s Stone Soup Annual Book Contest. It was a pleasure and an honor to read and consider all the manuscripts as well as incredibly difficult to select our two winners. We are excited to share more about the authors and their books in the coming months—stay tuned! Winners Poetry An Archeology of the Future, Emma Catherine Hoff, 10 Fiction The Handkerchief Woman, Lily Jessen, 14 Finalists Poetry REALITY IS HERE FOR YOU, Analise Braddock, 11 Imagination, Bethel Daniel, 12 Sunny Fitting Sangeeta, Raeha Khazanchi, 13 Simply Complicated, Madeline Male, 14 Scenes From Before, Pauline McAndrew, 14 Fiction Cousins, Emily Chang, 14 Let Me Go, Ariadne Civin, 13 Shattered Moon, Ivy Cordle, 13 Autumn Floods and Winter Fires, Nami Gajcowski, 12 In the Secret Cedar Woods, Elena Gil, 13 The Roaming Realm, Madeline Longoria, 14 Norcelia, Sabrina Lu, 14 These Words That I’ve Written, Jenna Reenders, 14 Maple of the Moss Folk, Kana Shackelford, 13 Overthrowing Antecessum, Isabella Washer, 13 Sparks, Eleanor Wernly, 11
