Write a scary story/poem.
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #46: The Villanelle
An update from our forty-sixth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, October 22, plus some of the output published below This week Emma Hoff, 10, led her third class since joining the Stone Soup workshops, and taught us all about the form poem known as the Villanelle. First, we went over the requirements of a villanelle: A villanelle has 6 stanzas First five stanzas have three lines Last stanza has four lines First and last line of each stanza rhyme First and third line of te first stanza repeat alternately in following stanzas as the final lines, until they both appear in the final stanza The four villanelles we read were “The House on the Hill” by Edward Arlington Robinson, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, “The Waking by Theodore Roethke, and “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas. In all four poems, we noted that the poets had the option to play with the form by using off-rhymes and sometimes they didn’t adhere to the rhyme scheme at all. The Challenge: Write a poem in the form of a villanelle. It can be about anything you like and you should feel free to tweak the structure of the poem. The Participants: Anushka, Benedetta, Savi, Arjun, Aditi, Samantha, Robert, Alice, Allie, Russell, Shelley, and led by Emma Quiet Night Emma Hoff, 10 It’s a quiet night, alone, ashes on the ground instead of leaves, cities turned to bone. A voice, speaking over the phone, the little girl, laughing, it’s a quiet night, alone. The scraggly pyramid shaped like a cone, in front of which sits the hunched old man, cities turned to bone. On the clock the time is shown, you sigh and admit its existence, it’s a quiet night, alone. You need to go home, but you chew on your pen, cities turned to bone. You want to write one more poem, but you can’t think of anything to say, it’s a quiet night, alone, cities turned to bone.
Saturday Newsletter: October 29, 2022
Drift (Sony a5100) by Anna Koontz, 13; published in Stone Soup September 2022 A note from William Rubel Dear Friends— An update: continuing website improvements! The Stone Soup team has been working for months with britecode, our web design and development firm, to make our site easier to navigate as well as more beautiful. We’re very proud of the new homepage launched some weeks ago. We recently completed the new landing page for the magazine. I encourage you to visit the page and enjoy the linked writing—the stories, poetry, and memoir—and art! Anna Koontz’s dreamlike photograph is not the only photograph Stone Soup has published that rewards contemplation. We have two more big pages to go in our revision process. They are the blog and classes pages. Improving these pages is important to us and Stone Soup’s future as we begin to market Stone Soup’s website to teachers to use in their creative writing programs. We will begin our Annual Drive within the next few weeks and are looking for sponsors to help with this redesign project. Each page will cost in the neighborhood of $3,000. If you would like to sponsor a page, please write to finance@stonesoup.com All my best, William’s Weekly Project A dream, a sigh. Anna Koontz’s photograph captures the ineffable. A wisp, a gesture, it takes us into the realm of shadows dancing by the candlelight, clouds blown by the wind, shape-changing. Anna’s photograph is like a poem, a haiku, capturing an instant in time. I’d like you to look at this picture for some moments, letting your eyes follow the gorgeous curves of the smoke. Congratulations, Anna, for finding this flash of beauty, this emanation from the spirit world! As you, our newsletter readers, view this photograph, let it speak to you and jot down your impressions. They may be very different from mine. Then, sit down and describe what you see around you. They can be small observations, like a spider in its web in the corner of the windowsill or your cat curled up sleeping. Try to capture what you see as mysteriously and succinctly as Anna did in her photograph. And as always, if you like your creation, please submit it for possible publication in the magazine. 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.
