Homepage Redesign A note from Emma W00d If you haven’t visited our website recently—we’re thrilled to announce that our homepage has had a major redesign! Sophia, William, and I have been working on the design for the past few months and are so happy it’s now live. It’s elegant, streamlined, and best of all, allows us to feature some of the best artwork we’ve published over the years. As many of you know, we are making a big push to get Stone Soup back into school classrooms and libraries and we hope this beautiful new homepage will help. We are also eagerly awaiting the launch of our redesigned magazine page, which will make the digital subscription a much more satisfying experience. It’s currently in development, so stay tuned! Relatedly, this year, we re-evaluated our privacy practices and ended up making some privacy-related changes to the digital and print magazines. First, we decided to remove all contributor headshots from the digital issue so that they would no longer be available to the casual internet browser. However, we knew from talking to some of our contributors that seeing the faces of their peers was powerful, so we ultimately decided to keep these headshots in the print issue. Digital subscribers will also find them in the PDF version of the magazine (which is always behind a paywall). Second, we’ve removed specific location information from both the print and digital versions of the magazine. Whereas we used to include the name of the city or town each contributor was from, you will now just see the state, province, or country listed for each contributor. We’d love to hear your thoughts on these changes and if there are any others you think it would be valuable to implement. My best, Fall classes have begun! Both writing workshops start today and will run weekly through December 3rd. Book Club’s first session is Saturday, September 24th, 2022 and meets on the last Saturday of each month through November. If you are new to our creative programs, our classes are for motivated readers and writers ages 8–14. Attendees will find a community of like-minded peers that share an enthusiasm and passion for writing and literature, and will develop writing and critical thinking skills at a more sophisticated level than you are likely to get in school. You can learn more about each class below or by visiting our Eventbrite page. All Stone Soup subscribers get a 20% discount on our courses, applied at checkout, and you can sign up for as many or as few sessions as you would like! You may additionally try classes at no risk. If, after attending a few sessions you want to drop, write to education@stonesoup.com, and we will give you a full refund. Please also write to us if the classes present a financial difficulty for your family. We want to make it possible for any student to participate in our programs, regardless of situation. William’s Group: At 9 a.m. Pacific Time the first three Saturdays of each month, our founder William will teach his normal workshop. This leaves the last Saturday of the month for attendees to be part of the Book Club. He will continue to teach his conceptual approach to writing. Conner’s Group: At 11 a.m. Pacific Time every week, Conner Bassett will teach a workshop focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of writing. Conner teaches writing at Albright College and has experience teaching younger writers—he is a poet and translator in addition to being a brilliant instructor. Book Club with Maya Mahony continues to meet on the last Saturday of the month at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, so that those enrolled in either writing workshop can attend. You must sign up separately for Book Club. The books being discussed this term are: The Time of Green Magic by Hilary MacKay, Front Desk by Kelly Yang, and Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo. 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.
Saturday Newsletter: September 10, 2022
The eight Stone Soup titles now available in China! A note from William Rubel Dear Friends, Although initially delayed by COVID-19, the eight Stone Soup anthologies we sold to a Chinese publisher have finally been released! We are hopeful that other titles will follow. The English editions are available at our Amazon storefront, which you can access by clicking the button below. For those of you who don’t already have copies of these anthologies, we encourage you to browse our titles and choose your favorite subject or genre. Our wonderful book agent for Asia, John Moore, who lives in Japan, tells us that now that the books have been released in China, it’s time for us to begin offering the titles to publishing houses in other East and Southeast Asian countries. We are preparing a presentation for a publisher in South Korea and Thailand and are looking forward to making proposals to others in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Stone Soup is going global! You can browse our anthologies on our Amazon storefront. Until next week, William’s Weekly Project The publication of the Chinese anthologies required a translator to render the English text into clear prose or poetry that maintains the beauty and nuance of the original stories. That is no easy task! Translation is as much an art as writing. It is so much more than just swapping out the original words for ones with equivalent or similar meaning in the new language. While translation algorithms like Google Translate have become much smarter and more capable, they rarely possess the nuanced, artful eye of a human translator. This week, your challenge is to review a text translated by an algorithm and make it better, more human. “Der Fuchs und die Katze” is a German fable collected by the Brothers Grimm, a pair of siblings who compiled a very famous anthology: Grimms’ Fairy Tales. You can download a pdf of the story by clicking the purple button below. Then copy the text (and title!) of “Der Fuchs und die Katze” into Google Translate. Does the result make sense? Where does the writing feel stilted, and which words in particular seem out of context or outdated? Are there words that didn’t translate at all? One peculiarity of the German language is its penchant to smoosh words together to make new words. Algorithms often struggle to interpret this. For example, in the original German text, the word “Bartputzer” appears. Google translated this as “beard cleaner”, which seems nonsensical in the context of the story. The intended meaning may be different than Google’s translation. Sometimes it is useful to refer to a dictionary to verify the translation of a word. Try breaking the German word in half, into “Bart” and “putzer”. The entry for “Bart” reads “beard; whiskers.” Aha! Does “whiskers-cleaner” seem more in line with the characters in “Der Fuchs und die Katze”? Work through the translation and see if you can improve its clarity and overall feel. Every language has its own quirks, whether it is a different system of sentence order (this is called syntax) or the absence or addition of certain grammar rules. For this reason, translation is often a lot of detective work! 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.
Saturday Newsletter: September 3, 2022
Playing with Bubbles (Canon PowerShot S5 IS) by Enzo Moscola, 11; published in Stone Soup March 2022 A note from William Rubel Friends — Welcome back from our summer newsletter break! It was a much needed break for me and the Stone Soup team. I spent a good portion of the summer in Kenya where I completed a big chunk of a research project that I started thirty years ago. For the last fifteen of those years I have been working mostly on a dictionary of Samburu culinary vocabulary. I love writing dictionaries—for me a dictionary is like a collection of short short stories, so this was a really fun project for me—and I look forward to now moving the manuscript into publication. I celebrated my birthday while in Kenya. I had a Samburu village birthday party: 500 people! Singing! Dancing! Feasting! It was the birthday of my life. And now I’m 70! How did it happen? Fifty years ago, I was a college student. I started planning the first issue of Stone Soup around the time of my birthday in July, 1972. By September 1972, when we returned to the dorms, friends and I were well on our way to making my idea for a magazine of writing and art by children a reality. As Stone Soup enters its fiftieth year, I will be getting in touch with some of you to discuss ways in which we can keep this magazine going for another set of decades. It is going to take a combination of imagination, money, and people. I would like to take a moment to congratulate each of the 81 writers who sent in a novel or collection of short stories or poetry to this year’s Annual Book Contest. The deadline was August 21st. Speaking as a writer, I can assure all of you that completing a book-length story or collection is a huge achievement. The quality of submissions continues to improve. Thank you all for making this project such a success. We will announce the 2022 contest winners as well as the deadlines for the 2023 Book Contest in a couple months. Remember the Flowers, the winning title in last year’s Poetry category, by Enni Harlan, is now available for sale at all major book retailers and our Amazon store. Foxtale, the 2021 Fiction category winner by Sarah Hunt, is slated for release November 15th, so keep an on your inboxes in the coming weeks for the preorder announcement! Until next week, William’s Weekly Project Playing with Bubbles (above) is an extraordinary photograph. So many fabulous gestures caught mid-movement. I especially love the man in brown trousers and black backpack who is walking through the scene. We are so used to photographs of people in which everyone formally looks at the camera—and smiles! Enzo Moscola’s photograph accomplishes the almost impossible: it captures a group of people doing things—not necessarily together—but in the same space and with no apparent regard for the camera. Snapshots like this one take advantage of chance. The chance arrangement of people. The chance arrangement of colors. The chance arrangement of space. So here is the weekend challenge: I want you to venture into your neighborhood or city, a shopping center, a park, someplace where many people are out and about. Your first task is to find a situation that makes for an engaging photograph. It is hard to know what that might be in advance, so keep an open mind. It could be facial expressions, gestures, the way colors are distributed… I do want you to be sure to be aware of the faces. Recalling that in most photographs of people the subjects look at the camera, I’d focus on taking a photograph where nobody (or hardly anyone) is looking at the camera. This is a a project that you can do whether you are a student or an adult. So, everyone, pick up your cameras and phones and see what you can come up with! And as always, if you create something you find exciting, please submit it to Stone Soup for possible publication. 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.
