“I envied the owl. It could go wherever it wanted, and I was trapped in a ghost’s boat on the river” Illustrator Noel Lunceford, 9, for A Lasso for Adagio by Julian March, 12. Published September/October 2003. A note from William Rubel A few weeks ago I put out the call for Stone Soup-aged bloggers. Several of you responded and so I am very happy to announce our first young bloggers live on the Stone Soup website: Lukas Cooke, today writing about nature; Jessica Crocker, who brings us a sewing blog beginning with a tutorial on how to sew a book cover; Sarah Cymrot, writing today about Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451; and Leo Smith, who is writing about sports, beginning with what he wrote at the end of the summer regarding the trade options for Kyre Irving. Welcome, bloggers! All of us at Stone Soup love to see your first blog posts and look forward to what you will be sharing in future. And, there is always room for more. Blogging can offer some of you writers a venue for writing on a much wider range of subjects than we publish in the monthly issues of Stone Soup. If others of you are interested in blogging, let us know by posting a free submission or suggestion to our blogging category. Meanwhile, do please visit our new bloggers and leave them a comment. Teacher bloggers wanted We are also interested in hosting blogs by teachers with strong creative writing programs. If that is you (and you know who you are) please write to me or post a proposal to the blogging submissions category above, and we can talk about blogging possibilities. The main thing we ask is that you be consistent with posts–something like once per week to once per month. Halloween contest! When I was a child, Halloween was for little kids. This is no longer the case. Where I live, in Santa Cruz, California, about 8,000 adults gather in the downtown on Halloween to show off their costumes. It is amazing! Pumpkin carving has also developed from the very simple triangle-shaped eyes to fantastically evocative or elaborate pumpkin creations. Get ready to document your Halloween. We want to see your pictures of your creations, your costumes, and your experiences of Halloween 2017. I’ll remind you again next Saturday and, of course, the contest will end on November 1, so please take this as a first reminder and an invitation to start sending us your pictures for a special Halloween context gallery on our website. Just send them into our Artwork submissions category and include the words ‘Halloween 2017’ in the title. Until Next WeekWilliam From Stone Soup July/August 2007 Ellie’s Market By Alice Mar-Abe, 11 Illustrated by Emina S. Sonnad, 12 “Alexandra! Alexandra!” came the excited voice of my younger cousin Clara from the hallway. “You get to take Max and me shopping for Halloween costumes!” I smiled at her seven-year-old excitement as I stepped out into the crisp autumn air, filled with leaves in a hurry to get to the ground. Halloween was coming, and that meant lots of shopping to be done, and that meant I would get to go to my second favorite place in the world: Ellie’s Market. A delicious aroma of pumpkin spice wafted out as I pulled open the door and the cheery jingling of bells met my ears. I had arrived at my second home, and at the counter was my best friend, Cecil, who owned Ellie’s Market with his brother Harry You couldn’t exactly romp and play with Cecil the way two kids would, and that is what many people remember doing with their best friends, but in a way Cecil was even better. He was almost like a grandfather. Oh yes, I had other kid friends, but hanging out with Cecil was fun…/more
About
Saturday Newsletter: October 14, 2017
“Just then the Rose appeared with her rosellas” Illustrator Cameron Osteen, 13, for Fort Cuniculus by Ralph Kabo, 11. Published September/October 2005. A note from William Rubel Well, this week has been a strange week. I was supposed to go to Napa to give a talk on the history of bread. The conference was to begin on Tuesday and I was to speak on Wednesday. On Monday, only vaguely aware there was a fire near Napa, I was surprised by a call from the conference organizers saying the conference was cancelled. The speakers were then asked to go to San Francisco to meet for a couple of hours to at least talk. The city was covered by a haze. The smoke was dense enough to make one’s eyes sting. One of the speakers had been staying with friends and on Sunday night, a couple of hours after the fires started, was awakened by his friends who told him he needed to pack up and leave. By the time he got to the bottom of the country road he was driving through fire on both sides of the road. Yes. Scary. Today, Friday, there is a haze and distinct smell of smoke where I live, in Santa Cruz, 130 miles from the fire. Strange and even frightening times. If any of our readers were evacuated, lost houses, or live in the San Francisco Bay Area and know the area well we’d like to read your writing about the fire, whether non-fiction or fiction, or see your art. Writing about conflict My colleague, Jane Levi, sent me a link to an article about Bana al-Abed, an eight-year-old Syrian girl who tweeted about her life in Aleppo. Now as a refugee in Turkey, she continues to tweet about the war in Syria. I recommend this article from the New York Times that introduces her to the many of us who have not been following her twitter feed. Her book,Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace was just published and is available in bookshops and at Amazon.com. If you read the book, then please submit your review to Stone Soup. We would like to read and publish art and writing by children who are caught up the many conflicts around the world. If you might be interested in helping us to give a voice to children who are living through difficult events in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sudan, or elsewhere, please reply to this newsletter. This goes for Stone Soup-aged readers or adults. I am flying to London on Monday to work on my book for three weeks (I plan on writing most days) so I will not promise a prompt response, but please write, anyway, and I promise I will get back to you. Several of you answered our call for young bloggers. Thank you. We should have several new blogs up and running to announce next week. I also received a letter this week from Ruth Nakazibwe, who lives in Uganda. She who wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Magician and the Birds, that we published in 1997. It is always a pleasure to hear from Stone Soup authors. Do keep writing to us! So, until next week, William Using objects in place of dialogue La fille mal gardée – Pas de ruban from Act I (The Royal Ballet) 188,665 views La Fille mal Garde is a wonderful comic ballet. It was first performed in the 1780s which makes it one of the oldest ballets that is still performed. The scene I include here is a duet between Lise and Colas, the man she loves. They dance with a ribbon. They wind and unwind the ribbon tying and untying each other. The scene takes place very early in the ballet—very early in the story as their relationship begins to take a more serious turn. As a ballet is a story told without words, this ribbon can be thought of as taking the place of dialogue. I want you to imagine what they would be saying to each other if this were a story told with words rather than a story told through movement. I feel pretty certain that they’d be having a fast moving, flirtatious conversation. You can tell the same story in many different ways—for example, through images, words, music, dance, and video. I am including this here today to get you thinking about how you might tell the same story differently as you shift from one story-telling format to another. From Stone Soup March/April 2000 A Puzzling Story By Erin Brock, 13 Illustrated by Nikkie Zanevsky, 13 Rachel loved puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles. Thousand-piece clear-blue-sky and flowery-meadow puzzles. Cute little puppy-dog-face puzzles. Any kind of puzzle suited her fancy. She loved the challenge of putting one together, piece by piece. Discovering the piece that fit was always thrilling and a small victory over the manufacturer who had labeled the puzzle “difficult.” For her thirteenth birthday, Rachel received a package in the mail from her Aunt Lola, who shared her passion for puzzles. When she ripped open the box, she found a one-thousand- five-hundred-piece puzzle with a painting of a colonial farm and the surrounding forest on it. It was very detailed, with a mother working in the garden while two girls hung up the wash and a boy led the cows out to pasture. A farmer worked in the fields and a large wooden barn stood off to the left. At the edge of the field was a forest and a gravel road running through it. The farmhouse and various animals were also included in the busy scene. Rachel sat working on her puzzle: “Colonial Farm: A Painting by George Smits.” She put together most of the puzzle pieces and was working on the forest. Being the imaginative type, Rachel thought the girls didn’t look like they were having much fun. She wondered if those colonial girls could ever have fun like she had, perhaps in the forest. She thought, That
Saturday Newsletter: October 7, 2017
“Ligiri’s only comfort was a fifty-foot baobab tree, which reminded Ligiri of her kind grandfather” Illustrator Rita Rozenbaoum, 10, for Ligiri, a Dogon Cinderella by the illustrator. Published November/December, 2001. A note from William Rubel What a dramatic painting! Intense! A tree and a person in silhouette backed by a glowing orange sky. Like the poem we feature today from our archive, it’s highly evocative. It makes me think of heat, of sunsets, of Africa, of times and places where women carry baskets on their heads. The silhouettes seem simple, but every line is carefully considered: there is no room for mistakes in the deep black outlines. What does it make you think and feel? Submissions & Contests Firstly, there is never a deadline for most issues of Stone Soup. Just upload stories, photographs, poems, reviews, music—whatever you have created—whenever you like at our submissions page, and your work will be considered for publication. However, contests and special issues do have deadlines. The December issue is closing this week so this weekend is the last minute for the Food Issue. We have some very good material—some wonderful stories, recipes, poetry, art, and photographs. But, there is always room for more—so, if you have something to say that involves food in some way, then please say it and submit it by Monday. Several contributions have come in for the Selfie contest and the deadline is still weeks away. You can work with the selfie as a self-portrait but you can also, of course, include friends, family, and pets in the picture, too. As you can submit up to three images you can also create a set of linked images that tell a story. Author interviews—for teachers and readers We have just re-edited our dozen or so interviews with Stone Soup authors. One of the changes we made was to take off the background music, which we were finding a bit distracting We have also decided to show the question that our authors are answering on the screen, so that if you are a teacher showing the videos in class and look away from the screen, when you look back up at it you will still be able to see what question is being answered. If you are a teacher, please check out the videos. I think you’ll find them useful in your classroom. If you are an aspiring Stone Soup writer I think you will find what these Stone Soup authors have to say of value for your own writing. And, if you are a current or former Stone Soup writer or Honor Roll recipient, and after looking at a couple of our existing videos think you’d like to be interviewed, too, then please reply to this Newsletter letting me know you are interested. I’ll pass you on to my colleague Sarah who will get you set up. This week’s poem from the archives I’d like to say something about the poem that is included, below. I think that it is unusually beautiful and powerful. It is definitely one to read aloud as well as to read silently. The non-English words are evocative. Without knowing what they mean they bring us to this other place—this lost home. In saying these words we can feel the poet reaching out to this place she loves and has left, and as you read on you feel in the language her longing for family and, especially, her dead father, left behind in the old land. This poem works even if you don’t know what attieke or aloko are, or who are the Baoule. But the power of the internet is that you can find out. The author, Soujourner, is writing about the West African country of Cȏte d’Ivoire. I don’t want to present this like homework—but I will say that if you want to both get deeper into this poem and get to know more about Soujourner’s influences, then spend a little time on the internet reading about Cȏte d’Ivoire and looking up some of the poem’s references. You can also use her work as inspiration for your own poetry. Imagine yourself having moved to a different country, no longer speaking your native language outside of your house. You write a poem in the language of your new country, but you include a few words of the old one to express the link between who are now and where you came from. See how evocative you can make your own writing with just a few well-chosen words. Until next week, William School Site Licenses and donations-in-kind This last couple of weeks teachers have been signing up on our website for trial subscriptions to Stone Soup in the form of site licenses, and some generous donors also contacted us to purchase licenses for their local schools. We are very encouraged! Thank you! Site licenses allow anyone in a school to use Stone Soup. The license also allows students to access Stone Soup from home, just as they can access other school resources. If you are a teacher please request a trial subscription. If you are the parent of Stone Soup-aged student, please introduce Stone Soup to your child’s teacher, or contact us to discuss how you might help us get Stone Soup into your local classrooms. From Stone Soup May/June 2006 Homesick By Soujourner Salil Ahebee, 10 Leaving my dear country made me sad, made me miss all that was worth remembering the food like foutou the food like attieke the food like aloko. Leaving my African country made me mourn, made me long for the people like the Baoule the people like the Senefou…/more
