About

““Potatoes again?” groaned Jasper, Sam’s eight-year-old cousin”. Illustrator Anton Dymtchenko, 13, for ‘Shepherd of Stonehenge’ by Casey Tolan, 13. Published November/December 2007, and in The Stone Soup Book of Historical Fiction (2013). A note from William Rubel When I was in college I fell in love with the writing of the Danish writer, Karen Blixen (1885-1962). The first book I saw of hers was a fabulously beautiful edition of her first book, Out of Africa, that was edited by President Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Onassis. That book was heavily illustrated with paintings by one of her African workers, Kamante. I will write about Kamante’s paintings in another Newsletter. Today, I’d like to keep the focus on our special December food issue. Karen Blixen wrote under the pen name of Isak Dinesen–Dinesen was her name before she married. She became famous for her short stories. And of her short stories, she became most famous for one: Babette’s Feast. It is a story with many, many ‘abouts’. Certainly, one can say it is a story about a meal–a feast that Babette makes for her employers and friends. It is a meal that is a pure expression of love, of art, of generosity in many senses. The meal the story is about is a gift that goes far beyond the food on the table. It is the biggest gift that Babette could give to anyone. But, of course, all good stories need a problem. And one of the problems is that the people she is making the meal for, her Danish employers and friends, have never taken an interest in food. In fact, they worry that taking an interest in food is wrong. The meal Babette makes for them is so fabulous and so outside their usual experience that each person who sat at that table was changed. Babette is French and in Paris she was a renowned and celebrated cook. But, through the fortunes of life, she ends up working in Denmark. Let me just say, that the food culture of Paris and the food culture of rural Denmark at the time this story takes place (about 150 years ago) are at opposite extremes. The people she lives amongst in Denmark are emotionally very closed. They tend not to express their feelings and they are suspicious of pleasure. In fact, their religion is distrustful of pleasure, and so are they. After working in this house in Denmark for almost fifteen years, Babette comes into some money. What she does with it is make a dinner like the meals she used to cook in Paris. Isak Dinesen’s story is all about that meal. How it came about, what she cooked, what meant to her, and what it meant to the people who ate it. It is not a story written for young readers, but I do think that some of you will find it engaging–and  of course, the adult readers of the newsletter should all read it! A movie was made from it which you can rent for a few dollars. Like the book, this was made for adults, so I suggest watching it with your parents or grandparents. Many of  them may have already seen it, as the movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1988. A dessert from the movie of Babette’s Feast (1987, Dir. Gabriel Axel). ‘Savarin au Rhum avec des Figues et Fruits Glacées’ (Rum baba with figs and crystallized fruit) Tell us your food stories! Babette’s Feast is a wonderful story partly because it is all about food–and at the same time nothing to do with food at all. It is really about a moment in history, the people in the story, their different cultures, their feelings, and the ways those can develop and change though social interactions like a meal. Many of you will be living in households in which one parent is from one food culture and the other parent from another. Or you have a grandparent who was born in another country and whose food is special or very different from what you are used to. When my daughter was in pre-school we were invited to a birthday party of a classmate. Her mother is from the Philippines. Let me tell you something. I think unless you are from the Philippines yourself, you will not believe the feast that was cooked for that five-year-old’s birthday party. There was so much food! So many different dishes, savoury and sweet: there was real energy around this food. This was not a table of sandwiches and cookies. Of course, this meal that the girl’s mother made for her birthday was a meal of love. And of course, she made for her daughter the kind of meals that her mother had made for her. Her father is not from the Philippines, and he is vegetarian. The birthday food of his childhood would have been very different. If you have different food cultures within your family, or those of friends, or can think of a story idea that revolves, somehow, around food and culture, please start writing! Or produce an image that says something that words can’t quite convey. We want to receive your food stories and artworks by October 10. From Stone Soup January/February 2005 A Second Begninning By Preston Craig, 10 Illustrated by Natalie Chin, 12 It was a dark, cloudy evening when Father told us the news. Our family was gathered around the worn dinner table in the small kitchen of our farmhouse. My father was sitting in his usual seat at the head of the table, his callused hands clasped together and his elbows resting on the faded tablecloth. He looked from me to my eleven-year-old brother, James, and finally to my mother. Her eyes looked sad as she met his nervous gaze. They had been strangely quiet all through dinner. As eleven- and thirteen-year-old children, my brother and I rarely spoke at the table unless we were spoken to. Mother took a deep breath. “Jack,” she said quietly. “What’s done is done. We must tell the children.” She sighed and brushed a strand of blond hair out of her brown eyes. Father nodded. His face was lined with sorrow, which startled me. He was a strong man. Everything about him seemed sturdy. He stood six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular, with sunburned skin from years of working in the cornfields of our farm

Guiseppe Arcimboldo, ‘Vertumnus’, the Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden. A note from William Rubel Our editor, Emma Wood, is about to send out a call for submissions for the December Food issue. I have copied the letter she is sending to contributors and honor roll recipients, below. Since we are publishing the December issue as part of our Print Annual we have to have all the material selected and designed for print in October. Emma has given October 10 as the deadline for food-related submissions for this food/holiday issue. Emma, in her call for submissions, includes links to images and poetry to give you some inspiration. Please click through to her links. I have included this painting by an Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who was born in Milan in 1527. Arcimboldo is known for his imaginative portraits. Or, one might say, insane portraits! Here is link to all of Arcimboldo’s portraits. I think it is fair to say that Arcimboldo thought “outside the box.” As an artist, a photographer, a writer, a composer, I encourage you to always stretch yourself. If you have an insane idea—follow through on it! I can’t guarantee that Emma will publish it—but you have nothing to lose.This is a Food issue timed for the holidays. So, we are definitely looking for stories that revolve around food. Memories that revolve around food. When I was a child, we would often go to my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. We’d come a couple of hours early. She had a box of marbles. I played with them—not a game with or against anyone—but I always enjoyed looking at them and hitting them against each other. She had a sunroom that opened up onto a back garden where there was pond with goldfish. I spent lots of time sitting on the mossy rocks surrounding the pond looking at those fish. But, my deepest memory is that in that sun room we ate blue cheese—Danish Blue—on Nabisco Triscuit crackers. The smell of that cheese instantly brings me back to being twelve, and to those lovely late afternoon Sundays at my grandmother’s house. For those of you who live in Los Angeles, she lived in one of those big boxy houses on Highland Avenue. The dinners were formal. My grandmother had a cook. The cook always made Parker House Rolls which she served in a basket as she walked around the table to offer each of us one. I don’t recall anything else about what was served except the dessert. The dessert of my memory is a floating island. (It couldn’t really have been every dinner at grandmother’s house, though, perhaps because I liked it so much, it was!) I always sat with my back to a wall of west facing windows. The kitchen door was to my left. The cook entered through the kitchen door bringing the floating island in and putting it in the center of the table. White clouds of poached egg floated in a custard. If you don’t know this dessert, the custard is a basic vanilla custard, called “Créme Anglaise.” I tried to make the floating island recently for my daughter but failed miserably. Frankly, my attempt was a disaster. Poaching those lightly sweetened egg whites that float on the custard isn’t so easy! These Sunday dinners took place fifty, even fifty-five years ago. The blue cheese and the floating island take me back to this time. One aspect of those evenings that I did not understand then is that there was always this tall, stooped, silent older man. I honestly don’t recall ever having said a word to him or hearing him speak. So, I am thinking that he must have been very old and unwell during those years. My parents said that he was my grandmother’s “companion.” I am named after him. Both my first and second names. My middle name memorializes the city he was born in. It is odd, thinking back on it, that I met my namesake, but never really met him. In writing this, I now remember that I’d greet him with the old fashioned, “Pops.” As it turns out, these Sunday meals were the last meals that we all had together as a family. When I was around thirteen, my grandmother, who was a chain smoker, had a debilitating stroke. My mother died when I was in college. My brother, sister, and I all moved away, and, to be honest, moved apart. My father died a few years ago at 93. Some of the strongest memories I have of my family, including silent Pops, is at my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. One thing that is interesting about the Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s is that its meaning has changed with time. Had I written about those meals when I was your age it would have been a story that was in the moment. Of course, you don’t need to write about a meal that has really happened in your life. What Emma is asking for are stories, poems, or images in which food is an important element—and so there may not even be a meal in them, at all. Until next week William Call for Submissions for the December Food Issue Short narratives about your favorite foods, dishes, cooking traditions, or your relationship to food more generally. Tall tales that revolve around a food—think about James and the Giant Peach or Jack and the Bean Stalk! Poems that turn food into metaphors, like this one by Lucille Clifton. Paintings, photographs, drawings, and collages of fruits, vegetables, dairy cows, cupcakes—you name it! And more! Interpret the theme as loosely or as literally as you like. We’d love to see what you come up with! The deadline to submit for the food issue is 10/10 so get writing!  Or maybe you already have a piece that incorporates food in some small way but you aren’t sure if it fits the theme; submit anyway! We’ll consider all submissions for publication in our regular issues as well. Looking forward to reading your work soon! Emma Business Updates St. Louis, NCTE Convention, November 16-19 Your whole Stone Soup

September issue now online! read it here Cover Photograph for the September, 2017 Special Poetry issue. ‘Satyrs’, by Laura Katz, 14 A note from the Editor, Emma Wood I have always been a very competitive person, and I have also always been a reader—which means I have always been a very competitive reader. Every summer as a kid, I tried to return in the fall with the longest reading list in my class. Sometimes, I even “cheated” by reading some very short books! Even so, I was very pleased with myself when I read over a 100 books a couple of summers in a row. Soon, however, I realized that quantity is not better than quality. Instead of reading the most books, I began to aspire to read the longest and most difficult books I could get my hands on. Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy? Um, only three books—really? Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo? Yes, please! (I read the whole thousand-page novel while fighting off a bad fever during a week off from school.) Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? Bring it on! For a few months, my two best friends and I each carried around our own leather-bound library copies of Shakespeare’s collected works. I remember dipping in and out of The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet on the bus home from school. Reading long books made me feel accomplished and adult. I hated to be talked down to, in my real life and in my reading life. My long book obsession reached its peak when, as a fourth-grader, I set my sights on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. War and Peace was, and remains, the epitome of The Long Book, the ultimate doorstopper. I checked out a hardcover copy from the library and began carrying it around everywhere, proudly announcing whenever I could that I was reading War and Peace. This actually caused some issues at my school; the head of the lower school ended up calling my parents to tell them she thought it was inappropriate that I was reading a book so clearly outside of my reading level! My parents felt I should read what I wanted to read and defended my decision. In truth, I didn’t end up getting much farther than page 100. The book was, in fact, over my head. But I’m glad that I ultimately got to make that call for myself. Still, War and Peace must have left some imprint on me, because I ended up studying Russian language and literature in college. Now I’ve read all of War and Peace—in English and in Russian! We’d love to hear from you, our readers, about books that have inspired, influenced, or challenged you. Is there one book you’ve read over and over again? Is there a book that changed you how think about something—yourself, your relationships, the world, other books? Is there a book that sparked your desire to write? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Write a short paragraph about it and send it to me at editor@stonesoup.com. Be sure to include the name of the book, the author of the book, as well as your own full name and age in the email! We might collect these to post on our website. Until next time Emma A note from William Rubel The September Poetry Issue is Published! The September 2017 Poetry Issue is published! This is an issue of firsts. It is the first issue produced by Emma Wood, the first themed issue, the first of our monthly issues, the first issue publishing reviews of poems, and the first issue illustrated with photographs. You can read the current issue on the website here. You get a certain number of free page views, even if you don’t subscribe. If you like what you see, then please support what we are doing with a subscription. We have also produced a PDF of the issue, and I have posted a PDF that contains an excerpt of the September issue. I encourage subscribers to download it. The poetry in this issue is really special. All of the poems will reward you when you read them multiple times. I really hope that all of you will look at the issue online and download the sample PDF to come back to the poems over and over. I also encourage you to read Emma Wood’s introduction to the issue. Recipes I received a letter this week asking about last week’s call for recipes. The question was whether you can use a recipe from a book. The answer is: yes, you can. But, in your headnote–the text that introduces the recipes–please say where the recipe is from. To be clear, it is OK to use the ingredients and quantities from a published recipe, but you should re-write the instructions. The idea is that there are only so many ingredients or proportions of ingredients in a pie crust, for example, so you cannot be expected to come up with an original mixture, but the way you tell people how to mix it is language that belongs to the author, so you need your own words for the introduction and the how-to-make the recipe parts. Until next week, William Weekly Business Updates Sales Reps Wanted: This is a first shout-out for commissioned independent sales reps. If you know anyone–or even a friend of a friend–who reps products to schools, please send them our way. We are looking for reps who specialize in software and literary. Thank you. November convention: As I’ve mentioned, we are exhibiting at the National Council of Teachers of English convention in St. Louis in mid-November. If any Stone Soup educators are planning to attend, please reply to this newsletter to let me know. We will have a staff of four: I’ll be there along with Emma Wood, Jane Levi, and the newest addition to our staff, Sarah Ainsworth. We’d all love to meet you there. School site licenses: Do you know a teacher who you think might want to use