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A note from William Rubel The fabulous July/August issue of Stone Soup has just been published online. I encourage you all to take a look, and add Stone Soup to your summer reading list. If you are going to be travelling, why not do what my daughter does: download the Stone Soup app to a mobile device. That way you can store up a collection of current and past copies in one place before you go and read whatever you like on a tablet while you’re on the move. Summer Creativity As summer vacation begins in earnest I encourage all of you to set aside some time every day to be creative. I have been making a drawing a day for the last couple of weeks — my own Summer resolution. Summer is also a good time to work on big projects. One of the other things I’ve been playing with recently is stop motion animation, which I’ve been experimenting with using the camera in my phone. I know you won’t all have your own phones, but this is kind of fantastic experiment that might encourage your parents to lend you theirs!You will also need a simple program to help you. The one that I got for my daughter is called Stop Motion Studio. There is an Apple version and an Android version. The program costs a few dollars, so you will need to discuss getting it with your parents, but my advice to your parents is that this is a very good program and well worth the price. Making Your Stop Motion Animated Film I would start out hand-holding your camera and also working from homemade stands. If you really get into it then a dolly, which helps you move your camera more smoothly than you can do by hand, is helpful. They are are little expensive to buy, or you could make one with one of your wheeled toys.Using lego, playmobile characters, dolls or toys, or drawings are all practical ways to get started telling stories through stop motion. To start with, just practice making something move. You take picture of something — anything — it can be a glass on a table — move it a short distance, take another photo, move it again, and so on, until you have told your story on moving pictures. Its easy!At Stone Soup we would be interested in seeing your story, or even an interesting film of abstract movements. As creating stop action is a slow process, I’d focus at first on dramatizing a story or a visual idea that will be under three minutes.I am not going to give you an idea for a story. But here are three ideas to get you into making something move. 1. Two objects move towards each other and then bump into each to each other. 2. A glass of water empties. 3. A drawing of a person forms on a page. Once you get the hang of stop motion, you can create anything! We look forward to seeing what you accomplish. Just respond to this newsletter and your email will come through to me. Until next week, William   She rushed up to the large horse that stood tall above her, grinding hay between his strong jaws From Stone Soup January/ February  2000 Waiting  By Annie Strother, age 12 Illustrated by Camille Hebert, age 11 The wind whispered through the long grass, blowing it gently into a lullaby of soft sounds. The grass rustled and the lake stirred as the setting sun dripped down the sky and below the stretch of trees that marked the horizon.The stains it left were stunning. Pinks and oranges smeared across the sky. They dripped lazily down the great sky, leaving behind a vast carpet of deep blue, intense and enveloping. As a myriad of stars became visible and bewitching with their bright twinkles, a little girl walked down the pathway to the dock.She pulled her hair back from her face and let the wind lift up the ends of it and toss it playfully. She was a very small girl, about five years old or so, with long red hair and freckles dotting her face. She had green eyes that shone like the tops of lighthouses, beckoning and beaming with a welcoming glow… read more

Profile of a Guardian, by Hannah Parker, age 11 Forthcoming issue, Stone Soup Magazine The Art of Photography Stone Soup Editor Emma and I have spent a lot of time looking at your art and photography submissions this past week. We are so impressed, especially with some of your photographs. You have made us really excited about featuring more photographs – like this wonderful one of a trusted dog –  in future issues of Stone Soup. Keep them coming, please!Photography is one of the more recent art forms. Sculpture and painting have been around for tens of thousands of years, but photography was not invented until the 1840s, fewer than 200 years ago. This makes it something of a newcomer within the history of art, which is why it has only joined sculpture, painting, and drawing on an equal basis relatively recently. We think it’s time for Stone Soup to embrace photography, too. From now on, we want to see your photographic art works as well as your drawings, and we want to see illustrations for stories and poems in both media too. In our submissions portal we have merged our categories, so that now you’ll see the option to submit Art – which can be a drawing or a photograph – in one place. Do please keep your Art works coming! Reviewing, Reading Aloud & Recording We are looking for reviews of poems for our September poetry issue, due in by 1st August. We have a page of top tips for reviewing poetry to help you if you are thinking about sending us a review. One piece of advice for getting into poetry that I particularly like is to read a poem aloud to yourself. Reading out loud really lets you hear the music that is part of most poetry, and often helps to make much more sense of what the poet is trying to say. Try it with some of Editor Emma’s suggestions for reviews: “Caged Bird,” Maya Angelou “Jabberwocky,” Louis Carroll “little tree,” e.e. cummings “A Bird, came down the Walk -,” Emily Dickinson “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes “Spring,” Edna St. Vincent Millay “Fog,” Carl Sandburg “I Hear America Singing,” Walt Whitman “This Is Just To Say,” William Carlos Williams “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William WordsworthYou could even record yourself reading or reciting a poem – you’ll be surprised what new things you hear in a poem when you listen to yourself! If you make a really great recording of yourself reading a poem, why not send it to us? We might feature some of you reciting poems as part of our September poetry issue! Until next week, William From Stone Soup May/June 2017 The Evolution of Calpurina Tate  Book by Jacqueline Kelly Review by June Hill The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, by Jacqueline Kelly. Henry Holt and Company: New York, 2009; $17.99 Calpurnia Tate is the kind of eleven-year-old who is always asking questions—questions about nature and animals and insects, such as why do dogs need eyebrows, or can earthworms be trained? Such topics fascinate her. The only person who can answer them is her grandfather, who spends his time either in his laboratory, trying to make whisky out of pecans, or out in the quiet Texas woods of 1899, picking his way through the underbrush, examining plants and various toads. Unfortunately, Calpurnia finds his bushy eyebrows and scratchy voice imposing and so contents herself with writing the questions down in a notebook one of her six brothers had given her. One day, a question about grasshoppers nags at her so much that she simply has to confront her fears and ask her grandfather. Rather than answering her question, he simply tells her, “I suspect a smart young whip like you can figure it out. Come back and tell me when you have.”… read more

A Village in Malawi, circa 1975 Wisland Phiri, age 12 Malawi A note from William Rubel Hello everyone School is out, so I know that you will all be spending a lot of time outside this summer doing things. When I look at this picture I like to think about the sounds that we don’t hear but that are implied by the scene—the sounds of chickens, roosters, dogs, and the leaves rustling in the trees. And, of course, even though we don’t see children, we can imagine them playing just outside the frame, perhaps around the back of the house. The woman making the basket is working alone, but it makes sense to imagine others doing similar things nearby. It is likely there is conversation in the air, as well. And birds. And insects. The air would be alive with sound. This picture has what is called “a sense of place.” I’d like you to make a picture this weekend of an outdoor scene that, like Wisland’s picture of this Malawian village, offers a full sense of what it looks and feels like to live where you live or to be visiting where you are visiting this summer. Make a picture that, though silent, is so rich with the sense of its place that viewers will be drawn into the scene even to the point of hearing the sounds that are part of it. I can’t wait to see (and hear) your drawings! Introducing Emma Wood, Stone Soup Editor Today, I’d like to more formally introduce you to our new editor, Emma Wood. Originally from New York City, Emma currently lives in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, CA, with her husband and their two dogs. She is a poet with a BA in Russian History & Literature from Harvard, and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught literature and poetry writing. Emma has previously served as an editor at The Morning News and currently edits interviews for the Rumpus. Her first book, a collaborative translation with the poet C Dylan Bassett, will be published in Winter 2018. The best way to introduce Emma, though, is to see and hear her talking about poetry and her own work in this video. I learned a lot about poetry from watching this, and I hope you find it inspiring, too. I also encourage you to visit Emma’s website, which includes a section with links to her writing. Welcome, Emma! Our new Stone Soup Editor, Emma Wood, talks about poetry.   This week’s story from the archives Like the drawing at the top of this letter, this week’s story has a strong sense of place. Perhaps you’d rather write a story than draw a picture this week, so perhaps you can read this one and think about creating a powerful sense of place with your own words. If you are looking for some great examples, other stories published in Stone Soup with a strong sense of place can be found here. Until next time William From Stone Soup January/February 2014 Where the Cotton Bolls Grow By Sharon Wang, age 13 Illustrator Vivienne Clark, age 11 My father was the first in his rural hometown to ever go to college. In China the colleges are scarce. College entrance exams were created to wipe out the majority of the people who wanted to advance from high school. In my father’s time, not all the high-school graduates took the exams, and out of those who did, only three percent made it to college. It was the accomplishment of this feat that led him to meet my mother and eventually move to the United States. Ten years later, our family took our first plane trip back to China. I was twelve the summer we rode on a silver bird over mountains and seas to fly to my father’s homeland. We transferred to a seven-hour bus which bobbed over miles and miles of blue and green expanse with fishermen laying sheets of plastic on the sides of the road to dry their newly harvested crayfish. Bus changed to pickup truck when an uncle that I had never seen enthusiastically picked us up in the only automobile in the village, a large clumsy machine with a roar that mixed with that of the wind until I could not tell which was which. Read more