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Do you want to illustrate a Stone Soup cover? If you are age 13 and under, then please take part in our cover illustration contest.  A Note from William Rubel Hello everyoneI know that school is out for some of you, or it will be very soon. My daughter is enjoying her first day of summer vacation today, and just like her the last thing you might be thinking about is doing more work. Take the weekend off! But, if you are like my daughter, summer boredom also comes sooner than you’d think. So, we are planning to post a number of Stone Soup projects over the coming weeks to help fill some of those long, leisurely days. Together we can have some productive summer fun, while rising to the creative challenges of Stone Soup! Stone Soup Cover Contest As I’ve said in previous newsletters, from September we are increasing Stone Soup’s frequency from 6 to 11 issues per year. That means we’ll need 5 more covers than we did before. In the past, we chose cover images from the illustrations commissioned for stories inside the issue. Now, we want to open up the process and choose a cover from your submissions to our cover contest. How to enter our cover contest I have posted three passages from three different stories that have been accepted by Editor Emma Wood for a future Stone Soup issue (congratulations to authors Ella Glodeck, Stella Lin, and Kaya Simcoe!) 1. Please go to the website, read all three of the passages, and choose the one that you respond to the most. 2. Read the advice on the cover contest page. Think about all the visual elements in the passage, and how you might depict them for Stone Soup readers. 3. And you’re ready to go! Create your illustration, and when you’re done make it into a high res scan. 4. Send it to us via Submittable. Please include the words “Cover Contest June 2017” in the Cover Letter box on the second page of the submission form. 5. We will look at all your entries, and we’ll choose one to be the featured cover for the issue the story appears in. We are offering a $25 Amazon gift certificate to the winner. Good luck, and happy illustrating! Behind the Scenes… Every week I tell you that we are working hard behind the scenes to implement all the changes that are happening at Stone Soup. Well, you have probably noticed that there is still a lot to do, and we won’t be stopping for the summer! Print and Digital We’ve had lots of good feedback on our switch to digital publishing, and also lots of great suggestions from our readers, their parents and teachers. I want to let everyone know that there are two ways in which Stone Soup will continue to appear in its more traditional, printed magazine form, which we think will give our readers and contributors the best of both worlds. Online PDF The software we use to create online issues of Stone Soup can produce a pretty good-looking PDF version of the whole issue, that all subscribers can print for themselves at home. It’s not yet absolutely perfect, but we really liked the draft version we produced this week, and we are going to have an improved version ready at Stone Soup online in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know here as soon as we do. Stone Soup Annual We have decided to produce a Stone Soup Annual, in print! There will be a more flashy announcement when we have the details better worked out, but I can say now that those of you who subscribe to the online magazine will have the opportunity to purchase a book that includes everything we have published in the previous year. At this stage we are pretty sure that we can do this at around the same price as the old Stone Soup subscription rate – as you know, the digital-only price is substantially lower – and still publish more material. Watch this space for more news on that. Orders, Renewals, Website Some of you trying to renew your orders this past week may have spotted that our ordering system is not perfect: we’ve noticed that not everyone is receiving the welcome email they should get from us straight away, and we are working hard now to write individually to each one of our new and renewing subscribers. We’re sorry if you are still waiting to hear from us, and we promise we will be in touch as soon as we possibly can! Rest assured that your orders are with us, and you won’t miss a single issue of Stone Soup. Next, we are at last almost ready to get to work on the website. Working with our advisors, who have been patiently waiting for me to get in touch with them, we’ll get your input over the coming weeks to make our Stone Soup website a truly world class affair. Parental Control On a different subject, we’ve noticed we’re receiving quite a few automated responses to the Saturday newsletter from Kids Email. This is a business that offers parents control over their children’s email accounts, letting you vet incoming correspondence addressed to your child. For those patents not familiar with it this looks like a program that is really worth looking into. This Week’s Story from the Archive Every week I post a story from a past issue of Stone Soup. I have to say that I personally really enjoy the one that I’ve posted today. “Mung Bean Noodles and French Bread” reminds me of my own childhood. My mother loved to cook. My father traveled a lot for work. It feels familiar to me. I also really like the story for its evocative food-related language, which I hope you will notice as you read it. As someone who writes about food I know how hard it is to bring to life the real experience of cooking. I think that Madelyne Xiao has

Call for Poetry Reviews by Writers Aged 13 and Younger Emma Wood, the new Stone Soup editor, is a poet. The September issue will be her debut issue, and it will also be our first themed one. September, also our first monthly issue, will be Stone Soup’s first dedicated to poetry. Emma has several interesting ideas for the issue that I think will help all of us, me included, get deeper into poetry. An example of one her ideas is to include poetry reviews. We are familiar with book reviews. Emma wants to publish reviews of individual poems. Quite a challenge! Emma has asked me to post the following in today’s Saturday Newsletter. From Emma: Do you have a favorite poem? We are looking for reviews of single poems to go in our September poetry issue. (When I was young, I just loved “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll!) Guidelines: Reviews should be between 300-600 words. The best ones will explore aspects of the poem—what is about? Are there images in it? Is there rhyme? Does it tell a story? Are there any unusual words, or any interesting punctuation or spacing? What feeling does it leave you with? Explain why you like it, perhaps connecting it to an idea or experience you have had, or maybe even another book or poem you’ve read. Poetry reviews can be submitted to the “Reviews” section of Submittable. Social Media and Younger Writers’ Writing A confession. Social networking is not our strong suit. Our Twitter and Facebook pages have never really gone anywhere. At various times we have tried more frequent postings, but I think we just don’t know what our potential readers want to read in that format,  our how, where, and when to post it. We need help. What education and literary oriented Twitter feeds do you follow? Is there a group or business whose Facebook page you think is particularly effective? What kind of information about children, children’s creativity, or whatever else do you think we should tweet or post? We have also just started an Instagram account. If any of you reading this are good at social media, perhaps even do this for a living, would you get in touch with me? You can just reply to this email. Please look at our Twitter feed, our pictures on Instagram. and our Facebook page and then let me know what kind of information you’d like to see there. And, the all important, can you help us by actually tweeting and posting and/or help us fashion a sensible program? The story this week, Mexican Song, is by a ten-year-old. I’d like to clarify that Stone Soup is open to any writer age 13 and under. In Stone Soup’s early years we published more work by very young writers than we do today. Very young writers sometimes express themselves differently. As they do not have the technical skills to write in standard English they make up grammar and expressions as they go along. This can be interesting. One hundred years ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, artists were pushing boundaries in writing, painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography — you name it. There is a way in which very young writers are always pushing boundaries. I just want to be clear that if you have a younger sibling in the house who writes or tells stories that are kind of fantastic, that we’d like to read them. Work that has something to say and says it in an unusual way is always of interest to us here at Stone Soup. Until Next Week William Calling All Teachers! Lots of elementary and middle schools use Stone Soup as a teaching aid or to motivate their pupils to create. You can order for your school single use and site license subscriptions, either directly from us or from any of the magazine agencies your district orders from (such as EBSCO or W.T. Cox). If you would like a trial site license then please sign up for a trial on our website.The site licenses can be based on email or IP address so students can have access to the website at home as well as in the classroom or school library. From Stone Soup May/June 2012 Mexican Song  By Kimberly Vance, 10 Illustrated by Frances Burnett-Stuart, 11 Natalie Dean grabbed her violin’s bow and began rosining it feverishly. The International Mariachi Conference was tomorrow. It was the biggest performance of the whole year. And she had to solo, on a microphone in front of thousands of people. You can do this, she thought. Her song, “Sabor a Mi” (Savor me), ran through her head like a CD that played one song a million times, over and over… Tanto tiempo disfrutamos De este amor, Nuestras almas se acercaron Tanto así, que yo guardo en tu sabor, Pero tú llevas también, Sabor a mí… Miserable questions chased after the lyrics. Why did my school have a mariachi? Not—I don’t know—orchestra, or band or something? Like a normal school? And why on earth did my innocent five-year-old self join? Why didn’t I see this coming? And so on and so on. . . . . more

I am often asked, are there Stone Soup authors who have gone on to be published writers? The answer is, yes. We always like to hear who they are, and now that we have this weekly newsletter, we have an easy means of passing on the news to you.We just heard from the parents of Stone Soup author Allison Trowbridge (1988), with a copy of Allison’s first published book, Twenty Two: Letters to a Young Woman Searching for Meaning. It is a work of non-fiction written as a series of letters. The work is very personal and is appropriate for its intended reader — young women who are just embarking on their post-school adult life. One thing we look for here at Stone Soup is writing from the heart, and this is certainly a work that speaks from Allison’s deepest feelings. She chose a letter format. She created a fictional reader to whom she addresses her letters. This is an original structure for a book of advice about life. It is a good idea! Congratulations Allison on your first book!As a writer myself, I can say that while I don’t write books that are explicitly in the form of letters, I do think of my books and articles as letters. I always have a clear idea who I am writing for, and as I write I imagine myself talking to that reader. My first book, The Magic of Fire, a book about cooking on a fireplace, actually literally started as a letter. I spent a month sitting in a Paris café working about four hours per day writing a letter (a long letter) to my friends Ga Lombard and Judith Milton. They had shared many, many meals at my house that were cooked on the fire and wanted to know how to do it themselves.  I never did send that letter as it took some years to finish it, and by that time it had grown to some three hundred pages. Whatever you write, it will be stronger if you at least imagine that you are writing to someone. I think this is true whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. As you write a story for Stone Soup, think about someone actually reading it. Writing for Stone Soup is different from writing in school. Your teacher commands you to write and you don’t have a choice. Even when you don’t feel like it, in school you have to write that story and turn it in. Writing for Stone Soup is a choice. I hope that whenever you choose to write for us that you do so because you have something to say that you want others to read. Allison’s parents sent us her book along with a letter in which they talk about how important it was to Allison to be published in Stone Soup. They wrote, “Allison’s experience of being selected for Stone Soup Magazine was such a huge encouragement to her that she still talks about it today.” That is almost thirty years later! It  actually easy to get your work published in Stone Soup. If writing is your passion, and you have something to say that you think Stone Soup readers will want to hear — a story that will take them deep into your imaginary world — then please do send us your work. Parents, grandparents, and friends of Stone Soup who are also reading this newsletter: you can try to encourage the young people in your life to write by giving them a journal for the summer. Of course, if you live with a young person, then there is nothing like modeling behavior. In other words, sit down together so you are both writing — by hand or on a computer. The art. The amazing drawing in this newsletter is by a fourteen-year old Egyptian boy, Moustafa Mouhamud Hussein, and it was drawn in 1977. I’ll write more about it in another newsletter. For today, I just want you to start thinking about the drawing you might make of a complicated space with lots of people, like a ball game. Notice the different colors between the many people watching the parade. Until next week, William Survey Results from Last Week: I am very pleased that 78% of the respondents to last week’s survey on reviews in Stone Soup are Stone Soup readers age 14 and under. The results are very useful. Thank you! The results: You are interested in book reviews (every respondent!), then music, followed by art and movies. What you were super not interested in are reviews of video games and apps. I don’t know whether this is because your parents were looking over your shoulder (or you really aren’t interested in reading reviews of video games – given how many video games my daughter plays I had thought that video game reviews would be a good idea, but maybe there’s less to say about them and its more fun just to play!) Apps were also not of much interest. As you all know, we have been publishing book reviews for decades. But what your enthusiasm for book reviews suggests is that it would be a good idea for us to have a full blown book review section on our web site. We’ll see what we can do. Many of you suggested titles of works you’d like Stone Soup to review. We will do further work on the survey results this week and hopefully next week we’ll be able to begin posting works we’d like to see reviewed — and clarify what kinds of reviews we are looking for. Thanks to all of you who helped us out with your opinions. From the Stone Soup issue: May/June 2010 Wave Song Written by Anna J. Mickle, 12 Illustrated by Ida Otisse McMillan-Zapf, 12 A vast land Small enough to comfort me Not an ocean, too big Not a pond, too small A meadow of green A field of waves So loud, so soft So big, so small