These two illustrations were commissioned by Editor Gerry Mandel for our upcoming July/August 2017 issue. On the left, an illustration by Catherine Chung, age 13, for her own story, “Welcome Aboard.” On the right, an illustration by Elena Delzer, age 13, for “A Horse Named Seamus.” Call to all young artists! There is going to be more art in Stone Soup. Starting in September, we will be publishing art separate from story illustrations. The four best images sent in this week will be featured in next week’s newsletter. Please upload images to our submissions page. A Note from Editor William Rubel Behind the scenes lots is happening at Stone Soup. Jane Levi, our new operations manager, is getting us set up so soon, probably defined as within a couple of months, we will be running efficiently in our virtual office configuration. Many of our back office systems are in flux as we move to a fully automated system for subscriptions. Michael King, our go-to person for just about everything, is responsible for customer relations. Michael is setting up a modern FAQ system for us so you will soon be able to answer more of your questions at our site online. I will be more formally introducing new staff in a few weeks — I want to introduce everyone along with a coherent explanation of future plans. But I do want to say that Emma Wood, a poet with an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, has joined our staff and is developing ideas for upcoming issues. I can also say that, beginning in September, we will be increasing the frequency of publication to monthly, though probably still with a combined Summer issue. Last week’s newsletter was short because the website was down, owing to an error made as it was shifted to a new server. The site is now transferred and opening many, many times faster than it was before. It is also more secure. In the change, however, we lost our Stone Soup Store with the Stone Soup Anthologies for sale. We hope to have that back up next week. Here it is! A photograph from last week’s reunion of Stone Soup founders, taken at Porter College, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), which is where we started the magazine. From left to right: William Rubel, Richard Hof, Ziggy Rendler-Bregman, Ivan Rosenblum, Darryl Ferrucci, and Gerry Mandel. Ivan, a pianist, was our faculty advisor. The only one not pictured is Laura Garcia, who sadly died a few years ago. And here we were in 1974! I am sure you can work out who is who. Darryl is the child. When he was 10 and I was his babysitter at 20, he remembers that I told him that when I am 80 and he is 70, and we are both sitting on a park bench, people would think that we were same age. Not 80, yet! But, in answer to the question young readers of this newsletter might have, like, how did it happen that our hair turned gray, I recommend you go to YouTube and watch the song You Have Deceived Me from Pirates of Penzance. My 10-year-old daughter loves this song. It is a song about how it is that our hair has turned gray. It answers the question about how this happened with the direct, and realistic, answer, “It’s gradually got so.” From the Stone Soup issue: May/June 2017 Maple and Marmalade Written by Fiona Mulley, 13 Illustrated by Maya Work, 12 A loud knock sounded on Violet’s dressing-room door. “Places for Act One!” Violet leapt up from her dressing-table stool, her breath quickening. A little shiver of nervous excitement ran down her spine as she peered into the mirror one last time, checking anxiously to see that her microphone was in place. She didn’t look quite like herself; the reflection staring back at her from inside the frame of lights was not the image of a thirteen-year-old girl but that of a young Civil-War-era woman. What with the stage makeup, full hoop skirt, and her normally loose hair gathered into a stately bun, she scarcely recognized herself.Violet slipped her hand into the hidden pocket in her costume and groped about, closing her fingers around a pebble- like object. It was a small piece of wood, its surface was smooth and soft; the bark had been whittled away. She drew it out of her pocket and gazed at it wistfully, slipping into a reverie. She could remember . . . . Read more
About
Saturday Newsletter: April 29, 2017
Your Saturday Stone Soup Newsletter — April 29, 2017 — Please share with the young readers in your family Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia and Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, and Susan Wilky. A Note from Editor William Rubel As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, we are moving our website to a faster and more secure server. This is a boring detail that I wouldn’t normally repeat except that the changeover seems to be taking place as I write this and for some reason the change has taken the site offline. Thus, I cannot link to anything at StoneSoup.com. As I am about to leave for the reunion of Stone Soup founders being hosted by the Provost of Porter College, University of California, Santa Cruz, about all I can do today is post this painting of skiing that we collected in the 1970s. This is by a Swiss child, who was 10 at the time. It never snows where I live. My daughter and I have to drive to the Sierras for snow. We didn’t get there this year. But if you did go to the snow, or if there is snow where you live, or if you are going to go for one last winter adventure, please make a drawing or painting for Stone Soup. What I want you to note about the painting I have included here is how the artist has used the entire page for the image. There is no white space. There is the snow-covered mountain, the rows of skiers and sledders, and the sky in the background. Lots of energy. A fantastic sense of a crowded gorgeous blue day on the ski slopes. Create an image that is filled with energy. That gives a sense of movement, whether that is by ski, sled, snowboard, or just rolling down a snowy hillside. We’d love to see what you make. Send us your work The school year is coming to a close. Please think back on what you have created this school year and send us your best work. When you go to our submission page (which I hope will be working when you click on the link) you will see that in addition to stories, poems, and book reviews, we also accept music, dance, photographs, art, movies, and reviews of video games, TV shows, and movies. Please choose your best work and send it to us. Thank you. How to submit creative writing and art to Stone Soup. Until next week, William Help Stone Soup through Amazon Smile My Amazon purchases through the smile program have now accumulated 89 cents for Stone Soup. Its a tiny amount on its own, but, like Stone Soup, the more who chip in the richer the pot will become. Amazon reports in May, so I will soon be able to let you know what we have collectively raised. All you have to do to effortlessly raise money for Stone Soup is go to the Amazon Smile portal. You will be asked to choose the charity you’d like to support. Once you have chosen, .5% of all your purchases will go to the charitable organization. You can change your designation at any time. Find us by searching on “Children’s Art Foundation – Stone Soup.” It takes a little retraining to switch to smile.amazon.com as one’s default Amazon URL, but once you do then every time you buy something from Amazon you help us out. Your support matters. Thank you!
History of the Stone Soup Folktale from 1720 to Now, by William Rubel
“Stone Soup,” engraving by Walter Melion for the cover of the first issue of Stone Soup Some Recipes for Stone Soup from 1732, 1808–and 2019! Boil stones in butter, and you may sip the broth. (Fuller 1732) ‘Give me a piece of paper’ (said the traveler) ‘and I’ll write it down for you,’ which he did as follows:—A receipt to-make Stone Soup. ‘ Take a large stone, put it into a sufficient quantity of boiling water; properly season it with pepper and salt; add three or four pounds of good beef, a handful of pot-herbs, some onions, a cabbage, and three or four carrots. When the soup is made the stone may be thrown away.’ Published in The American magazine of wit, 1808. The recipe published in 1808 is quite similar to the one in the version of the story made by the By Kids For Kids Story Time podcast in 2019. You can listen to their lively retelling of the tale on Megaphone here or at iTunes here! Origin of the Stone Soup Folktale Title page to the 1808 British magazine with the first English version of the Stone Soup story The Stone Soup story revolves around a clever man with a charismatic personality who can get people to help him when their first instinct is not to. This is the aspect of the story that folklorists have focused on. Folklorists place the Stone Soup story within the “clever man” category of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore classification system that they use to organize the entire folkloric tradition. Stone Soup is an Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1548 folktale. Where does the original Stone Soup story come from? Is it a genuine folk tale in the sense that it had a long life in an oral tradition before being published in print? Or is it a creation of authors writing for hire? Or a bit of both? I think it is probably a bit of both. The Stone Soup story does not appear in any of the major eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collections of folk tales. It wasn’t published by Charles Perrault or the Grimm brothers. The first version I have found, that of Madame de Noyer (1720), is the work of an internationally renowned writer. We will never know who “told her” the story, or whether she read it in a book that has not been identified, or whether she made the whole thing up! All of the early versions I have come across are already polished tales. None make the claim that they were collected from a peasant. If a strong oral tradition for the Stone Soup story existed in the 18th and 19th centuries it is probable that also referenced the fairly substantial body of published stories. The First Published Version: Madame de Noyer, France 1720 The first telling of the Stone Soup story that I have been able to locate is by a French woman, Madame de Noyer (1663–1719), a female journalist, a woman of letters and a dynamic personality who lived what can only be described as an interesting life. She seems to have been a woman who burned the candle at both ends. She lived in exile from France for the last part of her life, dying in Holland. Voltaire visited her in exile. Madame de Noyer’s version of the Stone Soup story, “Soupe au Caillou” (Madame du Noyer (1720), was published one year after she died, in a revised and expanded edition of collected letters that had been published a few years earlier. Madame de Noyer’s fame was so great that in French her version of the story is the most common version through the end of the nineteenth-century. You will find it in books that attribute it to other authors, but they rarely make the changes to her telling that are required to really claim authorship. Madame de Noyer begins her tale, as so many good storytellers do, with an element of mystery: “On me contoit l’autre jour que …” “Someone told me the other day that . . .” Her version of the story is set in Normandy, in northern France. Two Jesuits come to a farmhouse, but only the children are home. The Jesuits, who are hungry, convince the children that they are not begging for food, but in fact they are self-sufficient as they have a stone that makes soup. They tell the children that all they actually need is fire, a pot, and some water, and that their stone will do the rest. They remark that this is “curieux” and from that point the game is on. A fire is got ready, a pot put over, water is added, their stone is dropped in, and then, when the water is hot, this and that is asked for until, finally, a truly fabulous soup has been made. It is a story that always has a happy ending. Everyone always seems to have a good time making the soup, and the soup itself is always loved. In many versions the tramp (and it usually is a tramp) is asked for the recipe. In many other versions, like that of Madame de Noyer, all the neighbors and even all the other villagers are brought into the story. They attest to what a fabulous soup was made by a stone. Of course, nobody thinks that a stone can make soup. Nobody is tricked into feeding the stranger. The beggar is personable and is understood to be saying, “I’ll provide you some great entertainment in exchange for a meal.” As the banter surrounding the cooking was entertaining and by any standards the soup terrific, the making of stone soup always ends with smiles all around. Phillipe Barbe’s Version, France, 1771 Historic Stone Soup Story from 1771 in French by M. Barbe One characteristic of folktales is that they are contextualized by each teller. This is something the authors of the early Stone Soup stories clearly did. For example, the second version of the story was written by Phillipe Barbe (1723–1792) in his work Fables et
