Snip Snip Snip (Fujifilm FinePix XP140) By Astrid Young, 11 (Brookline, MA), published in Stone Soup May 2022 A note from William Dear Friends — Here is a link to the Brady gun control group. I just sent them $100. If not now, when? “Snip, Snip, Snip” is an utterly brilliant photograph. Astrid Young has a photographer’s eye. Look at how she framed the buildings to make the scissor joke more effective. Large pieces of fabric are often cut by placing them on a table and then, as the fabric is cut along a central line, each side, the right and the left, are pushed back at an angle in just the way the building seems to be folded in this photograph. The picture we see here is not obvious when standing on the street. I am sure I would have noticed the scissor, would likely have taken a photograph of it, but I am sure I would not have found the angle that Astrid did that would have made the image memorable. The photographic eye is the the eye that focuses in on a scene to frame it in a way that finds what is interesting. The difference between a “snapshot” and a “photograph” is intentionality. Astrid didn’t just snap this picture. She thought about what she was doing. In this weekend project, I am going to ask you to use your phone or camera to frame an image to highlight something you find in the scene that interests you. Something that you might want others to notice. Astrid’s photograph is “about” many things. There is the scissor joke, but there is a lot more. This photograph is also an exploration of light and dark. Note how the left-hand side of the building is in shadow while the right-hand side is in sun light. Note how the pole also has a bright white right side and a left side dulled by shadow. There are white window reflections in windows on both sides of the building, with an additional pattern of the white getting smaller in the windows on the left side of the building, windows that seem to melt into total darkness. The scissors are glaring white as is the right side of the pole. This photograph also has very strong lines. The pole. The stone work on the right-hand side of the building. The window ledges. In your mind’s eye draw lines that follow the various lines you can find in the photograph. A lot going on! Sometime today or tomorrow, I’d like you to pick up your phone, or a camera, and working in your house or outside, I’d like you to play with framing. Take four to 12 pictures of the same thing, experimenting with camera angles to highlight patterns in what you are looking at. Your camera angles don’t need to be as extreme as Astrid’s. Sometimes, just a slight shift in framing does the trick. As always, if what you come up with is something you like a lot, then please submit it to Stone Soup for possible publication. Connor Kiggins, 12 (New York, NY) From Stone Soup May 2022 American Monarchy By Connor Kiggins, 12 (New York, NY) Every day upon waking up, I wish that the burden of school had never been thrust upon my tired back as I cannot keep up with addition, subtraction, fractions, and historic factions while strangers observe my every action five days a week, eight hours a day, our only vacation being one based around letting kids out to start working on their parents’ farms during the harvest season. And that tradition only stays so that we kids can have a mental break from school although soon we will go back and have our schedule wiped clear, making me want to break out and go have fun before I’m buried underground with a sign above saying rest in peace. And we are not even free three days a week, a freedom I think we deserve as many seem to forget that one day we will grow up and work maybe twice as hard as you and of course, let’s not forget that when you grow old, who else but your sons and daughters will in turn take care of you and yet one thing we won’t do is take your freedom like you take ours. And still we will fight for you even though you dump us in school as the people who are often referred to as “America’s future” find themselves in a government-required American monarchy, where the teachers act like dukes, the deans like princes, and the principal the all-powerful king, while we the future are insignificant peasants stuck in the king’s castle while being told we have to follow all his rules, while we toil in a classroom, making our humor and passion slowly dissipate as we learn about but do not obey the rules of freedom of speech and democracy while being instructed on everything from how to breathe and when we can go pee and not to put our heads on the table and being scolded for doing it twice by a hypocritical math teacher, and when I go to the graded class of musical theater he tells us that we cannot even go to the bathroom unless we are about to wet our pants, and that just so he doesn’t get scolded by our parents for putting their children in an embarrassing position in front of the class—making me feel that this American monarchy has gone too far and is going to keep on destroying our future, even though they already have by filling the sky with toxic gasses—all so they could get a fancy pen and with a few strokes decide whether we will go to college and be successful or end up in a small apartment while working at McDonald’s, all because the American monarchy said we weren’t smart enough to go to even the worst college, which is why at the end of
About
Saturday Newsletter: May 21, 2022
Daydreaming (pastel, watercolor) by Audrey Li, 12 (Scarsdale, NY), published as the cover image of Stone Soup May 2022 A note from Emma Letters crash around me like waves in a storm… In this poem, Lilly Davatzes is clearly writing about dyslexia (it’s the title!). I am not dyslexic, but a few of my close friends are. And this poem unlocked something for me about what that means. I felt I immediately understood the way words can feel overwhelming with dyslexia, and the intense concentration needed to read or write with it. Lilly uses the storm and the ocean as central metaphors—the letters are like waves that crash down on her and threaten to drown her in a sea of words. …knocking me down, pulling me into the sea of words… And the distractions that surround her are birds: as distractions fly around me like birds. Birds, like words, dive down in a swarm. I love how the poem ultimately subtly enacts this distraction, as the subject shifts from the words and letters to the birds. By the poem’s final sentence, the words are not being compared to birds—rather, it is the birds who are like words. The birds/distractions are what have become most real in the poem. This also seems to reflect the confusion that can happen when reading while dyslexic—how the word “word” can be mixed up with “bird”—after all, the poem could have just as easily (and perhaps more coherently) read: “Words, / like birds, / dive down in a /swarm.” However, the fact that it doesn’t is its genius! I am not dyslexic. But, as I return from maternity leave, this poem speaks to my experience right now–of feeling overwhelmed, distracted, and needing intense amounts of concentration to read and write. That is also what I love about this poem. The title tells us it is about dyslexia, and yet it also speaks to other experiences. This weekend, I encourage you, like Lilly, to write about a mental or emotional state that is difficult to capture using a metaphor. How can you enact that feeling through your words, your sentence structures, your formatting, your punctuation, and everything else at your disposal? Exciting to be back and looking forward to reading your work! From Stone Soup May 2022 Dyslexia By Lilly Davatzes, 11 (Jenkintown, PA) Letters crash around me like waves in a storm, knocking me down, pulling me into the sea of words as distractions fly around me like birds. Birds, like words, dive down in a swarm. to read more from the May 2022 issue, including another poem by Lilly, click here! Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
Saturday Newsletter: May 14, 2022
Song at Dusk (watercolor) by Aspen Clayton, 11 (Lisle, IL), published in Stone Soup May 2022 A note from Caleb Happy second Saturday of May! This week, I’m delighted to focus entirely on two pieces of art from the May 2022 issue, which should have—if it hasn’t already—arrived for our print subscribers. (Once again, we apologize for the delay!) What we have with Aspen Clayton’s watercolor Song at Dusk and Necla Asveren’s poem “Golden Moons” is yet another example of our editor Emma Wood’s magnificent ability to match up artwork with written work. Of course, the obvious connection between these two works is the central object of Aspen’s painting and the title of Necla’s poem—a golden moon. However, I would like to focus more on the thematic links between these two pieces and how they work in conjunction to elevate each other. Necla’s poem is, at it’s core, a “song at dusk” in both content and structure. Its content is a lyrical eulogy to a crumbling society that flew too close to the sun, that had “beauty and riches beyond measure, and drowned in it.” In other words, a song at dusk. The structure or form of the poem can also be simplified into two things: song and dusk. At the molecular level, if we break down the two connotations of “song”—positive—and “dusk”—negative—the golden moon at poem’s end, of which the subjects of the poem “[crawl] out of our holes to see,” can be seen as the “song” of the poem whereas the setup—the fall of society—is the “dusk.” Of course, without Aspen’s painting and its title, I wouldn’t be able to analyze Necla’s poem in this manner. Most likely, the title of Aspen’s painting is in reference to the bird perched on a branch. Thus, a literal interpretation of the painting is a bird song at dusk. But placed next to “Golden Moons” and its descriptions of a society in collapse, the painting gains new meaning. Look at how thin, flimsy, and barren the branches are. Notice how the bird rises up out of the dark, spooky lower half and appears, with the help of perspective, to perch on the moon itself—the painting’s source of light. Like all great titles, “Song at Dusk” represents the literal image of the painting as well as its theme: the beauty of art and nature; that is, art and nature’s ability to champion lightness in the face of darkness, positivity against negativity. Until next time, Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our May Flash Contest was based on Prompt #202 (provided by intern Sage Millen), which, like her last contest prompt from February, dealt with food in a remarkably whimsical way. This time the food was pizza rather than tomato soup, as participants were asked to write a story where somebody betrays their best friend for a slice of slightly stale pizza. Once again, the submissions matched the sheer creativity and ingenuity of the prompt as submissions ranged from a direct address story in verse to a story set in an interrogation room to a piece of historical fiction set during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. We were also so impressed with the work of Ellis Yang in their story “An Unsent Letter” that we decided to publish it separately on the blog at a future date. As always, we thank all who submitted, and encourage you to submit again next month! Congratulations to our Winners and Honorable Mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this contest (and previous ones) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “The Stale Pizza Slice” by Suanne Li, 8 (San Jose, CA) “The Perils of Pizza” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “The Triad Trials” by Emily Tang, 13 (Winterville, NC) “The Trash Pandas and the Pizza” by Michael Wilkinson, 12 (San Carlos, CA) “Would You Like a Slice?” by Joycelyn Zhang, 12 (San Diego, CA) Honorable Mentions “Hope” by Jeremy Lim, 9 (Portland, OR) “The Tale of the Raccoon” by Anushi Mittai, 10 (Beaverton, OR) “The Last Slice” by Arshia Ramesh, 12 (Overland Park, KS) “Kaleidoscope” by Cayleigh Sukhai, 12 (Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada) “Two Best Friends and a Slice of Pizza” by Savarna Yang, 13 (Outram, New Zealand) For the Stone Soup blog “An Unsent Letter” by Ellis Yang, 12 (Los Altos, CA) From Stone Soup May 2022 Golden Moons By Necla Asveren, 12 (Shanghai, China) And it was with bright eyes and a bold step that we reached into the stars. Grouped around our television sets and computers, we cheered the sun on—just one more day until a new start. And we pulled down the diamond net from the sky. The lovely, glorious, gold-silver— we drowned in it. Beauty and riches beyond measure, and we drowned in it. Fireworks turned into bombs and our stars were against us. Nothing was ever enough. ../MORE Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
