“Mirrored” (iPhone 11 Pro) by Sabrina Lu, 12 (Ashburn, VA), published in the January 2022 issue of Stone Soup A note from William Dear Stone Soup Friends, It is a gorgeous end of January where I live in California. I went on a bike ride today along a path with the Pacific Ocean on one side of the path, and wildflowers blooming along the other side. Acacia trees are in bloom, clusters of bright yellow flowers filling the air with sweet perfume. I don’t know how those of who live where it snows do it! Stone Soup site licenses! Thanks to all of you generous donors, all of us at Stone Soup—with the help of Naomi at the Society of Young Inklings—are busy working on curriculum to help teachers use Stone Soup in their classroom, and on improving our website so that it is easier to navigate and, we hope, looks better. Shortly, we are going to be sending out thousands of emails to find teachers willing to sign up for a FREE school-wide license as beta testers. When we started Stone Soup almost 50 years ago there was no Internet! So, right now we are really rethinking Stone Soup magazine, the website, and the Stone Soup creative writing project for the modern classroom. After beta testers have given us feedback so we can fine tune the project, we will then start offering the site licenses for sale. Getting Stone Soup into the classroom is crucial for the long-term success of the magazine. We’ve made it 50 years; we need schools to adopt our online platform to make it another 50 years. We need your help to succeed. Here is what you can do. Please talk to teachers you know who teach creative writing in the classroom. This is through eighth grade. If the teacher doesn’t know about Stone Soup, then please show them the website and share your enthusiasm. If the teacher might be interested in a site license, then please, with their permission, send us the teacher’s name, grade, and email address. You can write to us at education@stonesoup.com. We will then write your teacher friend to confirm their interest, and then start getting them set up so every classroom in the school can access the website without logging in, and every student and teacher can log into the website from home using the school email address. Our goal in 2022 is to begin growing again! Thank you for your help. If you have marketing suggestions, and/or are good at marketing and think you might be able to help us, then please write to us at education@stonesoup.com. Now, business aside, just look at that photograph by Sabrina Lu. What can I say but, “wow!”? I know it’s not a very articulate thing to say about the work of art, but that is the first word that came to my mind when I looked at Sabrina Lu’s photograph, Mirrored. Brilliant is too weak a word to describe this masterful photograph. Imaginary forest. Real forest. Real sky. Reflected sky. Reflected sky as water so the snow ball becomes an island in the middle of a lake reflected by still waters. And there is so much more! Stare at the ball, and dream! Based on Sabrina’s photograph, the weekend project is simple: take a photograph, or write a scene that describes Mirrored. If you want to work in photography then I want you to work with reflections. Reflections in windows, in mirrors on polished table tops, polished cars, puddles, lakes, streams, maybe even a sink. Reflections are about repeated images, sometimes clear, sometimes distorted. If you can add something into the reflection, as Sabrina did, then so much the better. If you want to write about this scene you will be writing what is called a vignette. There is no story. No plot. You can describe this with the voice of an omniscient narrator—meaning a voice that knows all and sees all—or you can write your story so that we see this scene through the eyes of a character. Read the poem, below, “One Day a Blizzard Came,” by Rainer Paska for one approach to writing about this piece. In Rainer’s poem, the character, the protagonist may live inside the globe! Until next week, Rainer Pasca, 14 (Bay Shore, NY) From Stone Soup January 2022 One Day a Blizzard Came By Rainer Pasca, 14 (Bay Shore, NY) I live in a snow globe. A little lamp shines in on me. I talk to the lamp, maybe it’s lonely. A door opens. My brain is full of water, but I am not alone. Johnni, Adrian and Oliver are here. Johnni says, Look out, everyone! It’s a blizzard. Oliver counts five pieces of snow on his nose and Adrian jumps like glitter. Everyone stares for a second. Then, their lungs remember to breathe Continue reading the January 2022 isue 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.
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Saturday Newsletter: January 22, 2022
Town of Bright Holidays (iPhone 8) by Anna Leventopoulos, 11 (Menlo Park, CA), published in Stone Soup January 2022 A note from Sarah Happy weekend! In this newsletter, I want to talk about the brilliant story “Best Friends Forever” by Charlotte Moore from the January 2022 issue of Stone Soup (perfectly paired with the cozy-yet-ominous art piece “Town of Bright Holidays” by Anna Leventopoulos, pictured above). What I like so much about Charlotte’s story is the mixing of genres. Part realistic fiction story on friendship, part ghost story thriller–all of it extremely compelling. My project for you this weekend is to attempt your own genre mash-up story. Maybe you have two very different genres in mind–if so, go ahead and write! But if you need help coming up with the ingredients, I suggest brainstorming a variety of genres, writing them all down, and picking two at random. Once you have your genres, you can come up with a way to combine them into one cohesive story. How might you transition between the two? You can separate the stories into two distinct halves for each genre and create a middle act that transitions from one to the other. Or, you can switch back and forth between them throughout the story. What Charlotte does so well in “Best Friends Forever” is to make the back-and-forth between the genres so seamless that many readers may not even notice any kind of switch at all. I hope this weekend project sparks some creative work. As always, if you’re happy with anything you’ve created, submit it to Stone Soup! All the best, Charlotte Moore, 12 Brooklyn, NY From Stone Soup January 2022 Best Friends Forever By Charlotte Moore, 12 (Brooklyn, NY) The castle loomed large and ominous above me. I heard the tour guide blabber on about some people who had died inside the castle, probably trying to make it appear scarier than it was—something about ghosts and people hearing screams when no one was there. I wasn’t scared; I just didn’t want to be there. All I wanted to do was go home and be with my cat, the only being I felt I could trust. A feeling of loneliness washed over me as I watched the girls in the class huddling up and whispering about how creepy the castle was. The way the girls all had their secrets reminded me of my old best friend, Olivia. We used to be like that, always sharing inside jokes. When we were in fifth grade we began drifting apart, but honestly, she started drifting away. Every time I wanted to hang out with her, she would push me aside. She stopped inviting me over, stopped calling me, and before I knew it, we weren’t even eating lunch together. After that, I felt completely alone. By then everyone else had already formed cliques. The tour guide showed us through the door. As soon as we walked in, I noticed how dim the castle was. Engraved details covered the walls. I watched a mouse scurry from one hole in the wall to another. There were so many different passageways. The group paused to look at a painting of another one of those old rich guys from the 1800s. “Arthur Livingstone.” He was the master of the castle, and he had been the seventh-most wealthy man in America at the time, the tour guide explained. I didn’t care. Continue reading 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: January 15, 2022
The Rise of Democracy, Acrylic | Keira Zhang, 12 (Los Altos, CA), Stone Soup January 2022 A note from Laura This week I want to draw your attention to the play featured in January’s issue, Spring Will Not Die. It was written by a group of Syrian refugees living in Turkey who are members of Karam House, one of our Refugee Project contributing organizations. The play presents a fictionalized account of young people’s pivotal role in the anti-government protests that ultimately fueled the uprisings known as the Arab Spring. When I read this play, I think about a sense of ownership, a sense of belonging, or even entitlement to a place and to people, without which it is nearly impossible to envision change. The play begs the questions: whose world is it to change? Whose job is it to affect that change? The answer, of course, is that it is each of ours. But this notion can only be fully realized with a strong sense of belonging to a community and the social ties that make such a sense of belonging possible. If you are looking for a creative exercise this weekend, I urge you to capture a sense of community wherever it emerges for you, and with whatever medium you choose. Find a place in or around your home or community that is busy with people—preferably a place that you visit often (maybe it’s your own kitchen, a park or café nearby, your school cafeteria) and sit in observation for about twenty minutes. Use all five senses to observe and record everything that is happening around you, either with words or with the visual art medium of your choice. Be descriptive and pay special attention to the people in the space and how they’re interacting with one another. Ask yourself: Who is present and who is absent? Are people differentiated from each other in any way? Does someone appear to be in charge of the space? Do there appear to be spoken or unspoken rules that dictate behavior in this space? In capturing a space and the people that occupy it through your writing or artwork, see if you can capture a sense of community. As always, if you’re happy with what you’ve written or created, we would love for you to share and submit it to us via Submittable! An Update from the Refugee Project I had the privilege of conducting a similar activity to the one suggested here with young writers and artists at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya this past week. As the young people shared their texts and artwork describing scenes from their daily lives, many things were unfamiliar to me—a description of a confrontation with a lion after climbing down a mango tree and running into the river to escape a snake; hundreds of people lining a dirt road amidst throbbing music and rising dust during a miles-long bridal procession; a boy, alone in the middle of the road, his clothes and shoes tattered and worn from days of walking. But more striking than this were their vivid descriptions of the things that were familiar, the things that we can all relate to—people at the markets catching up and buying goods, “their white teeth chattering as monkeys;” students together after a long day, doing their washing, watering their trees, playing sports, relaxing, laughing, arguing, telling stories and singing together. In other words, their writing captured the universal experience of community as it emerges in daily life. I hope to share some of this writing in The Refugee Project portal of the website soon. To check out more writing and artwork by refugee youth, please visit the website. With best wishes, Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our January Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #185 (provided by Molly Torinus, Stone Soup contributor), which challenged participants to write a story in which the protagonist explained COVID-19 to people in the distant past. What a way to begin the new year! Molly’s thoughtful prompt led to a surge of creativity; these stories took us on journeys to Ancient Egypt and Greece, invented time travel via carrier pigeon, and centered on ghostly interactions. We even received a play set during the end of the Black Death! While each and every story was a pleasure to read, we narrowed down our selections to the usual five winners and five honorable mentions. As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please 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 “What Are You Talking About?” by Audrey Billington, 10 (Hillsboro, IL) “Dear Jane” by Finoula Breen-Ryan, 10 (Bridgeport, CT) “The Warning: A Play” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 10 (Brooklyn, NY) “Old Answers” by Daniel Shorten, 10 (Mallow, ROI) “The Ghost of You” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) Honorable Mentions “Covid-19 Explained to Ancient Egyptians” by Poorvi Girish, 8 (Fremont, CA) “Royally Messed Up” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “Dear People of the Past” by Zayda Parakh, 12 (Chattanooga, TN) “COVID-19.63” by Divya Srinivasan, 12 (Sammamish, WA) “COVID Time Travel” by Savarna Yang, 13 (Outram, NZ) From Stone Soup January 2022 Spring Will Not Die By a group of Syrian refugees in Reyhanli, Turkey with the support of Karam House—Afnan, 15; Ahmad, 16; Fatima, 18; Hayam, 16; Mohammed A., 16; Mohammed, 16; Mustafa, 16; Nour Al Huda, 16; Rasha, 16; and Sedra, 15 Welcome to all our guests. Revolutions, and especially the revolutions in the Arab lands today, aren’t simple events that can be conveyed in a play of less than half an hour. The reality is the blood of the people. It’s not easy to fully portray their pain and suffering. This play may not be one-hundred percent accurate or an exact mirror of reality, but it seeks to present the way in which the demonstrations the youth brought to the streets were driven by their passion for freedom. Thank you for
