Woodpecker (watercolor)By Aspen Clayton, 11 (Lisle, IL), published in the September 2021 Issue of Stone Soup A note from William Hello to all of you during these crazy, crazy times! We hope that all of you are safe from the natural disasters that are affecting so many of us. And, of course, that you are doing what needs to be done to stay safe from the pandemic. I have added a newsletter innovation today—a video! I hope you like it. I think that this is a mode of communication that works for me. Today’s video is about the publication of The Other Realm by Tristan Hui, the winner of this year’s Stone Soup Book Contest. Congratulations to Tristan for a job super well done! I’d also like to mention today—but there will be more in another newsletter—about our editor’s choice winner, who is Anya Geist. I am a working writer. I’d like to say to those of you who didn’t win that, unfortunately, not winning contests and having works rejected is part of the life of the writer. We look forward to reading what you come up with for next year, and you are also free to keep working on the novel you submitted this year. Refugee Project Fundraiser We have just sent out our first solicitation for our Refugee Project fundraiser. I don’t want to focus on that today, as for today Tristan’s book is the most important thing. So, more on this project next week. I will not explain that, in fact, in the words of the song from Cabaret, “money makes the world go round.” Classes As you all know, enrollment is open—we have two writing classes, the monthly book club, and now a filmmaking class starting next Saturday, September 11. There is flexibility in shifting between my writing class and Conner Bassett’s. The new filmmaking class does require that you know how to do basic video editing. However, if you don’t know how to edit, but this is something you really, really want to do, then please get in touch and we will discuss options. You will be able to enroll in classes after they start, but, obviously, starting at the beginning is ideal. Weekend Project Please read Summer Loh’s elegant poem about the woodpecker. And also, look at the paired illustration by Aspen Clayton. I was surprised a few months ago by a woodpecker just outside my kitchen window pecking away at the bark of a quince tree. Like Summer, I wondered what it was going for. And, like Summer, I found the sound comforting. I always enjoy the sound of woodpeckers. There is a trail I go on that starts at the Pacific Ocean and goes into the Santa Cruz Mountains. For an early stretch of the trail, before it gets into the redwoods, it goes through some old farmland. There are several huge old walnut trees along this part of the trail. I always stop to look at them—so many woodpecker holes! For this weekend’s project, I want you to observe something from nature. If you are where there has been extreme weather or fires, then use as a subject something from these momentous days. Otherwise, watch a bird, watch a cloud, watch your cat stalking a butterfly, watch the shadow being cast by a mountain as the sun sinks behind it. It doesn’t matter. Look for the center of your feelings, look for the center of how you are reacting to what you are watching. Note that Summer both gives you a sense of the bird with its “peck, peck, peck,” but also reaches into her imagination to describe what she is seeing in an original way—I am thinking there of the idea of the bird gliding like a paper airplane. As school has started and you may be busy this weekend still adjusting to being back in school—and for some of you, as it was for my daughter, back in school for the first time in a year and a half—I suggest that if time and focus is an issue, interpret what you see and feel either with art or with words. Prose or poetry are both OK. As always, if you are happy with what you make and think that our editor, Emma Wood, might like it for Stone Soup, then please submit it to us! Until next time, Refugee Project Dear friends and supporters of Stone Soup, Since the launch of the Refugee Project, we have partnered with seven organizations providing on-the-ground support to children living in refugee camps, as well as those resettled in host countries. Through these partnerships, we have collected over 300 pieces of artwork and writing by refugee youth. These creative works are currently on display in our newly created web portal for the project, which you can explore here. As we have said many times before, the media so often portrays refugee youth as the subject of a narrative. The Stone Soup Refugee Project provides a platform for these young people to tell their own stories, in their own voices. To make this vision a reality, we need your help. We have set ourselves a target goal of $10,000 to pilot the program. These funds will go toward the development of workshops delivered to young people in refugee camps, the facilitation of creative exchanges between young people, and the work of collecting and publishing more material on the Refugee Project website. In addition, funds will be used to support our Refugee Project contributing organizations and the young people they serve in the ways in which they deem valuable, such as the purchase of supplies and possible scholarship funds. —Laura Moran, Refugee Project Director Selfie Contest Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. As has always been the case, we want these selfies to tell us a story. Think about how masks can both aid and make more difficult the expression of thoughts and feelings. How can you
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Saturday Newsletter: July 31, 2021
Forest Creature (collage) by Eva Stoitchkova, 11 (Ontario, Canada), featured on the cover of the March 2018 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Tayleigh Ciao for now! We are taking a vacation from our weekly newsletter for the month of August. Don’t worry—we’ll be back in September with a brand new (and better than ever) format. In the meantime, be sure to check out book reviews, writing, and art on the Stone Soup blog. And remember that the deadline for the annual Stone Soup book contest is August 16th. We will select two winning manuscripts—one in fiction and one in poetry—to be published and distributed by Stone Soup in both print and ebook forms, available for sale on Amazon, in the Stone Soup store, via our distributors, and advertised along with the rest of our books. This is a contest you don’t want to miss. So, good luck, and happy writing! Selfie Contest Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. For more information on how and what to submit, please visit our Submittable form. Weekend (August) Project Now, I’d like to draw your attention to Eva’s breathtaking collage, Forest Creature. As collages do, this piece creates an image, in this case a raptor, out of something else. But what distinguishes Eva’s piece from the standard collage, and what I admire most about it, is the fact that she has used clippings of a forest, the bird’s habitat, in order to create its form. Moreover, Eva has made the white space work for her, allowing the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps of the image. In this sense, Eva has managed to enhance the relationship between viewer and art, allowing the two to work together, not unlike the forest and the raptor. All in all, what we have is a work of genius whose primary concept works on multiple levels. Rainer’s poem, “Rainer’s Mind,” is similar to the collage in content and form. To start, both works feature a forest as the setting, and a bird as subject. And, in both works, a bird is born from the fecund combination of forest and mind. The key difference, however, is that in Rainer’s poem, the mind consumes its creation, a metaphor for its endless capacity to entertain itself. But the brutal action of the poem calls into question this cannibalistic ability. The poem’s speaker appears cognizant of this brutality (“I didn’t even say hello”), yet helpless to change it (“I just walked home”). In short, Rainer’s poem builds off of Eva’s collage, posing questions about the mind’s tendency to create beauty for its own consumption—questions well worth considering. Taking all of this into account, I would like you to spend the month of August meditating on why it is that you create art. Then, I want you to choose a magazine—maybe an issue of Stone Soup—and either make a collage that utilizes white space to fill in the gaps of its image, or write an erasure poem by blacking out selected chunks of text. Until next month, Book Contest 2021 For information on submitting to the Stone Soup Book Contest 2021, please click here. To submit your manuscript, please visit our submittable site. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Young Blogger Mason Li wrote about his experience running a triathlon! New blogger Anirudh Parthasarathy wrote about why he finds Bobby Kennedy inspiring. April, 13, reviewed Alexandra Bracken’s new novel Lore. Daniel, 12, reviewed S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders. From Stone Soup June 2021 Rainer’s Mind By Rainer Pasca, 14 (Bay Shore, NY) I was in a forest with nothing but my mind. It opened a little bit— lifted its mouth like a shark. Suddenly, a bird. Snap, said my mind. Delicious! I didn’t even say hello. I just walked home. …Read more from the June Issue of Stone Soup, including more of Rainer’s poems 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: July 24, 2021
Spring, by Myra Nicolaou, 8 (Cyprus), and published in the May/June 1985 Issue of Stone Soup A note from William Hello again! I haven’t written our Saturday Newsletter for some months, as I have been writing a book about the history of bread. Thank you to my colleagues who have taken over during this time. I turn 68 on Thursday, which also brings us into the 49th year of Stone Soup. In 1972, I gathered a few fellow students at my college, and we set to work to teach ourselves how to be publishers. The first issue of Stone Soup was published in May, 1973. I must say, between the magazine, our blogs, and the work coming out of our writing classes, Stone Soup is publishing more creative work than it ever has—and this is attracting ever more brilliant young writers and artists. I am a writer. I write every day. I am in awe of the work Stone Soup is publishing. I encourage all of you to subscribe to the magazine so you can get copies of our important literary magazine, and gain access to our vast catalogue of writing on the Stone Soup website. Stone Soup Classes Our classes resume on September 18th. The fall session runs until December 3rd, with class readings scheduled for December 11th. Registration will open early August with my writing class, Conner Bassett’s, and a new class taught by Isidore Bethel, a French-American filmmaker who will teach students how to tell stories through film. All of our teachers practice what they teach. Both Conner and I are published authors. Isidore is a well respected filmmaker. Please check out his Wikipedia entry. We are in school expansion mode! We will be adding more classes as we find appropriate teachers. We will also be expanding the types of classes. Poetry, photography, long-form fiction, and book illustration are examples of classes that we are hoping to add to our listings. We also hope to offer classes to students in Asia. Refugee project Please check out our new Refugee Project web pages. A gift you can give to these young artists is to simply read their work and speak their names. We will be fundraising for this program in September, so check back then for more information. Right now, you can help by looking at the current material. COVID-19 broke the momentum that Laura Moran, who runs this program, had built. Our Refugee Project web pages have all been approved by the agencies currently featured. Laura put in a ton of work on getting approvals and managing requested revisions. Thank you, Laura. Weekend Project The magnificent painting from Cyprus was part of a group of paintings given to us in 1977 by the Cypriot embassy, in Washington, D.C. For me, this work captures the exuberance of spring. Art and writing projects based on seasons are often one of the dullest of school projects. I want you to put all uninspiring back to school projects out of your head. One of the most famous musical pieces of all time is a set of four violin concertos by the Baroque composer Vivaldi, which he published in 1725 under the name, Le quattro stagioni, or “The Four Seasons” in English. Here is a link to a YouTube recording of the spring concerto. The many sunflowers paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh are representations of summer. Most of his sunflower paintings—and he made a lot of them!—are of sunflowers in a vase. These can be thought of as summer brought into the house. A vase filled with hollies with their red berries would be a comparable image for winter. The painting he made of a sunflower growing in a communal garden in July, 1887 is another approach to memorializing a season. This painting could only be made in the summer, when sunflowers bloom. Depending on where you live, thunderstorms might also suggest summer. As we are at the height of summer, I want you to think of something that screams “Summer!” where you live, and then capture that idea in a drawing, painting, photograph, or in a story or poem. If you are currently working on a piece of fiction, then if appropriate, you could work something in that might anchor your story in the summer. As always, if you like what you produce and think that our Editor, Emma Wood, would be interested in publishing it in Stone Soup, please go to our website and submit it. Thank you. Lastly, please read the poem, “The Memorial Tree,” by Amber Zhao, which was published in the February 2021 Issue of Stone Soup. This is an unusual, evocative, and complex poem. Congratulations, Amber! As COVID-19 surges again, please, please, please stay safe. Until next time, Book Contest 2021 For information on submitting to the Stone Soup Book Contest 2021, please click here. To submit your manuscript, please visit our submittable site. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Emily Collins, 12, wrote a staggering, evocative story about desire for change in the face of the ongoing aftermath of COVID-19. Jaslyn Kwan, 12, wrote a personal narrative about her return to competitive ballet in the YAGP (Youth America Grand Prix). Make sure to read Pragnya’s (12) review of Laurie R. King’s 1994 novel, The Beekeepers Apprentice, the first novel in her Mary Russell series. Meleah Goldman, 10, wrote a lyrical and inspirational work, “The Roots of Our Peace.” April, 13, reviewed Jenna Evans Welch’s sweet, debut novel, Love and Gelato. Calling all 9-14-year-olds to Virtual Summer Camp! It’s not too late to join our summer classes with Young Inklings–we have a few spaces left in all our July classes. Each interactive writing camp runs for two hours per day, Monday through Thursday, with plenty of prompts and activities for you to take away and use outside class, too. Have fun writing and learning with us this month! July 26-29 – learn from two generations who have started journals before
