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Cracks and Fissures by Sage Millen, 12 (Vancouver, Canada) Published in Stone Soup December 2020 A note from Jane It’s always a good week when a new issue of Stone Soup comes out, and there is so much great work in the December issue—all 48 pages of it! One of the things I love about the story we are featuring from the December issue this week is its title, “The Serenity of the Simple Inquiry.” It perfectly describes the perspective of the questioner, Miss Lavender. But for the main character, the whole experience is the opposite. The inquiry is far from simple, and she does not feel serene. It is an unanswerable question that makes her feel annoyed and unsettled every time she thinks about it. She doesn’t want to think about it. She even avoids the teacher who asked it. But she can’t help wondering about it. I remember lots of times in my life when I didn’t know—or didn’t want to say—the answer to a question like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” For some of us, or at certain times, those kinds of simple-on-the-surface but deeply penetrating questions can be really hard to deal with, while the person asking the question doesn’t realize or doesn’t understand why it is so hard for us to answer. Ella’s character says, as she struggles again to find an answer, “I felt like a vacuum cleaner had just sucked up my long-lost teddy bear or something. I was devastated.” That’s a great line, and it makes me laugh, but it also takes me straight to that truly awful feeling of being put on the spot and not knowing what on earth to say. It’s a sign of great writing if you can generate two such conflicting emotions at the same time. Sage Millen’s beautiful photograph makes a lovely partner for this story. The colors and the scene are serene but evoke those same opposing moods. It’s beautiful, and we can see clearly what it is: a landscape from the air. But the more deeply we delve into the image, the more complex it becomes. What are those fields, those straight lines? Are those rivers or dry canyons, and do they link with one another? Is the light and color from sunlight with clouds throwing shadows on the ground, or is night falling? Is it warm or cold? For this weekend’s activity, think about some of the “simple” but difficult questions you have been asked in your life. Have you ever been stuck for an answer, or felt worried that you couldn’t answer? Perhaps you have given one answer and later on changed your mind. Try using that experience as inspiration for a story, or write a personal narrative about it. And as always, send us any writing you are pleased with. We always love to read what you write. Join us on Zoom for the Writing Workshop end-of-year reading! Saturday, December 19, at 9 a.m. PST For our last session of the year, the Stone Soup Writing Workshop is holding a public reading via Zoom. Members of the workshop will be reading some of their favorite writing from the workshops, live. Friends, family members, teachers, and Stone Soup fans are welcome. You shouldn’t miss this event if you can make it—come and hear the amazing work these young authors have been doing in 2020, in their own voices! Book in via Eventbrite to get all the details. It’s free, though donations are always welcome. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Fatehbir, 9, wrote a quiet but powerful poem called “I Express Myself.” How do you express yourself? We published a tutorial from Florence on “How to Draw Anime Art.” Nora, 12, reviewed The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, considered by many to be a classic. Find out why she thinks it’s a book for all ages. “Talk” by Dylan, 5, is a poem that conveys so many different emotions in its few lines. “Although I can’t put out a forest fire, or completely get rid of pollution, or stop ice caps from melting, I can do little things with lots of love,” Elise writes in her story “Pecky’s Bravery Saves the Forest.” Akhil, 11, was pleasantly surprised by Victoria Jamieson’s graphic novel Roller Girl. Read why Akhil enjoyed it in his review. News from the Stone Soup Open House and Annual Drive Open House On Giving Tuesday, December 1, we held our first-ever Stone Soup Open House via Zoom. What a great event and a wonderful group of people! We were joined by Stone Soup authors and artists, their parents, some former contributors, members of our board, and Editor Emerita Gerry Mandel. The Stone Soup team gave updates on all the projects and community building we have been doing this year, and we heard from students and adults about their experiences through the year and their feelings about Stone Soup. It was a warm, friendly, and for us quite overwhelming experience. Thank you so much to everyone who came and made it such a special evening. We will definitely do it again, and look forward to welcoming even more of you next time. Annual Drive One of the purposes of Tuesday’s event was fundraising. We have already received many incredibly generous donations, and one parent has offered a $10,000 50% match. We are heading toward that target: we have received nearly $10,000 so far, which wins us $5,000 of that match. Every single dollar makes a difference to us, and no amount is too small. Just click the “Become a Stone Soup Patron” button below or the “Donate” button at Stonesoup.com. Canon PowerShot SX600 From Stone Soup December 2020 The Serenity of the Simple Inquiry By Ella Yamamura, 11 (Cary, NC) Illustrated by Sage Millen, 12 (Vancouver, Canada) We sat in a circle, everybody facing my second-grade teacher, Ms. Lavender. She handed everyone a slip of paper. “Now everybody,” Ms. Lavender began, “I would like for you to answer the questions that I’ll ask you—you may say them aloud if

A note from William Thanksgiving best from everyone at Stone Soup! It is a calm Thanksgiving this year, but to be honest, I am enjoying the weekend with my daughter and my garden. Open House! You are all invited to our first-ever Stone Soup open house on Tuesday, December 1, at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern. For the first time, the whole Stone Soup community—adults and kids—comes together Tuesday for our open house. It’s a free event, but you do need to register through EventBrite. Please register. The whole Stone Soup team is looking forward to meeting you!This first open house is about you meeting us and also you meeting each other. It is the first of more community-wide events that we have planned into 2021. But more on that at the meeting. All of us at Stone Soup will be at the meeting, along with our board of directors. We will introduce ourselves, and those of us who work on Stone Soup will briefly talk about our accomplishments in 2020 and our plans for 2021. We will keep our remarks short as we want there to be plenty of time for the adults and kids attending get to know each other. Bring questions to ask. If Stone Soup has meant a lot to you, then you may want to be prepared to talk about you and Stone Soup. This open house is taking place in the context of Giving Tuesday. One parent has just joined us as a Stone Soup patron and given us a $10,000 50% match. So, one purpose of the meeting is to answer questions about giving to Stone Soup, to help us bring in new patrons to achieve this match—and our larger fundraising goal for the year. The best way to prepare for the open house is to watch the interview between Anya Geist and Lena Aloise that is posted at the top of this newsletter. Anya is a former Stone Soup author and artist, as well as a brilliant photographer—and now that she is in high school, a Stone Soup intern. Meanwhile, Lena is one of Stone Soup’s current stars. She is an Honor Roll winner, Flash Contest winner, and a creative force at the Saturday Writing Workshop. Anya and Lena are both good examples of what Stone Soup is about: introducing young people to the best of their peers, standing back, and watching them bloom. William’s Weekend Writing Project Take inspiration from Lena’s piece for a recent writing workshop on nature writing, “The Plum Tree,” for Thanksgiving weekend’s writing project. You can read it below. Lena’s prose is exquisite. The paragraph that starts with “There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye . . .” includes prose that is so beautiful it gives me goose bumps. Two of the most remarkable aspects of Lena’s story are how she so quickly establishes a caring relationship between the two characters, and between us and the tree. Note how effectively Lena uses personification—the literary device whereby you give nonhuman creatures, in this case a tree, some human ways of being. When Lena speaks of the tree’s “boughs reaching towards . . .” she animates the tree. She gives it life. Gives it a sense of purpose. Also, I think because we can imagine ourselves making the same gesture as the tree—reaching—Lena draws us into imagining we are one with this very alien being. Another example: Lena writes, “The tree sat there, calmly, waiting for the worst.” Effortlessly, we are drawn into the story’s imaginative space. We are standing there with this thinking, feeling tree, waiting “for the worst.” For your nature writing this weekend, I’d like you to spend some time quietly observing a piece of nature. Which, given the circumstances, can be observing a pet. Let your imagination do its work so that the characters in your story, whether a dog, or a tree, or wind, take on the warmth of life. And as always, if you are happy with your work, consider sending it to Emma, our editor, to consider. Until next week—on Tuesday, we hope, as well as next Saturday in the newsletter! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Jane, 12, wrote a poem about the way COVID has stolen the sense of normalcy. We published a travelogue documenting Mahati’s pre-pandemic trip to Whittier, Alaska. Learn more about the unique community by reading Mahati’s post. Nora, 12, reviewed The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer. Find out why Nora enjoys the fairy-tale-with-a-twist book series so much. “How cool would it be to live inside a book?” Pragnya asks at the start of her review for Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale. Read what Pragnya thinks of the book where the main character finds herself lost within the books she reads. Becca traces her experiences of Yom Kippur throughout her life, ending with this year’s very unusual celebration. Read Becca’s post to learn what her take-away is. Lena Aloise, 11Harvard, MA From the Stone Soup blog November 2020 The Plum Tree By Lena Aloise, 11 (Harvard, MA)   He was happiest early in the daytime, when the sky was painted over crimson and violet, when the crisp breeze flushed his cheeks a rosy red, when the birds sang their soft melody, whimsically conversing. Nowadays, there was nothing that brought him more pleasure than such a beautiful silence and he was content to be alone, for the most part. Human company depressed him. There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye. She sat on her throne of grasses, boughs reaching towards an infinite expanse of sky, bearing leaves of olive green and sagging under the weight of her indigo fruits. She bore the look of not a queen, but a mother, like the ones he had only read about in story books. He could not help feeling a twinge of jealousy, looking upon the spherical children that she loved so dearly. Why could not someone hold him with such tenderness? It brought him

“Squash Fest” by Taeyi Kim, 11 (Seoul, South Korea) Published in Stone Soup November 2020 A note from Emma How are you all doing? I have to admit that I am burnt out. I am tired of teaching my students over Zoom, tired of staying six feet away from others, tired of doing everything alone. 2020 has worn me down! I am hopeful that the news of a vaccine is accurate and that we will be able to resume something closer to our pre-pandemic lives soon. Lucy Hurwitz’s short poem in the November issue really captures how I have been feeling most mornings. It reads: Wrong side I wake up on that side of bed. My leg’s my arm, My arm’s my head. I love how Lucy takes a common idiom—”I woke up on the wrong side of the bed!”—and pushes it farther. It’s not just that the speaker woke up “on that side of bed” (the missing “the” is perfectly disorienting) but that she is somehow “wrong” herself: “My leg’s my arm, / My arm’s my head.” At the same time as it perfectly captures this feeling of waking up “off,” it’s also funny! This weekend, I challenge you to write a short poem like Lucy’s that is inspired by an everyday idiom. Here are a few you might consider using: It takes two to tango Let’s go back to the drawing board That’s the last straw I’m pulling your leg I’m bent of shape Time is money Her head is in the clouds And, since this is the last note we’ll write you before the holiday, I hope you all have a happy, delicious, safe Thanksgiving holiday! Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Mahati writes a lyrical farewell to summer, with tons of sensory details. Jessie, 8, reviews Out of My Mind by Shannon M. Draper (which we’ve published reviews of before and also was a Book Club pick!). Read about why Jessie recommends it. Check out the update from our 28th Writing Workshop, which was all about word choice. Pragnya, one of our new Book Reviewers, has another one for us! This time, she reviewed When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, which she says has a “perfect balance between reality and fiction.” Olivia, 10, reviewed The Doughnut King by Jessie Janowitz. She starts the review with this compelling line: “Warning: Once you open The Doughnut King, you’ll be stuck in the story for eternity.” Did you hear who won the Nobel Prizes this year? Mahati gives us a helpful roundup of the winners on the blog, plus some background on the award itself. Lucy Hurwitz, 10Newton, MA From Stone Soup November 2020 Wrong Side By Lucy Hurwitz, 10 (Newton, MA)   I wake up on that side of bed. My leg’s my arm, My arm’s my head. . . . /MORE from the November issue   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.