About

“McArthur Lights” by Oskar Cross, 10 (Oakland, CA). Published in the September 2020 issue. A note from Jane The first copies of Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella Three Days till EOC have been delivered to readers, and we are already getting some amazing feedback. The chief of United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) included a review of the book in his latest message on the UNAI website, and other readers are already posting positive reviews on Amazon. Congratulations, Abhi! Abhi has been interviewed by his local paper, the Stillwater News Press, for publication tomorrow (Sunday, September 13). Also this week, we were delighted to publish a review of his book by Anya Geist, 14, on our own website. Besides writing a thoughtful review, Anya also recorded an interview with Abhi over Zoom. They had a great conversation about Stone Soup, as well as about Abhi’s book. It’s a great chance to (virtually) meet the author and gives real insight into his ideas, his writing process, and the work that went into crafting Three Days till EOC. I urge all of you, students and adults, to watch the video. I learned a lot about writing from their conversation, and I think you will too. And get your copy of the book in our store or any other bookstore: it’s a really great read! There was a problem with our website last week, and a large number of people experienced problems, especially when try to subscribe. We are very sorry! Everything is fixed now, so do please try again if you suffered with this problem. We have decided to extend our Labor Day 15% off offer through the end of the weekend to thank you for bearing with us (discount code: LABORDAY20). Over the summer Anya Geist, the author of the review and Stone Soup contributor, has been interning with us. It has been such a pleasure for us to work with Anya, and we wanted to acknowledge her incredible contribution and say a public thank you to her in this newsletter. Anya has achieved so much over the last two-and-a-half months. She managed a project to conduct and record Zoom interviews with a dozen of our contributors and Workshop and Book Club participants. You are seeing the first of these—the interview with Abhi Sukhdial—this weekend, and there are more to come. We would not have these great videos, which are an important record of a moment in time as well as a really interesting insight into young writers’ processes and motivations, without her. In addition, she has worked hard behind the scenes on all sorts of production tasks (on the blog, on contests, on writing workshops, on new project ideas, and more). Everything we do at Stone Soup is about encouraging and celebrating the brilliant work and mature contributions that young students can make in terms of creative work. Having the opportunity to work with Anya added a new dimension to realizing our mission, and we hope that with the help of our supporters we will be able to set up a more formal internship program in future. Thank you, Anya, so much! We are excited to continue working with you for the rest of the year at the Writing Workshop and the Book Club, and we wish you every success at high school! Finally, now that our flash contest is happening once a month instead of every week, the closing date for entries has moved to Sundays at noon (Pacific time). This means you still have time to write and send in your entries, so please accept this week’s writing prompt as your weekend writing challenge. Full details are below, and at our website. We can’t wait to read what you write.Until next time, Monthly Flash Contest Deadline tomorrow, Sunday September 13 Every month we hold a flash contest based on one of our weekly creativity prompts. The deadline for entries is Sunday at noon Pacific time, so you still have time to create or polish your work and send it in to the September contest! This month’s challenge: Create a piece of flash fiction written from the perspective of the first object you saw when you woke up this morning. Your narrative should be no longer than 250 words. Five winners will have their winning writing published at Stonesoup.com, and all the winners and honorable mentions will be posted there and in this newsletter. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Chloe, 9, created a lovely piece of digital art called Fall of Silence. We posted another art piece, this time by Aya, 13. Aya titled her work COVID Isolation. Does this piece reflect how you feel about isolation? Leave a comment to let us know. April, 13, wrote a poem about a place that many of us have gotten familiar with these past few months: our bedrooms. Read “Perfect for Me” for eloquent descriptions of April’s room and how it makes her feel. As Jane mentioned above, Anya wrote a wonderful review of Abhi’s Three Days till EOC. Here’s the first paragraph of Anya’s well-written review: “When you are an avid reader, or anyone who reads books at all, there comes a point when all of the stories start to blend together. You pick up, say, a new dystopian book at the store, and sigh, because you know it’ll just be a new version of The Hunger Games or Divergent or a million other books, with the same plot, same characters, same villains. It’s inevitable. Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella, Three Days till EOC, is different.”   Yesterday we published another travelogue from Vivaan, our prolific travel blogger. This time Vivaan visited Warsaw, Poland, and detailed his experience visiting two museums. Allen, 5, wrote a short and sweet piece about his classmate’s birthday and how it was celebrated over Zoom. From Stone Soup September 2020 Liv Baker, 11Seattle, WA Everything I Love By Liv Baker, 11 (Seattle, WA) The ride up the mountain The thousands of trees The pine and bark Smell Makes me feel Like I am Relaxed and calm The rain pattering Against

“Self-portrait” (acrylics) Alyssa Wu, 12 (Pleasanton, CA) Published in the September 2020 issue of Stone Soup A note from William Labor Day sale! 15% off Stone Soup print and digital subscriptions, as well as books—including our newly published Three Days till EOC by Abhi Sukhdial. Use the code LABORDAY20 at the checkout. Now that you are all back at school, we have a few administrative details to share on the new programs we began for lockdown and are continuing through the end of the year. Writing Workshop and Book Club The Writing Workshop resumes next week on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 9 a.m. PDT with a workshop on metaphor. The class is for students ages nine through fourteen. Our schedule from now on will be to run Book Club in that same slot on the last Saturday of each month and Writing Workshop on all the other Saturdays (apart from Thanksgiving weekend). Having run the programs for free since the spring, we will now be asking for a small fee for the classes from non-subscribers, which I am sure you will all understand. We will also need everyone to register via EventBrite. Once you have registered, you will receive joining details for the Zoom calls. All the details and registration links will be posted on the relevant page on our website, Stonesoup.com. We are scheduling the performance we’d discussed with the previous attendees for the last class in December. This public reading will include work from all the classes since March, as well as new work from the second season. Creativity Prompts and Flash Contests We thought that since you are going back to school, it would make sense to reduce the frequency of the creativity prompts and flash contests. We also need to make sure our small staff has enough time to complete the additional work that comes our way in the run up to the end of the year! Thus, the flash contest is now monthly—first week of the month—and we are sending out a weekly, rather than daily, report. We are preparing a questionnaire to get your opinions on various Stone Soup activities, including the flash contest and daily prompts. Refugee Project Laura Moran, the Refugee Project coordinator, has been corresponding with the Kakuma camp in Kenya for months. Kakuma is the largest refugee camp in the world, with nearly 200,000 residents. The camp is operated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We have just been approved as an educational organization authorized to work with the camp authorities. Thank you, Laura, for your persistence! We had a Zoom meeting this week with the UNHCR education officer, and several others at the Kakuma camp, including the headteacher of the girls primary school funded by Angelina Jolie. We are developing a program with that school initially, with the intention of expanding to other less well-funded schools over time. We will now be meeting with people at the Kakuma camp on a regular basis to develop our partnership. Jane Levi and I also met with our website designers on Thursday to discuss building out a section of the website for submissions from refugee students. This portion of the website will have its own identity within the larger Stone Soup website. We look forward to soon being able to share with you works from refugee students that have been sent to us over the last year. Sincere thanks to those of you who are supporting this project. Your donations are making this important work possible. William’s Weekend Project Kateri Escober Doran’s “Locked out of Kindergarten” and Alyssa Wu’s self-portrait are the two creative works featured in today’s newsletter. Both of these works are extraordinary. I hope you will spend some time with each. Alyssa’s self-portrait shows us a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, hair done up in a bun like a dancer and wearing a black top with a striking bird print. The black hair, black eyebrows, black eyes lined with black eye liner, black ear studs, and the black top gives this portrait a fantastic energy. The portrait projects itself in front of the vibrant green background. And the birds! A magnificent print, striking in its simplicity, and so effective. If you don’t feel confident drawing or painting, then use photography to develop your creative vision. Pick up your phone or camera. Dress yourself with a striking outfit. Then, either work photographing yourself in a mirror or work with with a mirror and your hands or work with your phone or camera to take a portrait of yourself. You can use a selfie mode and also photograph yourself in a mirror. “Locked out of Kindergarten” by Kateri Escober Doran was the winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest. I have just re-read this story. It is everything that Stone Soup is about. Congratulations to Kateri for this well-remembered and well-written evocation of being in kindergarten—not yet on the first rung of the ladder to life. After you read this story, which I hope you will do right now, I’d like you to close your eyes for a few minutes, let the memories flow, and at least start your own narrative about something that happened to you when you were much younger. Kateri offers insights into the thinking of a child much younger than she is. As writers, one of your tasks is to create characters who offer insights into human behavior and emotions. Try to get back to a memory of you when you were younger and thinking in ways that are different from how you think now. Besides recording a memory that is likely to grow less precise with time, this is good practice for creating characters that think differently than you. As always, if you are happy with what you create, please go to our website and send Emma Wood, our editor, what you have done. Stay safe. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #22 Flash Contest #22: Write a Story About a Unifying Place For our last in the current series of weekly flash

A note from Emma When I selected Three Days til EOC as the winner of our inaugural Stone Soup book contest, I didn’t know how close it would seem we were already to the end of our civilization—especially in our little corner of the world, in Santa Cruz, California, where the pandemic has teamed up with climate change-driven wildfires, suddenly forcing evacuees into proximity with others after months of social distancing. Our home is in the evacuation zone, but we are lucky to be in Connecticut staying with my parents for a few months; we have been watching everything unfold at home with sadness and fear for our community. The fire has added a lot of uncertainty to an already uncertain year. We live in the mountains and even if our home is spared, we may be without power for months. Where will we live in the meantime? Will we need to leave Santa Cruz? And if we stay, what will it feel like up there, with some areas of the forest devastated and so many who have lost their homes trying to rebuild? The circumstances we are experiencing now may be different from the ones described in Three Days till EOC but the situation is the same: our world is in crisis, and it is up to us—not just one person, but all of us—to save it. I’m so excited to finally share Abhi’s novella with you all, and I hope, when you read it, you will be inspired to write and to take action against climate change. The official publication date is September 1, but you can preorder it now here, and at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your usual bookstores.  Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #21 Weekly Flash Contest #21: Write a poem about your favorite place Congratulations to our winners and honorable mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “Cherish the Temporary” by Reagan Ricker, 13 “My Favorite People” by Chloe Song, 12 “My Mind” by Analise Braddock, 9 “A Place Yet to Be” by Anushka, 10 “My Favorite Place to Be” by Georgia Marshall, 11 Honorable Mentions “The Observation Deck” by Nicholas Buckley, 13 “Perfect for Me” by April Yu, 12 “In the mountains” by Quinn Peacock Brush, 10 “Winter in my Bed” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 8 “My Room” by Julia Marcus, 13 Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Alice imagines life as a book in her post “A Different Kind of Chapter.” Maybe this chapter of our books is a little sad, but rest assured that more exciting chapters will follow. In “Exploring Madame Tussauds,” Alex gives us an overview of the famous wax museum, including how the sculptures of famous figures are made. Emma entered her poem “Mad World 2020” in our Flash Contest that asked participants to write a poem inspired by a song. She uses the lyrics of a song to discuss the chaos of the year. One of our frequent contributors, Liam Hancock, writes “A Plea from the Red Zone.” Read about his experience with the wildfires in California and what he wants others to know. Arshia, 10, writes a poem called “Thank You Doctors” as a tribute to the frontline health care workers who are working tirelessly during the pandemic. Are you a fan of Hamilton? Olivia, 11, wrote a poem inspired by the King’s song from the popular musical. Read updates from the latest meetings of our book club, including an announcement of the next book we’ll be discussing. “Today” by Grace, 11, is a hopeful poem that demonstrates how every day during the pandemic can feel completely different. A call for reviewers! We have three books to send to young reviewers who will commit to reading the book and writing a review for the website. (You can look at other book reviews on the website here.) All three books are middle-grade realistic fiction, but for different age levels. We’re looking for a reviewer age 11 or younger for the book that’s similar to the Ramona Quimby series, but whose narrator is a young Black girl named Ryan Hart. For the next book, which is a book about disability and brotherhood that’s been translated into English from Dutch, we’re looking for a reviewer between the ages of 11 to 13. Then, our last book has some serious themes, so we’re looking for a review age 12 or older. It has a mystery, an eccentric grandma, and gymnastics. Get in touch with Sarah@stonesoup.com if you’re interested in reviewing any of those books. Three Days till EOC By Abhimanyu Sukhdial, 12  Winner of our 2019 Book Contest Cover art: Stars, photograph by Grace Williams, 12 “Choose well. Your choice is brief and yet endless.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe * * * Giant waves, riding on the backs of punishing 150 mph tailwinds, crashed on the empty beaches of Soledad and came roaring onshore. The few cafés and shops along the sandy shore collapsed like a child’s house of cards and were mercilessly swallowed by the hungry, monstrous seas. The residents ran amok—their hearts raced fast and almost leapt out of their bodies. The ground shook hard from the screams and yells coming out of their mouths. The endless onslaught of rain flooded the already eroding hillside and threatened to destroy the homes on the hilltop. The massive seawall originally built 50 years ago was holding up—for now. It was the year 2100 and water, the thing that matters to all life, was wiping out life itself. A world so wondrous—with sea creatures, land animals, and humans of all colors, religions, and differences—was being annihilated, and it was soul-crushing to see. A year ago, the last surviving 1,000 humans were gathered and put on electric cargo ships to make the journey here to this hill. Many didn’t understand why it needed to end like this, even though the warning signs had been there for more than 100 years and alarm bells had been ringing for almost 50 years. But the