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“Canadian Beach” by Tessa Papastergiou, 11 (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) Published in Stone Soup, February 2019 A note from Jane First things first: this is the final weekend for everyone working on a book for our 2020 Book Contest to make their final edits, take a deep breath, and submit their manuscripts via Submittable. The contest closes on Monday! Emma, our editor, is back from maternity leave and can’t wait to starting reading through the contest entries. After the strange year we have had, you might think you have all earned a rest this summer—whether you have submitted your art, music, or writing; completed a book for our contest attended our writing workshop; responded to our Daily Creativity prompts; and/or entered our weekly Flash Contests. But no—we have a new challenge for you through the rest of August! Poetry submissions will be free of charge for the rest of the month. Polish up some poems, write some new ones, and send them in for Emma to consider. Now is the time! Seize the day, keep on writing, and send us your poetry soon. This week we are highlighting another poetry collection that placed second in last year’s Book Contest, and which makes up half of our the Stone Soup summer issue: Searching for Bow and Arrows by Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer. It is also available in our online store and on Amazon as an individual ebook. These are poems about family and collective memory, reflecting deeply on experiences past, present, and future. The poem we are sharing in this weekend’s newsletter has evocative imagery, and (for me at least) is filled with melancholy: People toss wet seaweed, as if it’s a joke To lose one’s memories. We have talked before about how different individuals can experience apparently the same things completely differently, and what rich matter that is for creative work—whether it’s how we see a color, experience a flavor, feel about an event, or interpret a person’s character. This poem represents the possibilities of these differing perspectives in such a subtle, beautiful way. One person’s carefree beach game is another’s painful experience of loss, or at least a pause for thought. While we sincerely hope you are all having many, many carefree moments this summer, we also hope that you will take the time to write or make art in your more reflective moments, and that you will be bold and share your work with us when you do! Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #18 Weekly Flash Contest #18: Choose one of three opening lines from classic novels, and use it as the starting point for your own short story. The week commencing July 27 (Daily Creativity Prompt #91) was our eighteenth week of flash contests, and produced a lot of entries. Our entrants took the opening words of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, or I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, in all sorts of creative directions. The pieces we received ranged from stories about extreme weather to family and family history—and to some introspective narratives. We immensely enjoyed reading all of the writing we received; well done to everyone for your work on this challenge. 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 “Wash the World Away” by Fern Hadley, 11 (Cary, NC) “Streaks” by Rachel Feldman, 10 (Narberth, PA) “My Manderley” by Anna Haakenson, 12 (Beach Park, IL) “A Letter” by Shuyin Liu, 8 (Kirkland, WA) “Pour Your Heart Into the Sink” by Alice Xie, 12 (West Windsor, NJ) Honorable Mentions “No Possibility” by Katherine Bergsieker, 12 (Denver, CO) “The Light Will Come Through Again” by Sneha Jiju, 12 (Chandler, AZ) “Dream and Dream More . . .” by Prisha Aswal, 7 (Portland, OR) “In the Kitchen Sink” by Allie Dollar, 11 (Monticello, FL) “Deadly Heat Wave” by Nishil KC, 10 (Chantilly, VA) Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! In her poem “Gas Mask,” Madi captures a scary scene in just a few words. Samson, 13, writes a similarly frightening poem, perfectly describing the feeling of “Overwhelming Panic.” Grace, 11, reviews the book The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart. Read her post to learn why it’s one of the few books that has “truly spoken” to Grace. Check out Aaron’s digital artwork—a portrait of him as an island. Plus, read his paragraph that explains the work, including how it relates to the pandemic. Read Jackson’s short, humorous piece called “Quarantine Robbery.” We posted an update from our writing workshop #18, where the topic was writing about food. So many creative pieces written during the workshop! Have you ever been to Norway? Vivaan writes his latest travelogue on his time in the Scandinavian country, with beautiful pictures of the fjords and some recommendations for where to visit. Julia, 13, wrote a story called “My Starduster Friends,” which tells the tale of one girl’s time in quarantine and the book series she picks up and can’t seem to put down. In “The Invention,” Mckenna, 8, dreams of a world where a young girl creates a machine to make life during coronavirus much easier. From the July/August 2020 issue of Stone Soup Memories Caught in Seaweed by Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer, 13 (Brookline, MA) From Searching for Bow and Arrows, awarded Second Place in our 2019 Book Contest!  >Wet feet on the sand Touching the seaweed. Memories dissolve in the tide, People toss wet seaweed, as if it’s a joke To lose one’s memories. Yet when the seaweed dries in the sand, It forms a grid And returns to life . . . Memory restored. To read more of the collection, go to your copy of the Summer issue of Stone Soup, or purchase the ebook version of Searching for Bow and Arrows in our online store or at Amazon. 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:

“Among the Asparagus” by Ula Pomian, 13 (Ontario, Canada) Published in the July/August 2017 issue of Stone Soup A note from Jane This year’s double summer issue is a special poetry issue, composed of the two wonderful poetry collections by our 2019 book contest second-placed authors, Analise Braddock (The Golden Elephant) and Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer (Searching for Bow and Arrows). Last summer, our special issue was a collection of reviews: book reviews, poetry reviews, and a movie review. In that issue, there were two reviews of the same book, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which is a book I too loved from the first time I read it when I was a girl. You might not expect to read two reviews of the same thing in Stone Soup, but it’s actually incredibly interesting to see two different reviewers’ thoughts side by side. Both loved the book, and both wrote beautifully-crafted reviews of it—each in their own way. Ava Horton’s review is personal. We meet her as her younger self reading the book for the first time, and she gives us insights into the book by powerfully communicating the impact it had on her. Vandana Ravi’s review opens with two dramatic questions that get to the heart of the book and its messages, then moves on to highlight elegantly the interweaving of the book’s themes. Both of these reviews are below—and I‘m sure they will make you want to read the book for yourself, if you haven’t already! Reading these reviews and thinking about my own love of the book made me wish I had written something about it when I first read it. I can (and will!) re-read it now, but I’d love to know what my younger self thought of it at the time. We all read so many books, watch so many movies and TV series, see so many works of art. So, this weekend, why not start a new review journal: every time you read a book, watch a TV series or a movie or a theater performance, see an exhibit or a work of art, write a short review of it (and the date) in that journal. You’ll be building up a valuable collection of your experiences of other people’s creative work and your responses to it. Start today with a review of the most recent thing you’ve read or sen, and then write a review every time you have an experience with a piece of creative work—whether you liked or enjoyed it or not. It might be just a few lines, or it might be a whole page of ideas it gave you. It’s your journal: you decide! This is your chance to reflect and think about why you feel as you do about works of art, and as your journal builds, you will see how your feelings change over time, and start to make connections among the different creative works you experience. And, you’ll have the future fun of seeing what you thought of something the first time you experienced it! I want to close today, as William did last week, by sending you all to the Stone Soup website, Stonesoup.com. Follow the links to the fabulous work that has been posted this week. If you are not a subscriber, please, please subscribe—and tell your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Subscription dollars are what make our work possible. The work our print magazine features is magnificent—worth re-reading—and the magazine itself is a pleasure to hold in your hands. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #17 Weekly Flash Contest #17: Write about a character waiting for something, but don’t reveal what they’re waiting for until the end. The week commencing July 20 (Daily Creativity prompt #86) was our seventeenth week of flash contests, with all the prompts for the week set by former contributor Anna Rowell. Thanks, Anna, for setting some great challenges and helping us judge our massive pile of entries! Congratulations to our winners and honorable mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) on the Flash Contest Winners’ Roll page at the Stone Soup website. Winners “From the Other Side of the Road” by Amruta Krishnan Srinivasan, 9 “Waiting for a Comet” by Madeline Sornson, 13 “Stalling” by Sophia Do, 12 “Wait for It…” by Ian Xie, 12 “Rain” by Kyler Min, 9 Honorable Mentions “Something Worth Waiting For” by Mila Zhao, 6 “The Waiting Game” by Elsa N. Ahern, 10 “The Woman” by April Yu, 12 “The Waiting Hill” by Liam Hancock, 12 “Cats of War and Peace” by Sneha Jiju, 12 Also, look out on our COVID-19 blog next week for “The Goal” by Ziva Ye, 9, which both responds to the contest prompt and tells a great story related to the current pandemic–from a very unexpected perspective! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Eleanor’s poem “Anxiety” conveys the uneasy feeling of living during the pandemic, though she ends on a positive note. Read the update from last week’s Writing Workshop, which was led by Anya. Participants were encouraged to think about music in their writing. Aviva, 9, writes about this year’s unusual preparations for back-to-school in “Six Feet Away From Our Teacher, Six Thousand Away From Normal.” In “Fighter,” Olivia, 10, composes a poem that tells of the fight waged by healthcare workers against coronavirus. If you were a fruit or vegetable, what do you think you would be? Trevor, 11, thinks he would be a cucumber. Read his blog post to learn why, and leave a comment! In “The End of the World,” Lucas wrestles with a difficult topic that you may be thinking about more often lately. From the July/August 2019 issue of Stone Soup A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett Two Reviews     Ava Horton, 13 Review by Ava Horton, 13 (Gresham, OR) I consider myself privileged. I have a wonderful family, live in a big house in the suburbs, and I go

“Peering Out” by Delaney Slote, 12 Published in the July/August 2018 issue A note from William Call for Bloggers Are there ongoing protests in your city related to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement? How about public art? We’re asking for blog submissions related to BLM in your town. You can submit art, writing, music, or whatever you’re inspired to create. We’re also looking for readers who live in Portland, OR to write about what is going on there. If you have anything you’d like to say about the situation, please submit it to our blog category. To our readers in Portland—please stay safe. Book Contest Warning! Warning! Deadline of August 10 approaching for Stone Soup’s Second Annual Book Contest! I know that a good number of you are on top of the deadline, and some of you have even submitted your manuscripts already. Congratulations! As a writer who is often running late, I can tell you that the ability to write to the deadline is a life skill that is (almost) as essential to the craft of writing as writing itself. Art and Poetry Peering Out, the featured artwork in today’s newsletter, is by Delaney Slote. What a difference time makes! In the Summer of 2018, when we first published this photograph, it made us at Stone Soup smile. Two girls looking out the window into the sunny outdoors planning an excursion. It is a photograph that suggests possibilities. At least it did in 2018. If this had been sent to us today, we would have read it as the opposite: As two girls looking out at a world shut down, one in which they are not quite prisoners but also very much not free. A world in which looking out the window reminds them of the danger we are all in, and what we have lost. This is a great lesson in how the meaning we find in art shifts with our experiences. I want you to keep this photograph in mind as you grow older. There is no question that at some point in school you will be assigned to read a book that you find totally boring but that has an outsized reputation as a brilliant work of art. This happened to me once with a novel by Charles Dickens I was assigned in high school: David Copperfield. What an utterly stupid book, I thought! And then, forty years later, I re-read it for a book that I was writing. I was amazed! What a deep and profound book that novel that I thought stupid really was. As a reader I had needed more experience, like having been divorced, to find the heart of the story. There needed to be a different William, not a sixteen-year-old William but a William that had more to bring to the book. Delany’s photograph is magnificently composed. Look at the arcs made by the girls’ arms. Pay attention to the shapes defined by the way their arms and bodies divide up the space. The part of the photograph I like the most is how the girls are together but separate, but also linked by how they are holding onto the curtain. They will both be feeling the pull of the other. Friends, sisters, cousins, sharing a moment together. Last year, there were two second place winners in our book contest, both poets: Analise Braddock and Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer. For those of you who subscribe to Stone Soup, you will have received both of their books in your Summer Special Poetry Issue. This week, we are featuring a poem by Analise in the newsletter. In a future newsletter, we will feature a poem by Tatiana. Their books are both available in the July/August edition of Stone Soup, which you can buy via our online store, and they are each available as individual ebooks, which you can also purchase for $4.99 at our store (and/or at Amazon). Please scroll down to the bottom of the Newsletter to read Analise’s “The Heart of the Earth” from her book The Golden Elephant. This poem is so powerful. So perfect. I just want you to read it. Please read it aloud. Thank you, Analise. I want to close today by sending you all to the Stone Soup website, Stonesoup.com. Follow the links to the fabulous work that has been posted this week. If you are not a subscriber, please, please subscribe—and tell your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Subscription dollars are what makes our work possible. The work our print magazine features is magnificent—worth re-reading—and the magazine itself is a pleasure to hold in your hand. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #16 Weekly Flash Contest #16: Write an unsettling poem. The week commencing July 13 (Daily Creativity prompt #81) was our sixteenth week of flash contests, with a sinister challenge set by contributor and writing workshop member Liam Hancock, 13. It seems everyone had plenty of scary stuff to get out of their systems: We had an absolute record number of entries this week. More than 70, in fact! Well done, Liam, for setting such a terrifically inspiring challenge, and thank you for all your work helping us read and judge our huge pile. It was really fun working with you. We were looking for the creepiest, most unsettling poems for our winners’ list, and we certainly found them! While all our winners had slightly different subjects, all of them built tension through their poems to a frankly terrifying end. And they showed us that while sinister, creepy, eerie things often come at night, these feelings can be evoked in broad daylight too. The honorable mentions were equally varied, moving between suspense, nightmares, death, unexplained disappearances, and even managing to make a butterfly into something sinister. 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 “In the Light of the Red Moon” by Katherine Bergsieker, 12, Denver, CO “Something Peculiar” by Fern Hadley, 11, Cary,