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Canon PowerShot G7X A note from William Juneteenth—Black Lives Matter. With every new police murder of an unarmed black man, and images of police attacking Americans who are exercising their constitutional right to protest government actions, it is clear that for many Americans, their city police can feel more like an occupying army than a civilian police force there to help. Every American who is in a position of power to do something can no longer hide. This includes Stone Soup. Of course, we have published work by African American students over the years. And in our internal discussions we are often saying how we would like more work from African American students, but like so many small organizations with their heart in the right place, just staying in business takes up all our focus. We are aware that a big problem is that African American students opening the pages of Stone Soup see this as another “white space.” It just won’t feel instantly welcoming. We have some ideas for how we can address this problem, but we need some outside advice. We would like to create a predominantly African American advisory board to work with us to develop long-term sustainable programs that will turn this around so that all Americans, and all students of African descent wherever they live—Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, Oceania—will see enough students who look like them in our pages to feel it is a welcoming place for their creative work. You may write to me directly if you are interested in helping us get this advisory panel off the ground. Thank you. New order form! The biggest news at Stone Soup this week is that we finally have an online order form we are proud of. This form is a long time in the making—and will give you a hint of what is in store for the entire website. The new form makes it much easier to see what you are ordering. It also tells something about Stone Soupfor people who are new to it. If you haven’t subscribed, please use our new form—and tell your friends. All of these new, free, COVID-19 programs: the daily prompts, the writing workshop, the book club, and the daily blog posts, are are funded through subscriptions. A couple of us still work without pay, so your subscription will make a difference to all of us, and what we can achieve. All subscribers get All Digital Access, and print subscribers also get a beautiful magazine delivered to their house 11 months of the year. Subscriptions start at only $4.99 per month. Thank you. Summer school: The joint Stone Soup and Society for Young Inklings summer program started two weeks ago and is going strong. New dates will be announced shortly, and right now there is space in the June class being taught by our own Stone Soup team member Laura Moran, called The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Anthropology at Home. This class is a late addition, and to be honest, it looks like people have been a little bit afraid of it. So. Here is what I can say. Laura Moran, who runs the Stone Soup Refugee Program and the Wednesday Book Club, is a PhD anthropologist. Her specialty is actually refugee children. She is teaching a one-week summer program starting in a little over a week. Students will be using their own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic as the basis for their writing. What students learn in this class will help them with developing characters in their stories. The class explores the sometimes ambiguous line between nonfiction and fiction.  Photograph and story by Anya Geist: The Newsletter is long, already. I am out of space to give justice to the photograph and story and to say all that I would like to say. I spent a lot of time and a couple of trips to New Jersey in the late 1990s working with Nelly Toll, a woman who survived the Holocaust hiding with her mother in a city that was then called Lvov and was then in Poland. Nelly’s father and brother went into hiding someplace else but were apparently found and murdered, as they were never reunited. During the period we were in close contact she hired a police artist to make a picture of him so she would have that memory. During hiding, Nelly’s mother had Nelly make paintings and stories as one way to deal with time and the stress. Within the next few months I will go back to that archive of material I worked on with Nelly to share with all of you. Please read Anya’s story below, and also spend time with her multi-layered photograph of a menorah-like candlestick with Christmas tree in the background. I find her photograph to be unusually calming. The candlelight so present. A window of light through which we see into another world. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, one of my parents’ closest friends was one of the Jewish children who was sent from Germany to England during the war (on the so-called kindertransport), so this situation from Anya’s story feels very alive to me. One of the biggest conflicts I had with my father (he died a few years ago when he was 93) was that he was always saying that “It could happen again. It could happen here.”  The “it” being another Holocaust. This annoyed me so! But what we are seeing today, and not just in America, is that, unfortunately, he was right. People forget where intolerance can lead. So, all of you reading this newsletter today, whether you are a student or an adult, please have empathy for those who are different from you. And remember that if you do not speak up when the police come for your neighbor, that it will be too late when they come for you. This could be something that you could talk about together as a family using Anya’s story, plus the daily news, as the catalyst. Weekend project: Let me change the mood! In the Friday Writing Workshop, one of the students (thank

“In the Wind” Photograph by Abigail Craven, 13 (Harland, WI) Published in Stone Soup Magazine June 2020 A note from Jane Welcome to summer The work we are highlighting in this week’s Newsletter, both from the fabulous June issue of the Magazine, are all about summertime. The bright red of the basketball hoop against the blue sky and high clouds in Abigail Craven’s photograph above; the poetic evocation of summer nights “cool like ice cubes / melting in your mouth” in Juliet del Fabbro’s poem below. Most of you in the USA are now finished with school for the year, and it’s the start of summer vacation; for others, holiday time is not far away. It’s the start of an unusual summer for everyone, with many of the plans we’d made and things we’d normally do thrown into question by the pandemic response. But this poem and photograph in their different ways focus our minds on some of the timeless, unchanging things about the different season, things that we can always enjoy and respond to: the weather, the color of the sky, the feel of the summer breeze. We wish all of you a happy, creative summer. To help with that creative summer, our weekly Book Club meetings and Writing Workshop are continuing through the summer, free to subscribers. If you do not have a digital or print+digital subscription to Stone Soup, you are welcome to try out the class before you commit to a monthly or annual subscription. We look forward to seeing you all and working with you through the summer! Printer running late Like everyone, we have had to face a few obstacles at Stone Soup in recent months. Most of our work is already automated, so we’ve been luckier than most small non-profits. But one big area that has been disrupted for us is the printing of physical issues and books. Our printer has increased its lead times not once, but twice, since the start of the pandemic–both times, without notice. The time between our sending them the files, to the issues being printed ready to be shipped to our mailing house (who then sends them on to all of you) has gone from 5 days before March, to 10 days in April, 15 days in May, and now to 22 days! This means that although the issue was ready and our print order went in even earlier than usual, it was still too late for us to guarantee the issues being ready to send out to you on June 15th as normal. At this point, we think we will not have the issues ready to ship until the end of the month, so print subscribers will probably receive the July/August Summer double issue in the second week of July. We are very sorry; and we assure you we are going as fast as we can. We’ll let you know how it progresses and what to expect. Summer camp Last week I was lucky enough to be the Stone Soup team member who got to drop into the first week-long writing summer camp with the Society of Young Inklings, to chat with Naomi Kinsman, the incredible leader of the sessions, and the participants. I arrived on the day that everyone had dressed up as the main character in their fantasy novel: the costumes were amazing, and I was so envious of how much fun everyone was having! Congratulations to everyone in the class–we can’t wait to read what you’ve written. To all of you booked in to future camps in June–you are in for a treat. For everyone else, we will try to get some additional dates organised as soon as we can–more news on that next week! Weekend project This weekend, to celebrate the freedom of mind that comes with the end of school, I want you to work on something free form and abstract. Try making some marbled paper, like the kind in old-fashioned book end-papers or on beautiful stationary. There’s a technique for doing that (as well as some other fun stuff) at the Tate website. Then, spend some time really looking at the patterns and color combinations you have made. What does it bring to mind? A poem, a piece of prose, an idea, a portrait? Whatever it is, write or draw it on that same piece of paper.  Let yourself be free to express whatever you feel, and make something beautiful to inspire yourself through summer. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #10 Weekly Flash Contest #10: Write down 5 ideas for some impossible characters – space frogs, singing clocks, walking cactuses – the more unlikely the better. Pick 2 of them. What would happen if they met? Write a story about it. The week commencing June 1st (Daily Creativity prompt #51) was our tenth week of flash contests, and our entrants rose to the double challenge of inventing some crazily impossible characters, and putting them together in bizarre situations. Well done everyone for your wildly creative stories and ideas! This was such a strange and fascinating group to choose from, that we found it just too hard to narrow down the number to share with you. So, this week we have 6 winners, whose work is published below, and 4 very honorable Honorable Mentions. Congratulations to them all! You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) at the Stone Soup website. Winners Isabel Bashaw, 10, Enumclaw, WA Lucy Berberich, 11, Oxford, OH Federico Lynch Ferraris, 11, New York, NY Lila Laton, 10, New York, NY Tilly Marlow, 10, Bristol, United Kingdom Alice Xie, 12, West Windsor, NJ Honorable Mentions “Enchanted Woods” (story and drawing) by Amelia Barth, 10, Elgin, IL “The Mathematician and the Songstress (A Story Told from 2 Points of View)” by Anna Haakenson, 12, Beach Park, IL “Polka Dots” by Samantha Lee, 10, Thomaston, CT “The Eerie Cat-Man Thief and the Gucci Bunny” by Daniel Wei, 13, Weddington, NC Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book

The Little Princess Acrylic painting by Rebecca Wu, 9 (Medina, WA) Published in Stone Soup June 2020, illustrating Part Three of Elana: A Novella by Hannah Nami Gajcowski, 9 (Bellevue, WA) A note from William New June issue: don’t miss the latest issue—which includes the final of the three parts of Elana, the novella that won third place in last year’s book contest. This final instalment of Hannah Nami Gajcowski’s novel is highlighted below. Congratulations, Hannah! I have been enjoying reading your work. Black Lives Matter. As readers, writers, artists, as citizens of the world, we cannot ignore what is happening in the United States right now. Many of us are at home self-isolating, and for this, and reasons that are obvious looking at news videos, are not directly taking part in demonstrations even though our hearts are with the demonstrators. For students all the way up to middle school age, we recommend that you look at the website for Illustoria. Illustoria and Stone Soup share common goals with respect to creative young people. They have good projects this week to help you safely participate in social action. The post that I include a link to here is a letter-writing campaign. Real letters. Real stamps. Real mail. It seems old fashioned. It is. And yet, over time, letter-writing campaigns have proven effective forms political protest. Summer school programs. Our Society of Young Inklings and Stone Soup summer writing workshops are now full with waitlists—except for the newest class that we opened for our own Stone Soup’s Laura Moran. Laura’s class has space for more students. It a class that is very different from what creative writing classes for young writers are usually about. So! If you want a challenge, if you want to be stretched as a writer in ways you may not have previously been stretched, sign up for her class. As with the other workshops, the cost is $200. Laura is a cultural anthropologist. In this class you will write about your COVID-19 experiences using the techniques that social scientists use when doing field research. This is an unusual, innovative class. Laura is a wonderful teacher. You cannot go wrong taking Laura’s class. Registration is through the Society of Young Inklings. Friday Writing Workshop. The Friday writing workshop is open to young writers ages 8 through 14. The new time is 9 a.m. PDT. It will run at this time on Fridays through July and it will then shift to Saturday for the duration of the 2020/21 school year. The work these students are producing is extraordinary. This workshop is free—it is a service provided by Stone Soup. We are posting written work by the students on our blog, which we encourage you to read (see link below). We are also working on posting stories read aloud by the class on our YouTube channel. In the meantime, please trust me. This is a class not to be missed. It is made up of a very strong group of young writers. I am usually the instructor, although sometimes we have guest instructors drawn from the students in the group. Get your Zoom invitation by signing up for the Daily Creativity Prompts—link at the bottom of the page. Saturday writing project. With so much terrible happening around us, I suggest this weekend that we all take a few moments to explore a completely different mental space. I want you to go outside—wear a mask if going anyplace public—and sit where there is a spot of nature. Whether that is in your yard, a park, or even some weeds growing through a crack in the sidewalk, I want you to sit, be quiet with yourself, and see what you see. A line of ants. A bee. A hover fly. A cloud passing over casting its shadow. Focus. Pull your mind away from the pandemic, from political and social unrest, from the fact that school just ended (or is just about to), and focus on what you are seeing. I don’t mean stare. I mean look and open your mind and imagination to the world around you. And write what comes to you in that time. As always, if you like what you write, then please submit it to Stone Soup so Emma, when she returns from maternity leave, will be able to consider it for publication. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #8 Weekly Flash Contest #9: Write a mystery story.  The week commencing May 25 (Daily Creativity prompt #46) was our ninth week of flash contests, with another record number of entries. It was also the second contest based on Stone Soup contributor and reader Anya Geist’s writing prompt, which meant that we got to work with her again to judge the contest. Anya’s prompt inspired a really terrific batch of entries, and all the judges were impressed with the diverse ways in which the entrants approached the idea of writing “a mystery.” Thank you, Anya, for wise judging and for setting a great writing 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. Don’t miss out on these posts: the writing is really great!Winners Isabel Bashaw, 10, Enumclaw, WA Nick Buckley, 12, Needham, MA Liam Hancock, 12, Danville, CA Enni Harlan, 13, Los Angeles, CA Michelle Su, 13, Sudbury, MA Honorable Mention Amelia Barth, 10, Elgin, IL Amelia Pozzo, 11, Arnold, MO Mihika Sakharpe, 11, Frisco, TX Sophia Stravitsch, 10, Katy, TX Michela You, 11, Lexington, MA Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We published another cartoon by Natya, 12, about how things have changed because of COVID-19. In this case, Natya illustrates how graduation ceremonies have changed. Kat, 10, wrote a song called “I’m Fine,” which we’ve posted to the blog and our Soundcloud page. Take a listen and let us know in the comment sections what feelings the songs evokes for you. With his poem about the pandemic called