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“Gateway to Darkness” by Grace Williams, 13 (Katonah, NY) A note from William Summer classes: The first round of Stone Soup and Society of Young Inklings classes are finishing up next week. A second round of classes—two writing classes and an illustration class—will take place in July. One class starts the 13th, another the 21st, and the last class on the 27th. The first round of classes sold out quickly. This is a fabulous program. I highly recommend it. More information and registration information is here: Stone Soup & Society of Young Inklings Summer 2020 program. Gateway to Darkness photograph: Wow! Gateway to Darkness is one of those brilliant works of art that speaks without words in a voice that speaks directly to one’s soul. You look at this photograph and you know what it saying. The knowledge is direct. An extraordinary work of art. Thank you, Grace Williams. Gateway to Darkness speaks to exactly how I feel so much of this pandemic time. Even when the sky is blue, the outdoors feel dark, my world shut down, and my daughter and I are mostly at home. The strange angle Grace used to photograph the fence, and thus frame the scene, perfectly captures my sense of these strange, disorienting times. The way the fence frames the sky is unsettling. Not symmetrical. It says to me, “Something is not right.” Leaving one’s house, we ask of everyplace we go, “Is this safe?” When I go to the grocery store to buy food, there is one employee stationed at the entrance, and one at the exit. They each have a walkee talkie. They keep track of how many people are in the store. You wait for permission to enter. You are counted in and then counted out when you leave. Inside, we all try to avoid each other. When you are ready to pay, we wait in a line inside the shop, each of us spaced out, waiting to be told that we can move forward to a register to check out. It is organized and does make us feel safe. Even so, I sometimes find myself inside the store, wearing my mask, amongst the other masked customers, crying. This photograph, and the story “Pigeon City” we are highlighting in this weekend’s newsletter, are two pieces of work that fall into the “COVID-19” category published on our blog. Jane has posted 87 pandemic-related posts at the Stone Soup website inspired by our Daily Creativity Prompts. If you haven’t already, I encourage you all to check them out. Comments are always welcome. “Pigeon City” was written in response to a prompt written by Stone Soup author Anna Rowell. Art project for this weekend: Take your phone or camera and take a picture that captures the idea of being spontaneous. I put it this way because sometimes to take a picture that looks spontaneous, you have to plan! Not always, but sometimes. Make it a photograph of happiness. Of joy. Of the opposite of being trapped and fearful. A jumping kitten. You, jumping.  A face that is laughing. A spray of water. Leaves blurred by the wind. Use your imagination to make something light and delightful. When you succeed, please send it to Stone Soup so our editor, Emma Wood, can consider it for publication. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #12 Last week’s contest was a fantastic challenge set by former contributor Anna Rowell, 15, who was also a judge of the contest. What would the world be like without color? What if there were a few select people who could see colors? Write about the effects of not being able to see color, or of there being no color, and how that affects people and society in a good or bad way . . .   Congratulations to our winners and honorable mentions, listed below. Your work really stood out in an extra-competitive field! You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “Seeing Through Gray” by Isabel Bashaw, 10, Enumclaw, WA “It’s All Ridiculous” by Lucy Berberich, 11, Oxford, OH “Flowers for Mamma” by Sophia Do, 12, Lititz, PA “The Sky is Blue” by Nora Heiskell, 12, Philadelphia, PA “Project Achromatopsia” by Alice Xie, 12, West Windsor, NJ Honorable Mention “Miya’s Gift” by Savannah Black, 9, Yuba City, CA “Colorless” by Anna Haakenson, 12, Beach Park, IL “A World Without Color” by Aditi Kumar, 10, Ashland, VA “In a World Without Color . . .” by Charlotte McAninch, 12, Chicago, IL “Color” by Michela You, Lexington, MA Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Amelia, 11, wrote about coronavirus in a creative way in her story “The Chase.” Read to find out if Alco Hol catches Cora Na Virus. Have you had a birthday during coronavirus? Check out Natya’s cartoon about the new way we have to celebrate, and leave a comment if you’ve had a similar experience. Charlotte, 12, wrote a poem called “The Virus” that captures the lonely and unsettling world that coronavirus created. Abhi reviewed the book The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare by Zillah Bethell. Find out why Abhi enjoyed the book’s pacing and interesting characters. At our twelfth Friday Writing Workshop, the theme was Sense of Character. Read some of the work created during the meeting. Vivaan, 11, wrote a poem about his thoughts on coronavirus and global warming. In “Joining Together at a Distance,” Catherine, 11, writes about how we all have to do our part during this pandemic. We posted Zachary’s picture journal documenting his time during coronavirus. Sejal, 8, wrote a poem called “Bad to Good” about various aspects of the pandemic. Fern Hadley, 11 Cary, NC From the Stone Soup blog June 2020 Pigeon City by Fern Hadley, 11 (Cary, NC) Amber rays of sunlight flooded through the city, casting long shadows behind the tall buildings. A glint of sun caught on dark-grey feathers as the bird glided through the darkening sky, skimming the tops of the buildings. It landed

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