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Artist Mark Wallinger standing behind his work, The World Turned Upside Down (2019) London, April 2020 A note from Jane A couple of weeks ago I took my daily walk in central London (walking at a two-meter distance from Stone Soup’s designer, my neighbor Joe Ewart). All of you who live in big cities will know how strange and wonderful it is to experience city spaces in a whole new way right now. Usually thronging with people, traffic, fumes, and noise, London is currently almost traffic-free, its pavements (sidewalks) barely populated, and the air filled with birdsong. But some of the same rules of life still apply: It doesn’t matter how big the city is—you are probably going to bump into someone you know! On this walk, that someone was the artist Mark Wallinger. As we entered Lincoln’s Inn Fields, we saw him sitting on a bench, so we said hello and had a catch up (each of us forming a point on a two-meter-spaced triangle to maintain social distancing). It turned out that Mark had installed a whole new public artwork in 2019, and it was just around the corner, so we walked together (though also still apart) to see it. And this is it: The World Turned Upside Down. It is a gigantic globe balanced on the ground, like the ones you see in geography classes or on people’s desks, but there’s something odd about it—the words are the right way up for the reader, but the world itself is upside down! It’s a deceptively simple idea, but this artwork has a profound effect on the viewer, and not just because it is so huge! It plays with our perceptions of the world and really makes us think about how we look at it. In the photo here, you see Mark standing beside the Americas. Looked at from this angle, Brazil dominates the view, and we can see how almost invisible the land mass now positioned toward the bottom of the globe becomes. Then we work out where it is: how could a huge country like Canada disappear almost out of view! Walking around the globe, you realize just how much of our world is water: you can stand at a point where all you can see is blue (the Pacific Ocean). The familiar shapes of countries and continents remake themselves when you look at them a different way around. You realize how much of what you think about the world—the place of your own country in it, the relationships between different continents—has been learned from the way maps have been drawn and the ways we have been taught to look at them. It’s exciting to be prompted to look at something so familiar in a completely new way! For this weekend’s activity, we want you to think about worlds turned upside down. Right now we are all living through something that is a version of the world turned upside down. School is closed even though the semester hasn’t finished—summer vacation/holidays (what you call it depends on where you’re from, of course) are coming, but you are already at home and might have to stay there—and maybe you want to write about that. But you can also think outside the current situation to make some new worlds upside down. What if the kids were in charge and the adults in the role of the kids? What if the animals took over the farm? What if fish could walk or mammals (besides bats) had wings? What if gold was worthless? Try focusing on one specific factor that has turned topsy-turvy and see what it means for the wider world of your story, poem, or art. If you like what you’ve made, send it to us via Submittable. We always love to see your work! Until next week, Weekly Flash Contest #5: Write a story inspired by one of these funny headlines. Visit the Bestlifeonline.com webpage, and read their selection of the “25 Funniest Newspaper Headlines of All Time.” Write a story inspired by your chosen headline. Every week during the COVID-19-related school closures and shelter-in-place arrangements, we are running a Flash Contest based on the first Daily Creativity prompt of the week. The prompt is posted on Monday, and entries are due by Friday. The week commencing April 27 (Daily Creativity Prompt #26) was our fifth week—and our funniest! Everyone obviously needed to get some comedy into their lives, and we had a record number of entries. We enjoyed reading each and every one of them, but a few made all of us laugh out loud, so they are our winners this week. Published below, they come in every shade of humor, from light to dark, and they are all hilarious. We also have a few honorable mentions singled out for special recognition. Congratulations, everyone! Winners Read their work here! Eliana Aschheim, 13, Santa Clara, CA Gabe Finger, 13, Nesconset, NY Hannah Nami Gajcowski, 10, Bellevue, WA Liam Hancock, 12, Danville, CA Alice Xie, 12, West Windsor, NJ Honorable Mentions Lena Aloise, 10, Harvard, MA Cora Casebeer, 10, Salem, OR Samantha Lee, 10, Thomaston, CT Remember, we are running the Flash Contest every week during the COVID-19-related school closures and shelter-in-place arrangements. It is always based on the first Daily Creativity prompt of the week. The prompt is posted on Monday, entries are due by Friday, and the winners are chosen and announced the following week. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Annabelle, 10, wrote a graphic art story about the coronavirus. Alice, 10, shares journal entries about her experience with COVID-19 closures in “Diary of a Locked Kid.” We may not be able to travel at the moment, but you can still enjoy reading accounts of what it’s like to travel to other places. Check out Vivaan’s latest travelogue, this time describing his time at the Taj Mahal. SierraRose, 12, talks about how COVID-19 has affected her life as a student in Los Angeles, California. In Daniel’s latest post, read about how Daniel learned  about the importance of confidence while playing basketball. What are the sounds of COVID-19? Daniel captures some in his poem that we posted to the blog. Connor,

JellyfishBy Heloise Matumoto, 13 (Quebec, Canada), iPhone SE photograph, the cover image from Stone Soup, May 2020 A note from William First, the news and some updates I would like to thank all of you who have recently subscribed. Sales are up for the month. Thank you! It is probably best to think of Stone Soup as a micro-business. We do not have a single full-time staff member. We have done our best to rise to the current occasion with Daily Creativity writing prompts, the Weekly Flash Contest, the Wednesday Book Club, and the Friday Writing Workshop—there is a special newsletter section reminding you of all our new COVID-19 resources below, as well as a daily email signup link. The best way you can support us is to subscribe, and share the news of Stone Soup’s resources with your friends around the world. Month-by-month digital subscriptions start at $4.99, and month-by-month print and digital subscriptions start at $7.99. Thank you again. The Book Club held its second meeting this last Wednesday and doubled in size to 20 students. Laura Moran, who runs the group, invited Nicole Helget, author of our first chosen book, The End of the Wild, to participate in the session. She was so inspiring! Thank you, Nicole! The Writing Workshop has 23 participants. Last Friday, they asked that the workshop last longer! So this week, it ran for an hour and 20 minutes. You can read about the workshops and some of the work produced during them via the web links below. I want to remind all of you that our second annual Book Contest is running (see below for details). We have had requests from students who have started and who are thinking of starting manuscripts for a special workshop, to help them make this leap to longer-form writing. I will run a preliminary workshop for people interested in this on Saturday, May 2, at 1 p.m. PDT. Email us here with the subject line “Long Form Book Contest Writing Workshop” if you would like to join, and we will then send you a Zoom link for the workshop. I will hold the workshop even if only one of you responds. What do you have planned for summer? My daughter’s school has five more weeks to run. Then, summer vacation starts. An odd idea, a vacation at home following what for many of you will already have been over two months at home. A double “vacation” this year. We are thinking of programs we can offer to help fill the summer with creativity, and we would like to know what you think about our ideas for Summer Camps and Summer Workshops. Please respond to our questionnaire and tell us! We have been able to offer our Book Club and Writing Workshop over the past month because, to be honest, we are doing it ourselves and we are not all being paid. We will have to hire writers and artists to run summer programs, so there will have to be a charge. Please fill out the questionnaire. It includes questions about what you wold be willing to pay. Please be honest. We will be using what you say in the questionnaire to develop the program. Thank you. William’s Weekend Activity The May issue is out! I received mine on Wednesday. The cover photograph by Heloise Matumoto (13) of jellyfish is striking, and any of you who have seen jellyfish in aquariums will appreciate its beauty. The central jellyfish is poised in the water. Going up? Going down? I personally have very traumatic memories of repeated jellyfish stings from the summer of 1960, in Annapolis, Maryland. I was eight years old. Jellyfish were everywhere at the beach! It was truly awful. Tentacles lay on the sand. My feet were in agony. And, in fact, even though I have never lived further than two kilometers from the Pacific Ocean since the age of 11, I have not been into the ocean since! I want you to look at the May cover image and think about a photograph you could make of something that, like the jellyfish, seems to float, perfectly balanced, between up and down. I know that you are probably not able to just leave your house with your parents and go exploring for this situation, this image to photograph. So. I am not saying it will be easy. But, around your house, or where you are permitted to go during this pandemic, find an image that has the kind of balance and grace we find in the cover image. I am writing this at night. Right outside the window, to my right, there is a jar hanging from a tree—like the kind we use for canning—that is filled with a string of small lights powered by a solar charger in the lid. The lights are twinkling about 12 feet (four meters) from me. I can’t see the tree’s branches. The light seems to float in the night, as the jellyfish floats in the cover photograph. Think about lights, reflections, mirrors, shadows, clouds, and . . . Also this month, I’d like to call your attention to our Honor Roll. Every issue includes the mention of authors working in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and artists who have sent us their work for consideration. It is often not an easy choice for our editor, Emma Wood, to decide which works to include in the magazine. The Honor Roll is a commendation by Emma for work well done, and we celebrate all of you who make your work and send it to us. We and all your readers appreciate you! Until next week, Weekly Flash Contest #4: Winners The week of April 20 (Daily Creativity prompt #21) was our fourth Flash Contest, and our food theme really got everyone’s creative juices flowing! You obviously had fun finding your food objects and thinking of creative ways to write about them. We enjoyed reading each and every one of the entries, and it was just as difficult as ever to choose our top five this week—so

“Experiments in Reduction” by Caitlin Goh, 13 (Dallas, TX) Published in the April 2020 issue of Stone Soup A note from Sarah Things are difficult and overwhelming right now, but I want to take the time to highlight some really excellent initiatives happening online that you can enjoy. Did you know that the author Kelly Yang is holding writing workshops on Instagram Live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 12 p.m. PDT? Kelly Yang wrote the critically acclaimed Front Desk, which was reviewed on our blog. Also, Library of Congress Ambassador of Literature Jason Reynolds has been creating great videos with prompts for young writers. Here is where you can find the videos for his series, Write. Right. Rite. We’ve never featured reviews of Jason Reynolds’s books on our blog, but we would love to! If you’ve read one, consider writing a review and submitting it to us LeVar Burton, who you might know from the show Reading Rainbow, is going live on Twitter reading books three times a week. He’s reading children’s books Mondays at 9 a.m. PDT and young adult books on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. PDT. It’s not just authors, though. Museums are also offering more online for people at home. The Museum of Modern Art has started Virtual Views every Thursday, where they highlight one of their exhibits with commentary from museum curators and more. And you can explore famous museums like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from the comfort of home. And that’s just to name a few! Other arts organizations are also doing exciting things. I tuned into my friend’s theater company doing a Facebook Live reading of the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing (each actor at their own home!) and really enjoyed it. Also, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is streaming weekly concerts on Fridays for free. Getting back to more mainstream–but still great!–providers or inspiration and tools, there is a really great list of links to free Learning at Home resources being provided at this time by lots of major publishers–including Stone Soup–on the Copyright Clearance Center’s website. Plus, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention all of the things that Stone Soup is doing at this time. We’re holding Book Club on Wednesdays and Writing Workshop on Fridays. Check out an update from our book club here. And read what participants have created during writing workshop for our first meeting here, our second meeting here, and our third meeting here Are there other cultural events happening online that you’d like the Stone Soup community to know about? Email me at sarah@stonesoup.com and we’ll start a page with a list of resources. We hope that some of these can make your time at home a little brighter. Until next week, Weekly Flash Contest #3: Winners The week commencing April 13 was a very special week for our Daily Creativity series. We had a takeover by one of our readers, Molly Torinus, age 11, from Middleton, WI! Molly is a volunteer in our COVID-19 Focus Group, and she wrote a whole series of terrific writing prompts for us. When we planned her takeover, we all agreed that this prompt, challenging everyone to write from the point of view of an animal (Daily Creativity prompt #16), would be a great one to set as the contest. You all seemed to think so too, as we had a record number of entries! We were thrilled that Molly also joined the Stone Soup team to be one of this week’s judges. Once the contest closed at the end of last week, we all read the entries independently and gave them our own scores. Then, we put the three judges’ scores together to come up with a shortlist and had a Zoom meeting to discuss it and agree the final results. It’s the first time we have had a reader judge in one of our contests, so it was very exciting for us to work with Molly on the contest: we can tell you that she was a very thoughtful and fair judge, and we really enjoyed working with her on this contest. We will try to get readers involved again in future, so look out for another takeover soon! We all very much enjoyed reading these entries, and we were impressed by the different ways people approached the challenge of thinking like an animal. We especially loved the entries that really sounded like the thoughts and behaviors of animals we have met. It was easy to agree on our top contestants, and we also wanted to honor some of the other entries, as there were so many good ones. So this week we are announcing our five winners, whose work is published here, plus four honorable mentions. Congratulations to all of them, and thank you, Molly, for a great writing challenge and a fantastic job as a judge! Winners, in alphabetical order: Yutia Li, 10, Houston, TX Anna Rosini, 12, Arlington, VA Audrey Tzeng, 11, Rocklin, CA Ella Yamamura, 12, Cary, NC Sophie Yu, 12, Houston, TX Honorable Mentions: “Chickens and Playtime” by Nora Heiskell, 12, Philadelphia, PA “Piano Bunny” by Maya Mourshed, 8, Silver Spring, MD “The Great Indoors” by Enni Harlan, 13, Los Angeles, CA “A Good Summer Day: A Day in the Life of Moti” by Anushka Trivedi, 9, Silver Spring, MD Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We posted another art piece by Sloka, 11, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how families have been separated because of the risk of contagion. Audrey, 11, wrote a poem that captures the anxiety she feels about the coronavirus and the inescapable news coverage of it. Daniel, 10, writes about what he learned about the scientists who created the atomic bomb in the book Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin. Though proud of their invention’s success, many of the scientists felt overwhelming guilt. We posted a short, humorous comic strip by Abhi, 12. Are there parts of the self-isolating lifestyle that