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“Web Dweller” by Anya Geist, 12 From Stone Soup April 2020 A note from William Joyful news! This newsletter is dedicated to the newest member of our Stone Soup family, Editor Emma Wood’s first child, Margot Dylan Bassett-Wood, who was born last week. Congratulations to Emma and her husband, Conner. This is a very strange time to be born into our world. I would like each of you to find a way to say a welcome to Margot. Margot has very special parents, so I know she is a very lucky child. She lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains in a redwood forest, so her first vision of the outside world will be these huge amazing trees. Emma is not checking her Stone Soup email, but if those of you who write poetry would like to write a poem for Margot, I know that Emma will value whatever you send. You can email your poem to me with the subject line, “For Margot,” and I will be sure that Emma receives it so she can read it to her daughter. The email address to use is stonesoup@stonesoup.com. This is a very emotional time for all of us. I am writing this on April 15, which is always a very emotional day for me. This is the 45th anniversary of my mother’s death. She died two years after I founded Stone Soup. My mother gave me so much: my life, of course, but also my world view and the encouragement and money to make Stone Soup possible. We all owe this wonderful project to her, and so I also dedicate this newsletter to my mother. These are eventful times! It is a long newsletter today. Please stay with me. There is a lot to say. Thank you, team! Before getting into the heart of the newsletter, our first project, and lots of news, I would like to thank my colleagues for the huge amount of work they have put into getting our coronavirus programs up and running. Monday will be our 21st Daily Creativity Prompt, and we now have two Zoom workshops running, a new COVID-19 blog with daily posts, and a weekly Flash Contest. The heavy lifting for all this has been carried by Jane Levi, who, like me, has been working unpaid for the past three years. Sarah Ainsworth, a graduate student in Library Science, has been going the extra mile on top of her coursework. Our newest colleague, Laura Moran, who manages the Stone Soup Refugee Project (more on its status in a future newsletter) has stepped in to run the Wednesday Book Group on top of being a parent and an adjunct professor in cultural anthropology. (Also, Emma wrote a large number of the prompts before taking maternity leave.) Thank you. This week’s art—and William’s weekend project What a gorgeous photograph! A tour de force. A story told with a limited color palette—golden brown, silver, grey, and black. Anya Geist has titled the image Web Dweller. At the moment, all of us are house dwellers. Our houses are closed boxes. Her spider’s dwelling is as open as open can be. It is also a trap. An engineering marvel. And exceedingly beautiful. Anya’s vision of this spider and her web at night is told with boldness and subtlety. Sharp lines and blurred light. We all have spiders in our houses, so spiders make the perfect COVID-19 photography project. One thing we all have right now is lots of time. So, find a web, and take the time to observe it closely. And photograph it in different lights and from different angles. Send us the images you like the best by going to the submissions link. COVID-19 projects update We have two groups meeting via Zoom every week: the Wednesday Book Group (ages 10–13) and the Friday Writing Workshop (all ages). To receive the link detailing how to join these groups, you must sign up for the Daily Creativity prompts that we are sending out Monday through Friday. Monday will be the 21st prompt. Please look below for the winners of this week’s Weekly Flash Contest. Remember, the first prompt of the week is the prompt to use when you enter the contest, and entries are due at midnight on Friday of the week. This week’s story—and some thoughts on writing serials You might have noticed that we brought forward the launch of our second annual Book Contest. I hope you are all thinking about your entries for this year! But this week, I want to talk about last year’s Book Contest because this month everyone can finally start reading some of 2019’s winning work! In this month’s issue of Stone Soup, you can enjoy the first part of nine-year-old Hannah Nami Gajcowski’s inventive adventure, the novella Elana. Elana won third prize in last year’s Book Contest and is appearing in three parts over the April, May, and June issues of Stone Soup. Hannah has invented a world populated with colorful characters and filled with fantastical adventure. Congratulations, Hannah, on writing a wonderful book. We are very excited to be publishing it in Stone Soup and thrilled to be sharing it with all our readers at last! Publication in serial form was a common model in the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote many of his most famous novels week by week for publication in parts in newspapers and magazines. This imposes quite a discipline on a writer. You need to be very organized. You must make it easy for the reader to keep track of all your characters, remember what has happened to them in past episodes, and make sense of what might happen to them in the future, without lots of repetition and reminders. You also need to be able to retain a reader’s interest in every section of the story: each episode has to be able to stand on its own, with its own arc, as well as earn its place in a larger narrative. If, like Dickens, you have a huge cast of characters, you need to make sure that your reader can still remember about one group while you are talking about another. It’s a big challenge! Elana wasn’t originally written to be published in episodic form, but the inventiveness of

“Eyes on You” by Rebecca Wu, 9 (Medina, WA) Cover art for the April 2020 issue A note from William First things first. As our fabulous editor, Emma Wood, puts it herself in her now-switched-on out-of-office message: “I am busy welcoming our first child (and future Stone Soup contributor!) to the world.” We all wish her the very best of luck as she embarks on the greatest adventure of all: becoming a mother. This week, our fabulous new April issue was released, and we have lots of news on our new projects to help our young readers and writers through the current COVID-19 situation. Yesterday (Friday), we held our first Stone Soup Writing Workshop. Thanks to each of you who participated. Where the participants wish to, we will be posting work produced from the session along with our summary of what we did. I can tell you that what these young writers produced in half an hour was incredible, so I hope all of them decide to share their work with you via our website! Look out for that next week. Also, do consider joining the Friday workshop. It is held from 1pm to 2pm Pacific Time. The group is open to Stone Soup subscribers and those of you who have signed up for the Creativity Prompts mailing list. All you have to do to get on the list is click the link. Every weekday the newest COVID-19 Daily Creativity prompts are posted to our website. Even if you are on the list for daily emails this is an easy reference and archive to refer back to for teachers and all of us now-homeschooling parents. Ten prompts have been published already, and there is a new one every weekday, so there will be 15 by this time next week! Starting last Monday, the first prompt of the week is a Flash Contest. Pick up the prompt, and submit your response by the end of Friday. We will choose our top 5 early the following week, and publish them our blog and announce the winners here in the Saturday Newsletter. All the details are on our contest page. We supply some free content, but the entire website is accessible to all subscribers. Subscriptions start at just $4.99 per month for a digital subscription. This includes access to all current issues, 25 years worth of back issues, dozens of writing and art activities, and the right to submit work to Stone Soup for free. Subscribers also receive the daily Creativity Prompts and the right to join our online Zoom workshops. Month-to-month subscriptions, both print (which includes digital) and digital only, can be cancelled at any time. If you are not a subscriber, and have not already signed up, then sign up for the Daily Creativity prompts by clicking on the link. We have developed a good looking page that you can print out each school day morning. We are being told by kids who are using them that they are helping to keep them focused and keep their morale up. Kids on this list are eligible to join our writing groups. William’s Weekend Project: Keeping a Journal Jane recommended keeping a journal as the project in last week’s Newsletter. I want to reinforce this project by repeating it today. These are historic times. What you write about your experiences as they occur is something you will want to revisit when you are an adult. If you have already started a journal then skip this paragraph. If you haven’t started, then here is my advice. Start. Like, now. And no later than this evening. A journal is different from a memoir. A journal is a contemporaneous record of your life. It is what you write today about today. A memoir is what you write about today next year, or in twenty years. Journal writing is crisp, sharp, full of the confidences and uncertainties of the moment. The only day you can write about today when it is today is today! So. How are you feeling? Whats going on in your life? What did you do today? How are you feeling about the coronavirus pandemic? Are you sheltering in place? Are you safe? Are you afraid? Are you bored (see this week’s poem, below!)? Do you see friends? If so, online, only, or if in person with some rules? A journal is an open ended project – and what we have right now is lots of time and the need to keep focused. I started my journal yesterday. Until next week, April is National Poetry Month Did you know it was National Poetry Month? The Academy of American Poets is celebrating in a few different ways: Dear Poet, an annual education project featuring videos of our award-winning Chancellors and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows reading their work, and to which students can respond through letter writing. They will consider all letters for publication on Poets.org beginning in May 2020, and our Chancellors and Fellows will reply to select letters of their choosing.  Poem in Your Pocket Day: Their interactive PDF can be downloaded for Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is happening April 30 this year. We’re encouraging the sharing of poems throughout the day at schools, bookstores, libraries, offices, and on social media with the hashtag #pocketpoem. Downloadable Poster: This year’s poster features artwork by tenth grader Samantha Aikman as part of our national student contest. Anyone can request a free copy of the official National Poetry Month poster on Poets.org for their library, classroom, or home. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Marco, our science fiction and fantasy, reviews one of his favorite books on the blog: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. Read the review to find out about the book’s unconventional setting, and why Marco thinks it’s such a fascinating story. Sabrina Guo, a Stone Soup author, has started the initiative LILAC (Long Island Laboring Against COVID-19) to raise money for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in hospitals. We’ve linked the fundraiser in the post and encourage you to

Mountains with Trees (oil pastels)Enoch Farnham, 12 (Edmond, OK), published in Stone Soup, March 2020 A note from Jane Pandemics are not something new. Sheltering in place, which many of us are doing by not going out of our houses except to get exercise or food, is also an ancient human practice. The great British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) spent two extended periods between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667 holed up in the countryside at Woolsthorpe. He had left the city of Cambridge to escape the bubonic plague that was ravaging the UK in the year 1665–66. That year of Newton’s life is referred to as his Annus Mirabilis—his “Year of Wonders.” In later life, Newton himself said that during this time in self-isolation, he was able to concentrate in ways he hadn’t before. Newton’s plague year was one of the most creative of his life. This is where and when he did his foundational work on optics (using a prism); the laws of motion and universal gravitation (watching an apple fall from a tree outside his window); and calculus (“fluxions,” or early calculus). We might not be able to produce work with the brilliance of Newton’s, or as much of it! But we can all use this time for sustained creative projects. And Stone Soup is here to help you in all our usual ways, and a few more for this particular time. We have brought forward the launch of our Annual Book Contest—you have the whole spring and summer to work on your novel, your poetry collection, or whatever long-form work you want to submit. For shorter projects, we are posting Daily Creativity prompts to help challenge or stimulate you to do something creative—writing, drawing, singing—every day. You can sign up here and below for our daily newsletter, and check back on the previous prompts at our special COVID-19 page. Starting Monday, we are making the first Daily Creativity prompt of every week into a Flash Contest! You’ll find all the details of that on the page on Monday morning. Last but not least, we have had our first Zoom meeting with volunteers who signed up to brainstorm with us on new adventures for this strange time—thank you SO much to all of you who joined, there were lots of great ideas and constructive suggestions! And we were very excited to meet some of our readers and writers almost-in-the-flesh! Everyone–watch this space and our COVID-19 page for exciting updates and new initiatives next week. For those of you who don’t want to write a book, or on the days you don’t feel like the daily prompt is for you, why not use this time to start a journal? It could become an important historical document in its own right one day! The world will look back on this time, and people in the future will want to know what you did and how you felt as you lived through this experience. Like Newton, maybe you can use this time to make some creative history. Stay safe and well, everyone. Until next time, Daily Creativity Prompts Last week, we launched our new series: Daily Creativity. Every day, we add another idea for a writing or art project, or another kind of creative act that you can take part in. We have made a page at Stonesoup.com where you can pick up the new suggestion every morning, or you can just visit once in a while to choose something that sparks your imagination. If social media is more your thing, you can find them there (see links at the bottom of the newsletter). And, if you want us to poke you every weekday morning, sign up for our new daily newsletter and we’ll send the Daily Creativity activity direct to your mailbox every weekday morning! We hope you enjoy these mini projects, and that you share them with anyone else you think might like them as well. They are a free resource for everyone. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Himank, one of our young bloggers, wrote a tribute to Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball player who recently passed away, along with his daughter, in a helicopter accident. Read about Bryant’s accomplishments and how people are honoring his life. We published another post in Marco’s series on science fiction, this time on “Fantasy: High, Dark, and Everything in Between.” Once again, Marco explains the subtleties of the genre in an accessible and engaging way. Bargain Back Issues! Did you know that we reduce the prices of Stone Soup back issues in our online store? Any issue published over six months ago is reduced by 25%—that’s $5 per issue instead of $7.50. And issues over 12 months old are half price, just $3.75 each. The cover date may be 2018 or 2019, but the content in Stone Soup never gets old, and you can’t beat the feeling of holding one of our beautiful magazines in your hands. Why not give the print edition of the magazine a try, or build up your collection of back issues, at a bargain price? Also in our online store: our themed anthologies, and copies of our 2017, 2018, and 2019 Annuals, while stocks last! Mail will take a little longer than usual to arrive, but the store is currently still open. From Stone Soup March 2020 Mountain By Zeke Braman, 9 (Acton, MA) Illustrated by Enoch Farnham, 12 (Edmon, OK) Pine needles cover the ground, Life chirps and peeps from cracks in the Earth. These mountains rise high, Scraping space. Lizards and bugs infest the leaning trees, The elder branches of the oak, Fir, And birch Wave their spidery fingers at the sky As if waiting for an answer to a prayer. Paths twirl and unfold like ribbons, Tracing the past generations’ steps to the peak. Clouds encircle the summit as if dancing. Markers are set to tell you that many people Have been here to rise above. Trees make a thin blanket against the buffeting winds That scour everything And withdraw suddenly.