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“A Sweet World” by Cathu Tu, 12 (Shanghai, China) A note from William I’d like to thank Cathy Tu from Shanghai for this month’s striking cover image. It is a sweet world, but it is also melting! As publishers of creative work by thoughtful young people, I think it appropriate today to talk a little about the Swedish youth Greta Thunberg. I am sure that she has inspired many of you to participate in youth school walkouts. I would like to encourage all of you to listen to a few of her talks. She is in the news this week as she attended a big international gathering in Davos, Switzerland. What I want you all to pay attention to is the unusual clarity with which she expresses herself. The ultimate task of all writers is to say what you mean and mean what you say using words that are aligned with your vision. I think Greta’s statements are worth studying for the way she distills complex ideas to their most basic core concepts and then has the discipline to stop. Unlike someone like me, who always talks too much, Greta never wanders. She is always on point. Your voices in Stone Soup are the voices of artists, poets, storytellers, and playwrights. As with Greta, your voices often speak with a maturity that surprises adults. I would like to call out one poem and the two plays from the January issue. The poem is Huài shì hǎo shì (“Evil Things, Good Things”) by Sabrina Guo, featured in last week’s newsletter. Sabrina is a long-term, repeat contributor to both the magazine and our blogs. This poem about friendship, and much more. Thank you, Sabrina. Plays! Stone Soup has not published many plays, so we are super lucky that Emma Wood was able to select two fabulous ones for this issue. Valentine Wulf’s parody of the often frustrating interactions we have over the phone with increasingly automated phone systems is a classic. The play, an excerpt of which is printed below, includes directions for music, so go to YouTube to find the appropriate soundtracks when Valentine tells you to. Parody is a literary genre that requires exaggeration. Through exaggeration, parody writers arrive at the truth. The dialogue in Valentine’s play is ridiculous, but in its ridiculousness it brings the reader to that same state of utter frustration that occurs on real calls with automated phone systems! Valentine’s play so thoroughly and creatively explores the most frustrating aspects of modern phone systems that it should be required reading for phone-system programmers. Funny, clever, insightful. You are all in for a treat! The other play in the issue is The Illusory Life of Mr. Brite. We included Galen Halasz’s play in our recently published Stone Soup Book of Science Fiction Stories. Order now if you haven’t already. Galen’s play revolves around the idea that computers end up taking advantage of a basic flaw in human behavior: our laziness. “This allowed them to turn people’s laziness against them, trapping them in the exoskeleton and weakening them for life.” Like Valentine, Galen exaggerates to find a truth. In this case, a work of science fiction, Galen extrapolates from behaviors we are all familiar with to ask what would happen if we continue in the direction we seem to be going—relying on computers “for everything.” Having read Galen’s play, the next time you look up from your tablet and realize that most of a day has passed with you watching a parade of self-loading shows, you will not have the excuse that you were not warned where this could lead. For a project this weekend, I suggest working on a short play. It can be helpful to list your characters at the beginning. And if you want people to imagine your character being dressed a certain way, then provide the kind of detail when you introduce them, as Galen does. In plays, you tell the story through dialogue. Playwrights vary in the amount of stage direction they provide, if any. Note in Valentine’s play her instructions for music and in Galen’s play his occasional notations of what gestures or tone of voice he expects of the actors performing his work. We look forward to seeing what you come up with. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! On Tuesday, we published a blog by Vivaan about his travels in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Read more about the city, and where you can find “unforgettable views.” We’d love to see more travelogues like Vivaan’s on our blog. Submit yours through Submittable! Thursday, we published another chapter of Marco’s series on science fiction. Read “Magic Systems” to learn about “hard” and “soft” magic with examples of each, plus the pros and cons and using them in your story. From Stone Soup January 2020 I Would Like to Speak to the Manager By Valentine Wulf, 11 (Seattle, WA) Illustrated by Daania Sharifi, 13 (Gainesville, GA) Overture: “Happy Go Lively” by Laurie Johnson. On the left half of the stage is a pristine white office room. On the right half, we see the burned-down remains of a living room, with only a small side table still standing. On the table sits an old rotary phone. The OPERATOR sits in the office, and the CUSTOMER sits on a burnt stool in the living room. CUSTOMER angrily dials the phone. There is a pause, before the OPERATOR’S phone rings. The OPERATOR picks up the phone with a fake smile. OPERATOR Hello. This is customer service. How may I help you today? CUSTOMER Hello. Yes, I would like to file a complaint. The toaster I ordered exploded and burned down my house. OPERATOR Oh no! That’s terrible. First, you will need to give me the 16-digit personal identification code, your four-digit product verification code on the certificate of authenticity that you received with your product, and the official purchase edition number written on your product. CUSTOMER What? What are those!? OPERATOR You will need to take all of

Pond, Tomb of Rekhmire, approximately 3,300 years ago, Egypt. A note from William Rubel Last week, editor Emma Wood wrote about a painting by “outsider” artist Morris Hirshfield. If you missed that newsletter, please read it here. Emma wrote about the artist’s evocative and yet not exactly realistic way of depicting scenes. Keeping with this theme, this week I would like to offer you this painting of a pond with people and trees that was painted on a wall in Egypt 3,300 years ago. What I want to remark on is the way in which the space is depicted—specifically, the trees that are painted around the rectangular pond likes spokes around the center of a wheel. This way of depicting trees around a pond has a very strong meaning for me. When I was in sixth grade, in 1963, I painted a pond with the trees organized just like this. I will never ever forget what my teacher said. She said that this was wrong. That the bottom trees should be upright, not “upside down.” And she laughed! I was so upset. That pond had meant a great deal to me. I had just moved to Los Angles from Washington, DC, and it was spring. I missed going with my mother to the see the cherry trees blooming around the tidal basin by the Washington Monument. When the teacher said that the trees should be upright, I remember thinking, “But the leaves will get wet!” I vowed at that time to never paint a painting again. And, somehow, I managed not to until I was in college, when I took an art class. This terrible memory of being bullied by a teacher into depicting a memory the way she wanted me to, and not the way I imagined it, was actually one of my inspirations for starting Stone Soup in 1972—just 10 years after my terrible sixth-grade experience. So, please, all of you—whether you write or draw or compose music or dance or whatever else you may do to record what and how you see and feel—follow your personal star! I will also point out that by depicting the trees surrounding the pond in the way this ancient Egyptian artist did, we can see the people in the pond and exactly how the garden around the pond was landscaped. Notice how very clearly you can make out the different kinds of trees around the pond—in other words, this “unrealistic” way of representing the space actually gives us more information that a more “realistic” painting would. As Emma said last week, “I hope this painting will inspire you to create something similarly strange, striking, and beautiful.” Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! On Tuesday, we posted Lucinda’s second installment in her series 103 Elements and their Interesting Facts. Want to know which element makes up the majority of the yellow surface of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons? Or how about what foods have potassium or iron? Read the post to find out! (Plus, read the first post here.) Have you ever chosen to do something because you wanted to, even though it wasn’t very popular among your peers? Maya describes her experience of magnet-making in the library, and how even though she had reservations about doing something by herself instead of choosing a more popular activity, she enjoyed herself (and it turned out one of her friends did show up!). Canon PowerShot Sx600 From Stone Soup January 2020 A World Without Color By Elyse Bambrough, 7 (Bristol, UK) Art: Eternal Hourglass by Sage Millen, 11 (Vancouver, BC) Dear Diary, I woke up again yesterday and saw the hammering rain pouring harshly down on my small little house. It was the worst sight I had seen in years! It was quite a boring sight, though I’m used to it, so I wasn’t that surprised. I had another amazing dream. I dreamt that I was in a forest with tropical trees and exotic flowers. There was spikey grass and even tigers! I guess it didn’t come true. I had to try to tidy the rubbish by sifting and sorting, burning and burying, but it didn’t work. However, while I was sorting the rubbish, something caught my eye. It was a tiny tin flower! Suddenly an idea planted itself in my head. The idea sprouted and grew roots. Day after day, the idea got bigger. While I was feeding on the rubbish, a forest emerged under my hand. It was not the forest of my dreams, but it was a forest just the same. In the forest, there were tigers, toucans, tree frogs, and even butterflies! I was still a bit disappointed because it was a very dull forest with no color at all. As I walked through the forest, my heart was aching with emptiness. Listen to a recording of the author reading her story, see the artwork in more detail (and read more from the January issue) on the website here. 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: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.