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Illustration by Arthur Manuelito, 12, for “How I Got Over My Dream” by Diane Dubose, 11. Published in Stone Soup, March/April 1989. A note from Sarah Ainsworth This week, a serious subject. At the Museum of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, I was fortunate enough to see a powerful exhibit called There is Truth Here: Creativity and Resilience in Children’s Art from Indian Residential and Day Schools. This is a chapter of North American history that doesn’t get talked about very often. In the Indian residential schools in both the United States and Canada, indigenous children who were taken from their families were forcibly assimilated to Eurocentric traditions. The goal of the schools was to take away the children’s indigenous culture and traditions. These children were not allowed to speak in their native languages or practice their traditional religions. The results of these “schools” were devastating and continue to affect indigenous communities today. This exhibit showcases the artwork that indigenous children created during their time in these institutions. It is thought-provoking and heartbreaking. The work is a reminder of the importance of creative expression as an outlet for children. Here are just a few of the pieces that stood out to me: You can see more of the works in the show, and find out more about them and the lives of the artists, at the Legacy Art Gallery in Victoria website. I am certainly no expert on this subject, but I am trying to learn more about it. I encourage you to also seek out information if you are interested. Here is a list of books on the subject of residential schools. Please, if you read one and have any thoughts, consider submitting a review to Stone Soup. Until next time, Raising funds to reach kids in marginalized communities Part of Stone Soup’s mission has always been to try our best to reach children living in marginalized communities and help them use the power of their creativity to share their worlds and experiences with others. This week’s story from the archives is one from a special Navajo issue that Stone Soup published in 1989. The stories, art, and poetry in that issue—and other work published in the late 1980s in regular issues of Stone Soup—were by children living on reservations, some of whom attended boarding schools. Those stories touch on some of the elements mentioned above, such as the children having two names (a secret Navajo one and the English one used in the outside world), and the division between their home and boarding-school lives. When we moved out of our office two years ago, we found a box of that special issue in our storeroom. Still wrapped tightly in the plastic the printer packed them in all those decades ago, they are in great condition! We held on to them, knowing that we should do something more with them than send them for recycling, but not quite sure what that something was. Now, inspired by Sarah’s visit to that exhibition, we know what we want to do with them. We want to sell them to the readers of our newsletter and dedicate all the money we raise to our programs for reaching marginalized kids, wherever they are. This is your chance to get a pristine, vintage copy of Stone Soup and help us dedicate additional funds to our programs reaching out to kids living in challenging circumstances. We have 60 copies available; at $15 per copy, if we sell them all we’ll raise $900. We promise we will devote all the money raised to finding new ways to seek out and support the harder-to-reach Stone Soup readers and contributors of today and tomorrow. You can buy your copies of the Stone Soup March/April 1989 Special Navajo Issue here in our online store. If you would rather make a donation—or if you would like to make a donation in addition to your purchase—you can do that here. Thank you, as always, for your support. We will report back in the newsletter on how much we raise, and what we achieve with the funds. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Vandana reviews the newly released Shouting at the Rain by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Here’s an excerpt from the review: “Strikingly, not once in the book did the author give away any character’s feelings in a single word, but painstakingly described physical actions: staring at shoes, standing straighter, bouncing on toes. More than once, I had to stop reading and consult my knowledge of human body language—what are people feeling when they avoid someone’s gaze?” Abhi reflects on the feeling of love and shares a poem on the subject: “As we all know, love truly cannot be explained well. While some people find love as a relationship between two or more, others see it differently. I personally find love to be having an awesome time with someone, and just enjoying life.” What do you think love means?   From Stone Soup March/April 1989 How I Got Over My Dream By Diane Dubose, age 11, New Mexico Illustrated by Arthur Manuelito, age 12, New Mexico One warm sunny afternoon in November I was sitting at my desk reading a library book about gorillas. I was looking at the gorillas when Kathleen, my cousin-sister, said, “Diane, why are you looking at that picture?” I said, “I’m just looking at it.” Then I said, “That gorilla looks big and scary. I only like orangutans and chimpanzees. They are small and they’re not mean.” It was three-thirty, time to go to the dorm. The students walked down the hallway heading for Dorm Two. That is where I live Monday through Friday because I am a Navajo girl and I live way out on the Navajo Reservation. I live out too far to go to a public school so I go to a boarding school. I started going to boarding school when I was very young and

“Illuminated,” photograph by Lara Katz, 14. Published April 2018. A note from William Rubel It is so easy to take a glance and then just turn the page. Photography was invented in the 1840s. Photographers have been recognized as great artists since the beginning of the art form. But it has only been in recent decades that exhibits of photography at museums have drawn crowds that match those of exhibitions of paintings. In newspapers and magazines we become accustomed to seeing photographs as documentary tools. The photograph shows us the subject that is discussed in the article. We glance, our internal voice registers, “Ah, that is what it looked like,” and we then usually focus on the accompanying text. Stone Soup is a literary magazine. The photographs that are included in Stone Soup do not illustrate the stories (though they can partner with them, and add another dimension). They stand as works of art in their own right. Photographs are not composed of words. Words slow us down. It takes a while to read a page. But we can read a photograph in an instant, literally. How many words would it take to describe your house? And then how long would it take to read the description? But it only takes a short glance at a photograph of your house to recognize it. I hope all of you read Editor Emma Wood’s thought-provoking note on reading poetry in the April 6 Newsletter. If you didn’t, then read it now. I promise you, you will find something there that you will remember for a long time. I’d like to borrow one paragraph from Emma’s note: The poet Wallace Stevens once said, ‘A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’ What does this mean to you? To me, this means that a poem should operate just on the edges of reason and rational thinking. It should tell me something that I don’t quite understand. The poem should force me to spend time with it, to read and reread it, and, with each rereading, to come closer to my own understanding of it. Lara’s Katz’s photograph, which we published last year, forces you to stay with it. You cannot understand it in  a glance. As Emma puts it regarding understanding poetry, it “operate[s] just on the edges of reason and rational thinking.” What is happening to the right of the column? What do we see on the left? And what is the column part of? Is this a doorway? A gate? An arch along a walkway or in a grand building? Is that graffiti or a projection?  Is that a face at the top of the column? Eyes in the wall to the right? There is a lot in Lara’s photograph that we “don’t quite understand.” This is a photograph you can come back to for years. Where does this photograph take you? I’ll leave it at that. Once you are done, send us what you’ve written to Stone Soup.  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. In a review written together, Ben and Jackson discuss Angie Thomas’s modern classic The Hate U Give. Read their review to find out why they think the book offers a ‘unique perspective’ of main character Starr being ‘split between two worlds.’ Have you read this book or watched the movie? Let us know what you think! Soohong reviews Coraline by Neil Gaiman (which is another book that got turned into a movie!). ‘Coraline was a very amusing and super enjoyable novel. Though it scared me so much and sometimes gave me nightmares, this would definitely be a book I would recommend to people.’ Read more of Soohong’s thoughts here. From Stone Soup April 2018 The Stone Angel By Julia Lockwood, 12 Photograph by Lara Kaz, 14 The pewter sky hung like a tapestry over the graveyard, dark clouds spilling across it. The clouds boomed and thundered like an angry beast, releasing torrents of water that drenched the gray headstones below. Lightning sliced through the air like a sword, illuminating the world for a second with its violet light. Libby liked the rain. The way it left her honey hair wet and clingy, the way the droplets slid down her cheeks like cool tears. She knelt down next to her favorite grave in the furthest corner of the cemetery. Most of her neighbors grew up in fear of the cemetery across the street, but Libby loved it. Each weekend she would place flowers on her favorite graves, and she loved calculating the ages of the people on the headstones. Libby peered at the grave in front of her. The cool stone of the memorial was cracked and crumbling, with moss climbing up it, filling in the crevasses. A smiling angel stood atop the base of the grave, holding a harp in its chubby hands. The angel’s face had been worn away by decades in the rain, giving the grave an eerie look. Engraved in the podium was the name of the girl who rested there. Here lies Ada Lee Clemmons 1896-1907 Beloved daughter, sister. May her soul rest in peace. “Pretty, isn’t it?” a sweet voice said from behind Libby. Startled, Libby turned quickly to see a girl standing behind her. The girl looked about Libby’s age, with tawny skin and soft coils of chestnut hair. Her cheeks held a slight rosy blush, probably a result of the cold of the rain. But what struck Libby as particularly striking were the girl’s eyes. They blazed blue against her darker skin, as if holding a cold fire inside them. The girl took a step closer to Libby. “It’s sad isn’t it?” She asked. “She was so young. Only eleven, only as old as I am now.” The girl turned to look at Libby, as if noticing her for the first time. “You come here a lot,” she said. It was not phrased as a question, but simply as a statement. “Y-yes.” Libby stammered.

Illustration by Thea Green, 13, for the story “Penny’s Journey”, Published November/December 2005 A Note from William Rubel I came back from Kenya to my home in Santa Cruz, California, to find that spring had finally arrived. We had had such a wet—and for us, cold—winter! I hope that all of you are enjoying a lovely spring. My garden is lush with foliage and alive with flowers. But it is not a normal city garden. It is a wild garden, a garden of wild plants. I pull out all the grasses, but otherwise I let the wild plants grow—“weeds,” as some call them. Water a weed garden, and nature presents you with a paradise! Wherever you live, even in the most built-up parts of a built-up city, you will find beautiful flowering “weeds.” For this weekend’s photography project, I’d like you to go out to your garden, if you have one, and also to take a walk in your neighborhood. At this time of year you will find flowering weeds wherever there is dirt—including in sidewalk cracks. Use your phone or camera to draw out the beauty in the dandelion and in the other wild plants you find. Perhaps your day looking at urban weeds will convince you to let them into your garden as I have! If you take a photograph that you feel is especially good, please submit it to Stone Soup so Emma can consider it for publication. Thank you! I’d like to say something about the poem “Some Days,” which you will find as the last entry in this newsletter. The poem asks questions about something that is really, really important. It is a poem that explores a question that those of you who have not yet reached university will be able to study when you are there: How is identity constructed? You are a girl. You love pink. Why? Were you born loving pink, or do you love it because ever since your mother’s baby shower—which means before you were even born—everyone around you associated you, a girl, with the love of pink. We can all agree that a dragon is a fiction—a made-up creature. In her poem, Olivia seems to ask whether our identity as boys, girls, men, and women might not also be something of a fiction, like the dragon. Thank you, Olivia, for making us think. Until next week, Focus on poetry for the final days of National Poetry Month! To celebrate National Poetry Month, we are offering a discount on the wonderful Stone Soup Book of Poetry, a collection of 120 poems published in Stone Soup between 1988 and 2011. Pick up  print copies at 25% off, and eBook editions at half price in the Stone Soup Online Store through April 2019. And, for more poetry ideas, don’t forget to visit the Academy of American Poets’ website—in particular, check our their “Dear Poet” initiative. Just click on their logo below: Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. New blogger Oishee Sinharay urges us to take animal abuse seriously: “When people abuse animals, they often forget that animals, no matter what kind, are living, thinking, beings.” Read more here, but be aware it is an upsetting topic. On Thursday, we published a piece by Abigail Herrington that goes over some interesting traditions that people in Poland have to mark springtime. Read Abigail’s post to find out about Śmigus-Dyngus or “Wet Monday,” and the Drowning and Burning of Marzanna. From Stone Soup, March 2019 Some Days By Olivia Cadham, 11   Some days I am a girl. On these days I like to giggle and play with toys. I wear bright blue clothes and shirts with cats on them. When I feel like a girl, my feelings change. I feel kind and happy. I like being a girl. But . . . There is a downside. My heart is bigger than on other days. It becomes too big for my body. This causes my feelings to mix together, and that results in emotional drama. This doesn’t make me want to be a girl. So . . . Some days I am a boy. On these days I like to be silly and play rough. I wear darker clothes, like blue, black, or red. When I’m a boy, I feel like my body fits me better. Sometimes it’s as if God intended me to physically be a boy, but changed his mind at the last second. I like being a boy. But . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m too awkward to be a boy. I’m not a very sporty person, and I don’t like jokes. This causes me to appear abnormal and too “sensitive.” This doesn’t make me want to be a boy. So . . . Some days I am a dragon. On these days I like to stomp through the hallways and growl under my breath. I wear light clothing on these days so, being a Dutch Angel Dragon, my fur doesn’t overheat. When I’m a dragon, I like to use pronouns like it, they, them, and their. But . . . Dragging around invisible wings, horns, and a tail all day gets exhausting really fast. I get agitated, and sometimes chirp swears (or something rude) in my language. Even though no one can understand, it is not a good feeling to be cursing, even if it’s an accident. This doesn’t make me want to be a dragon. So . . . It’s really quite simple. I make another choice . . . to be Olivia, who is currently a dragon (roar!!!). Read more reflective poetry on our website, Stonesoup.com. 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