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I vividly remember my mom, dad and stepdad around Tyler’s bed, each massaging a different foot and hand.Illustrator Sarah Dennis, 13 for ‘Together’ by Alex Miffiin, 12. Published January/February 2001. A note from William Rubel In the next few Newsletters I’d like to re-introduce to you the Stone Soup staff. As the current September issue marks the first anniversary of Emma Wood taking over as Stone Soup’s Editor, and she also has a new book out this week, we’ll begin with Emma. I’ll start with congratulations on her just-published translation from Russian, A Failed Performance: Short Plays & Scenes by Daniil Kharms. Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was a Soviet poet, writer, and playwright who worked in the surrealist and absurdist literary traditions. Emma only told me her book (co-authored with C. Dylan Bassett) had just been published yesterday morning. I ordered a copy right away! Is surrealist and absurdist Soviet literature something I know anything about? No, I don’t. But I always order books written by my friends and I always learn something. While this is not a young adult title, I hope the many adult readers of the Newsletter will join me in supporting Emma by ordering her book. If you can also write a review on Amazon that will be extra great. Before I say more about Emma, I’d like to just say, thank you, Emma, for the extraordinary work you have put in this past year at Stone Soup. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have you. Thank you from my heart. In addition to being a translator, a poet, Editor-in-Chief here at Stone Soup, and an editor at other literary publications, Emma is a university instructor, a PhD student, and a marathon runner. I encourage all of you to check out Emma’s website. Like you, Emma sends her work to publications hoping to get published. Here are the literary magazines where her poems appear. I posted a link to this interview in which Emma talks about poetry when she first joined Stone Soup. Whether you are a young writer or an adult reader of this Newsletter, please listen to the interview.  Even if you don’t understand the entire interview I know that each of you will find something in it. I find it inspiring. What is poetry? Listen to Emma’s answer. I’ll write more about the other people in the team who bring you Stone Soup next week. This week’s drawing and story from the archive Look at the drawing by Sarah Dennis. I mean, really look at it. What I find remarkable is the amount of information conveyed about the the scene around Tyler’s hospital bed. You see Tyler’s face is scraped up–note the big red patch on the right side of his face–and he has stitches above one eye. The story the drawing is linked to is about an awful car crash (it’s scary in parts–but, spoiler warning, everyone is fine in the end). The two figures in the foreground, Tyler’s mother and step-father, are massaging his feet while his father holds one of his hands. Everyone is looking in a different direction. We are observing an intimate family moment in which the participants in the scene are united around the injured Tyler. He is in physical pain. His family are in emotional pain for him. His grey-haired father looks very worried. I also read worry on the face of the man in the left foreground. His mother, with her red fingernails (nice detail) seems to be the calm one, despite the detail of her neck brace, a remnant of her own injuries from the crash. I sense that she may hold the family together through her calm demeanor and practical solutions. Somehow, I sense that she is the one who said, “Let’s massage Tyler’s hands and feet.” Inspired by this, here is your activity for the weekend: sketch a scene that involves an important moment with other people. Think of something from this past week or two where you were involved with two or three other people, united in a common purpose and doing something. It might be a moment in your family, with friends, out in a public place, or at school. I suggest the doing something part of the idea inspired by the strength of the hand gestures we see in Sarah’s drawing. Give thought to where each person is looking when you make your drawing snapshot. And, as always, if you come up with something you really like, please send it to Emma by uploading it on our online submissions form. Until next week Write a book and get it published: a brand new contest Do you think you can write a whole book? This week we announced a brand new contest, in partnership with MacKenzie Press, challenging you to  you to do just that. Do you dream of getting it published? Well, if you win this contest, the prize will make that dream come true! The Secret Kids contest invites entries in three age categories, for longer fiction, either illustrated or unillustrated, in any genre. We’ll write more about this contest over the coming months–the deadline for entries is January 1, 2019–and for today we invite you to check out the contest information at our website (click the link above) and think about writing, revising, editing and perfecting your best work in time to submit your entry by the end of the year. Plus, one last reminder about the Concrete Poetry contest: you have until midnight (Pacific time) tonight to get your final entries in! More deadlines!  The deadline for recipe submissions for the December food issue is September 30. As I’ve mentioned before, for Stone Soup we are interested in both the recipe and the headnote, the narrative that precedes the recipe that explains why it is important to you, the author. The  December issue is not limited to holiday recipes. This week, I purchased the cookbook, The Bread and Salt Between Us: Recipes and Stories from a Syrian Refugee’s Kitchen. I’ve had the book a few days and my daughter and I can say that the recipes are good. But, what makes this book exceptional is the combination of the text and the recipes. Recipes can often tie us to a memory. Perhaps it is the memory of a dish that was a grandparent’s favorite, or a dish that you

MaCall, I don’t feel like I’m on a magical island”. Illustrator Zoe Hall, 12 for Sisters by Cameron Manor, 11. Published March/April 2010. A note from William Rubel There are four projects for today, one new one and three that we’ve been reminding you about for a little while: a new Instagram project, a recipe with headnotes for the December issue, a last call for the Concrete Poetry contest, and a look back to summer journals. Instagram #whatsinmybackpack I’d like to encourage all of you to follow our Instagram account and to contribute to it. We have images from our archive and images related to current content, and many of you recently sent us images for our #whereiwrite campaign. Thank you! You will see those entries when you go to go to our Instagram account. We are now starting a new hashtag program. We know that nearly every one of you wears a backpack to and from school. We want to know what’s inside! Please send us photographs of #whatsinmybackpack. There is an entry category for this Instagram project here, on the Stone Soup online submissions page. Whether you include the pack itself in the photograph is up to you, but I think it will make a more interesting photograph if it is included. I also think that however you compose it, you will find your own photograph more interesting as the years pass. It has been more than forty years since I unpacked my seventh-grade pack for the last time. It would be amazing to have a photograph of what had been in it! Recipes: December food issue deadline extended to September 20! Thank you to those of you who have sent in your recipes. We are working through them and will get back to the recipe writers very soon. We also have some really nice writing about food (or related to food), without recipes, thank you! To the rest of you—OK. We get it. This is not a good time to think about holiday cooking. I know it is September, and December and holiday eating seems far away. But, we have deadlines to meet, so we have to think about it now. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Years—December is holiday time in lots of places. That means family visiting time. It is eating time. It is the time of year when nearly every family is in the kitchen, cooking. So. What foods mean something to your family? Favorite holiday dishes—favorite cookies—favorite main dishes—favorite homemade drinks and snacks. Or, maybe it isn’t even a food you like very much, but it is a fixture in your family and so has some good stories surrounding it. Remember: we are not a food magazine, and we are international. Just because the issue is being published in December, it doesn’t have to only contain winter recipes for a cold climate—you can send us anything at all, and it will be online in all the other months of the year too.  As I’ve said in previous newsletters and as you can see by looking at last year’s food issue, all recipes must be preceded with a story that talks about the recipe or the food in some way. A great recipe without a great story won’t get published, but something the other way around just might! Concrete Poetry We extended the deadline to midnight, September 15. Poems are coming in—thank you!—so there will not be a further deadline extension. First prize is $50, second prize is $25, and the third prize is $10. I’ve written about this contest in previous Newsletters and you all know the drill. Go to the submissions page, find Concrete Poetry, and click on “more” to read the contest guidelines, or go straight to submit here. Journals! I have not forgotten about the Summer Journals. We have a few in the wings waiting to go online. Are any more of you ready to share yours? Please send me images of a few pages from your journal, along with a passage that you’d like to share. Do this by replaying to this email, or submit to our blog category. I’ll be writing more about journals in another Newsletetter. Until next week What’s behind the paywall? Here is the business news. We at Stone Soup are all extremely pleased with the number and quality of book reviews being sent to us each week. There are new reviews being posted weekly. There are also new blog posts every week. We love the work these Stone Soup writers are doing and feel they are good enough to be folded into the larger Stone Soup literary project.  Up to now, access to the book reviews and blogs has been free. And, they are still free today! However, I have just asked our programmer to include them into the Stone Soup paywall so there will be a limit on how many you can read for free. So, non-subscribers—please check out the extraordinary work being done by our reviewers and bloggers. Today, I read the two book reviews—of To Kill a Mockingbird and Beasts Made of Night—posted this week by our young reviewers. They are both interesting reviews—very topical in these turbulent times. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at stonesoup.com! This week, it’s all about books. You’ve read lots of great book reviews by Vandana R over the past few months. This week, she has written a lovely piece about her book collection, and why some of her books mean so much to her. Are you a Jane Austen fan too? And which books are in your backpack (or locker?) Don’t miss Mirembe Mubanda’s topical review of the exciting and thought-provoking Beasts Made of Night  by Tochi Onyebuchi. Have you also read this book? Leave a comment and tell Miremebe and us what you thought. And, as William mentioned above, we have Maya Viswanathan’s review of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. If you haven’t read it yet, be inspired by her review. If you have, leave her a comment on the blog! “MaCall!” I screeched, snatching up my favorite

‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, 13, a work in colored pencil, ink and watercolor. A detail of ‘Parker’ is the cover of our September 2018 Science Issue. A Note from William Rubel I am so proud to be able to introduce to you Stone Soup’s Science and Science Fiction themed September issue. As always, to download the full issue and to read all of the contents you have to be a subscriber. Single copies of the print issue can be ordered from our online store. This issue marks the first anniversary of Editor Emma Wood’s first year with Stone Soup, and a continuation of the program of special themed issues that she initiated with her first issue last September, which was poetry. A huge thank you to Emma! The art in this issue is particularly fine. Emma commissioned illustrations for this issue, to complement our Science Fiction contest winners’ work. I’m going to write more about Emma, and our staff, and our plans for Stone Soup this school year in next week’s Newsletter. But, for today, I’d like to keep the focus of the Newsletter on this extraordinary September science issue. ‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, is the cover illustration. Look at the detail! This is classic science fiction in visual form. Real science—precise observation of nature—underpins the animal and plant forms. The bark on the trees is at once believably bark-like and exotic. The bird is clearly a bird—but not one living on earth today. Is it a throwback to the age of the dinosaurs, a future mutation, or something real as yet undiscovered? A real tour de force! This is what Emma wrote to introduce the issue: I’m thrilled to finally share the winners of our Science Fiction Contest with you, in this special Science Issue of the magazine. Each story is inventive, strange, suspenseful, and “scientific” in its own way. “Middlenames,” the winning story, imagines a society that assigns you a middle name—which determines your identity for life—at birth. “Young Eyes” explores the dangers of technology, while “Mystical Creatures of Blue Spout Bay” and “Sunk” take on the environment. This issue also features nonfiction writing on scientific topics—from the solar eclipse to organ transplants—as well as three poems that engage with scientific topics and ways of thinking. I hope this issue serves as a reminder that writing and literature don’t happen in vacuum; they aren’t separate from other subjects like algebra, physics, or biology. As you read, I want you to think about your largest, nonliterary passion. How can you engage it in your own writing? As always, send the results of your experiment to Stone Soup! This issue really challenges the boundaries we place on writing. Our own labels of fiction, science fiction, literature, science writing, etc. are conveniences. They are ways of packaging writing. And, of course, when you sit down with a book or a magazine article it is good to know that what you are reading is fiction or nonfiction, as that helps determine how you think about what you are reading. On the other hand, lots of great fiction writing and lots of great nonfiction writing cross genres. For example, while one of the most famous American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), is clearly a work of fiction about the hunt for a whale, large portions of the book are pure non-fiction. The inspiring French naturalist, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was a great scientist. And even more wonderfully, he was a great writer. Fabre wrote brilliant science about insects, and his texts are often woven through with personal observations. He uses descriptive language that is so elegant, eloquent, evocative, and beautiful that whole pages can transport you into the realm of poetry. And so, when you pick up Emma’s challenge to engage your largest non-literary passion in your writing, I encourage you to think outside the box; think outside the literary categories that you know about. You can write a novel that is also a work on marine science, or describe an ant colony in a way that fully draws us into that world. If you are someone for whom algebra opens up a beautiful world, then Emma is asking you how you might incorporate that algebraic way of seeing into something more literary, and in doing so help the rest of us who cannot see it to understand it and discover something new. So, pick up a pen and start writing! For many of us, the act of writing itself gets ideas flowing. Until next week Contests, submissions, and more There are two weeks left to submit material for two of our current calls for submissions. Recipes for our food issue, and entries for our concrete poetry contest should both be with us by September 15th. As ever, use the Submit button to send your work to us. Next week we will be telling you more about a brand new competition that we have been working on with MacKenzie Press: the Secret Kids contest. For this contest, we are looking for book-length work, and the prizes in several age categories include publication of your own book! Entries are due in January 2019, so you have time to polish your longer form entries. Look out for our more detailed email all about this contest, coming soon. Highlights from the past week online Visit the Stone Soup blog for thought leadership, reviews and more from our young bloggers, all age 13 and younger. There is new material throughout the week, every week. If you have something to say that you think our readers would be interested in, then please submit a sample blog entry. Don’t miss our young blogger and leader in our refugee campaign Sabrina Guo’s latest blog post. This week, Sabrina shares a summary and her reflections on a talk by Tara Abraham, Executive Director of Glamor Magazine’s The Girl Project, “Reflections on the Syrian Refugee Crisis.” Our sports blogger Leo T. Smith makes his predictions for the new NBA season. What do you think