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I noticed the slightest little crack on the crown Illustrator Christian Miguel, 12, for ‘If Only’ by David Vapnek, 12 Published September/October 2014. A note from William Rubel I’d like to start out today with some business news. Firstly, some great news! Stories from Stone Soup are included in some of those assessment tests that so many of us adults recall with dread and that so many of you Stone Soup readers are about to sit for as the school year winds down. In the last year, Stone Soup stories have been read in reading assessment tests one million times! That is right: ONE MILLION pages. Wow! Congratulations to our Stone Soup writers. You writing is so good it joins the work of adults in those daunting assessment tests! Also business related. I spent two days last week  in Philadelphia to work with the programmers and the account representative for ICN, the fulfillment house that handles Stone Soup orders. Finally, huge progress was made simplifying the login procedures. No more need to enter your name. No more passwords. All you need to sign in is the email address that we were given when your subscription was set up. We’ll be sending out a letter next week reminding you what that address is in case you don’t remember. Powerful portraits My colleague, Jane Levi, selects the art and the story from the archives for this Newsletter every week, and it is always a nice surprise for me to see what she has found when I come to write my part. She selected this striking and colourful portrait of a football player for this week. There are many things that I like about Christian Miguel’s painting, especially the well-observed attention to detail. The detail I want to call your attention to is the boy’s face and, in particular, his eyes. He is looking down, which reinforces the sense of the boy sitting in repose. His thoughts are inward. Yet, at the same time, we can still see his eyes, which communicates to us even more clearly that there might be something going on beyond a mere glance at the helmet in his hands. All of us, and by ‘us’ I mean both our Stone Soup-age readers and adult Newsletter readers, are handy with a camera. There is a custom that when we take a photographic portrait that the person we are photographing looks straight into the camera lens—like looking into our eyes. What I’d like you to do is take a portrait in which the person you photograph is not looking at the camera. Note how the downturned eyes, spread legs and forearms resting on his thighs all work together to communicate this moment of introspection.  When working with photography it is reasonably easy to also work with lighting and the setting for your portrait. I am thinking here of a fairly formal portrait—not a photograph you take while someone is unawares. You and your subject are partners in this project. Your goal is to capture your subject’s inner self.  Kids, parents, grandparents, friends, you may want to make this a shared artistic project in which you take portraits of each other. The only technical advice I’d like to give is to turn off the camera’s shutter sound. When you take your pictures the camera should be silent. That puts your subject at ease. Also, it is often effective when taking portraits to take several in a row. If you are age thirteen and younger then send Emma, the Stone SoupEditor, up to three of the images you like the best, and give them a title that tells us what the moment was about, beyond capturing the person’s likeness. Submit your writing, art, and music to Stone Soup Catch the latest on our Blog! Lastly, don’t forget to keep looking at our blog, where there is always something new. This link will take you to the latest blog posts, where we have several new book reviews (including, at last, the reviews of the books we received from publishers last November), plus a review of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and another graphic story with the latest in the adventures of Luxi and Miola from Hana Greenberg. Until Next Week William Subscribe to Stone Soup From Stone Soup July/August 2015 Different City, Same Stars By Abby K. Svetlik, 12 Illustrated by Audrey Zhang, 12 I jolt awake when I hear the stewardess’s too perky voice come over the plane’s intercom system. “We will be landing in New York in just about fifteen minutes. I hope you all have enjoyed your flight thus far…” I zone out when she starts to ramble on about the weather conditions and time in New York. My dad realizes I’m awake and turns to me. “Welcome home,” he says. I give him a lame smile in return and hope he accounts its lack of cheeriness for sleepiness. But on the inside, all of me is frowning. New York is not my home. It never really was and it never will be. Colorado is home. Colorado was where I could lie on the roof in a sleeping bag and stare at the stars for hours. Colorado was where I kept a collection of newspaper articles and random doodles in a loose floorboard in my room. Colorado was where I grew up, despite the fact that I was born here, and where anything that ever mattered happened to me. *          *          * The airport we touch down in is like any other. Filled with people, smelling like dry bagels and tasteless coffee, and crowded with suitcases rolling along always clean hallways. As we make our way through the airport, Dad proceeds to tell me of his childhood here, the things he did, and the neighborhood he grew up in. I keep a few steps ahead of him so that he can’t see the grimace that contorts my face. Dad is just beginning a speech that I’m sure will go on for at least ten more minutes about where we’re moving in, and I can’t stand

I clutched my pen and began to write Illustrator Joanne Cai, 13, for ‘Drifting’ by Emma Peterson, 11, Published March/April 2016 A note from Emma Wood What is a poem? What can a poem do? What makes a poem good? These are three questions I was considering this week with a group of students at UC Santa Cruz who are working with me to put together our July/August issue. As we talked about poems and read poems, we realized that many of us had grown up hating poems—that there had, once upon a time, been a teacher who had sat us down before an Emily Dickinson poem and said: What does this mean? One student said that “poetry feels like a riddle, and I hate being tricked.” I am a poet now but growing up I wasn’t, and for a long time, I felt this way, too. I preferred poems that had a clear meaning or message. Anything else made me feel stupid. I didn’t know what it meant. But the more I read both in and about poetry, the more I began to love, and even prefer, poems that had no clear meaning or message, poems that evaded my understanding but that made me think or wonder in new ways, about new things. Poems that suggested instead of told, that traced a line of thought without a final drawing in mind. “poetry feels like a riddle, and I hate being tricked” When we thought about poems in class this week, we all wrote our own definitions. Some people thought about the form or the shape of a poem. A poem has lines, they said. But this was misleading because a poem can also be written like a story, in sentences and paragraphs. Some mentioned rhyme and rhythm. In my definition, I wrote that a poem is the saying of the unsayable. Maybe. It’s hard to write a definition of poetry. One of my favorite definitions was written by a third grader: “A poem is an egg with horses in it.” I love that definition because it captures the mystery—and joy!—of poetry. A poem should be a pleasure, a surprise, a gift. Not a puzzle, a riddle, a trick. Think about how you experience a painting or photograph: do you look at it then immediately think—but what does it mean? Of course not! You look at it and you smile, or maybe you turn away—it’s not interesting to you—or maybe you step a little closer to look at a small detail. You admire it, enjoy it, observe it! This is how you should also aim to read poems. To approach them as you would a painting, with an open mind and an open heart, not primarily with your intellect and certainly not with fear or anxiety. If you want to look more closely at the poem, as you would at a painting, if you want to analyze or interpret it—that’s wonderful! But you don’t have to. The brain is a mysterious organ, even to scientists, and I believe we can understand a poem on a visceral, emotional, even unconscious level. That we can understand a poem, in a way, without intellectually “understanding” it. “a poem is an egg with horses in it” This month, National Poetry Month, I encourage you all to read as much poetry as you can. You can start on the Stone Soup website, where we have partnered with the Academy of American Poets to create a small anthology of “poems for kids.” Subscribers can also explore the poems in our archives, including the poetry portfolio in our April 2018 issue.I also encourage you to write your own poems! This weekend, try writing a poem like Marley Powell’s “Sounds,” which is included in full below. In “Sounds,” Marley wrote a series of sentences connected only by a single idea—and that single idea is sound. When you’ve written your poem, please submit it to Stone Soup with a note telling me about your experience with this writing experiment! Until next week,     From Stone Soup January/February 2002 Sounds By Marley Powell, 12 My iguana cage is silent. Just two weeks ago it was alive with sounds. I wish we’d just throw it out. The other night I heard a helicopter fly over my head. I hear a lot of helicopters at night when I’m trying to sleep but this one was different. I was at UCLA and it was late at night and it flew over my head and I ran away from it but then it landed on the top of the UCLA emergency room parking lot and I was glad the awful noise just stopped. The answering machine picks up and says I would like to know if you can join Kaleidoscope on Sunday night. I don’t recognize the voice but I know it has something to do with school. I hear my stomach gurgling. It sounds like a washing machine. The siren of a police car wakes my cat up. The sound of a blue jay squawking is stopped by a loud shriek. I wonder if my cat got the bird. A dog is howling like a werewolf next door. The thought of that makes me shiver. I hit my pen against the table like a drumstick. I’m drumming to “Love Me Do.” It’s suddenly so quiet. The French people to the left of us are not home. The Japanese people to the right are asleep. I don’t like it. The only sound I hear is the tap tap tapping of my foot on the floor and the rap rap rapping of my pen on the table . . . Paul McCartney’s voice sings in my head. I can’t believe he can sing so deep and so high at the same time.     Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia and Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, and Susan Wilky.

It must be very early, the light is just creeping sleepily up from behind the trees and rooftops Illustrator Rosemary Engelfried, 13 for On the Bridge of Dawn by Megan M. Gannett, 13 Published May/June 2004 A note from William Rubel At last, thanks to Emma and Sarah, the long-promised Book Reviews section of our website is here! What you’ll see on the page today is a small beginning to something we want to see grow. We’ve got lots more reviews to add, and we’ll be putting them up every day this week and into the future, so you will see something new popping up on a regular basis from now on. We want our Book Reviews section to develop into a lively place for Stone Soup readers to drop by and discuss the books they love (and even those they don’t!). If you love books and want to get some ideas of new ones to read, or hear what others thought of some you have already read, take a look, read the reviews, and leave your comments. Do you agree or disagree with the reviewer’s thoughts? Do you have something to add? Let us and the reviewers know what you think! And of course, do please keep on submitting your book reviews to us. Relating to others—thoughts from great novels and our bloggers For those of you who are following the news at all, or have talked with your parents about the many huge changes in the politics of the world taking place right now, I think you will probably have talked about how polarized politics has gotten in the United States and in many other countries around the world. We are tending only to talk to people who think the way we do, with less reaching out to people with whom we disagree in order to find common ground. I want talk talk today about Sarah Cymrot’s review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, posted on our blog a few weeks ago. Like many of you, Sarah is in middle school. She is experiencing changes in the way kids (people) relate to each other compared with elementary school. What adult reading this Newsletter does not also remember those cliquish years? Which group were (are) you in, which group weren’t (aren’t) you in, how could (can) you make new friends? The Scarlet Letter is one of the major American novels of the nineteenth century. It is regularly taught in high school. I think it is fantastic that Sarah has taken this book on and has found that it offers some insights into middle school life. At the end of her post Sarah asks a question and invites readers to answer in a comment. I have left a comment, and now I am hoping that this weekend you will read the review—alone or with your parents or another adult—and will answer her questions too. Adults: the comments sections are open to adult readers, as well, and in this case I think the question is challenging enough to force all of us to think and to then struggle to find the words to answer. Sarah asks us to think carefully about how we relate to others: “Are there ways that you are judged by your peers? Are there ways you convince yourself to accept others in the face of feeling judgmental? Are there times you have reached across perceived differences and have connected with someone you didn’t expect to? I’d love to hear from you…” Go to her post, read her review, and then please continue the discussion by leaving a comment. It’s National Poetry Month! Did you know that April is National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada, and that in springtime in particular poetry is celebrated all over the world? Coming back from Taiwan last week my colleague Jane read a feature about poetry in the inflight magazine, written in celebration of national poetry month. I’d like to leave you with a few words from the article that express some of the ways we think about poetry here at Stone Soup, to inspire you both this weekend and for the rest of the month. “Love, warmth, and hope are all part of the April rhapsody. April is a never-ending love song. Come along with us as we experience the poetic side of April. In this warm spring month, take the opportunity to write poetry, recite poetry, sing poetry, discuss poetry and experience a poetic life.” (Dynasty, Inflight Magazine of China Airlines, April 2018, p. 22) We will share with you some of the work being done by our friends at the Academy of American Poets during National Poetry Month next week, and meanwhile, as ever, look forward to receiving your expressions of your poetic lives, whether they are written, painted, sung or recited!Until next week William From Stone Soup July/August 2015 The Five-Dollar Bill Written by Katherine Tung, 11 Illustrated by Aris Demopoulos, 12 “Stop Tiger from chasing Fluffy!” Mike Brady yelled as he charged headlong at his sons’ dog at his wedding reception. Tiger dashed under the wedding cake table and tipped it. The three-tiered cake slid along the table and into Mike’s arms. When Carol Brady hugged him for saving the cake, it toppled onto Mike’s face. This scene on TV sent my brother and me rolling on the carpet in fits of laughter. Ben and I relied on The Brady Bunch reruns to release frustration. We watched them every afternoon, since we spent our taxing schooldays proving to the mostly  white student body that we were not mentally retarded, we just couldn’t speak English. After all, we came to the U.S. three months ago, knowing only how to say “hi.” I wanted to return to Taiwan, where I lived a Brady-Bunch life—wholesome and carefree, where each day ended with everyone happy. Mom yelled from the kitchen, “哥哥, 去市場 買一袋紅蘿蔔. 現 在就去!”1. She ordered Ben to buy a bag of carrots from the market, this instant. “我不要! 叫妹妹去,”2. Ben shouted back, refusing to budge and offering me a chance to go. Mom marched