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I realized that I’d probably never have what she had. She had hope Illustrator Anika Knudson, 13, for Hope, by Isabel Folger, 12 Published January/February 2014. A note from William Rubel Another week! Where do they go? Last week, I said that I’d write about blogs this week. To begin, I’d like to acknowledge my colleague, Sarah Ainsworth, who manages the blogs, including the book reviews. We at Stone Soup are very excited by the material that our young bloggers and reviewers have been sending to us. I would like to ask you–whether you are a young Stone Soup reader or an adult Stone Soup reader–to please look at the material being published in our blogs. The blogs enable us to publish more book reviews than we can in Stone Soup, and they enable us to publish writing by young writers that falls outside of the literary framework of the magazine itself. When you read a blog post or a book review that you like (and I’m sure you will), then leave a supportive comment. If anything you read on the Stone Soup website makes you think of something, if a blog post or review gets your own thoughts and creative juices flowing, then please share. I am now working with a web developer who is going to set us up with a system to reward you for commenting on blogs, but in the meantime, please leave comments anyway! I can tell you as a writer of books and magazine articles that it is rewarding for authors to receive feedback and fan mail. We are so pleased with the additional material we are publishing online that I’d like to issue another call for bloggers. We are particularly looking for young bloggers–that is, age 13 and under–and we are also looking for teenagers, young adults, and adults. If you are a homeschool parent or a teacher, then we especially want to hear from you. We are about to launch an educator blog. To become a blogger you need to to first send us an example of a blog entry. You will find full  instructions on our submissions platform. I want to share with you an excerpt from Vandana Ravi’s review of The Book of Boy. It is thought provoking. “I think that this book, though told in a medieval setting, really applies to modern day. Everyone is different. Although most kids have been told this many times, we still tend to single out the people who are very tall, very short, who have learning problems, who look different. We look at someone and judge them, forgetting hidden under everybody’s metaphorical disfigurement, there is a mind that thinks and feels just like we do. Everyone has, at some point, felt that they don’t fit into the norm. It’s hard to realize that our differences might actually be assets. When you are singled out or made fun of, it’s difficult to put a smile on your face and show the world that you may be different, but you have your own special powers. When you do, however, you are given wings for your personality to fly free.” For something very different, I recommend ‘The Winds of Change,’ by Lukas Cooke, who we think of as our nature blogger. This is Lukas’ fifth post. ‘The Winds of Change’ is about Spring. Lukas talks about the smell of the air, the signs of the season’s change. At the center of his story is a nest of moles that he saves from from a bonfire. The post includes a photograph of the nest. My summary does not do Lukas’ work justice. It is a well written evocation of Spring on a farm. Here is the link to find all of the work by our young Stone Soup bloggers: STONE SOUP BLOGGERS. Until next week,     Making Stone Soup even more accessible Those of you who read our masthead will have noticed that for many years Stone Soup has been available in braille and ebraille for our visually impaired readers. This free service, in print and online, is provided by the US Library of Congress’ National Library Service, who you can contact to sign up or receive more information either at their website or by calling +1 800-424-8567. Now, we have expanded our accessible options by partnering with the US National Federation of the Blind’s NFB-NEWSLINE®, a free audio information service available to anyone who is blind, visually impaired, or print-disabled. We are delighted to add Stone Soup to the list of more than 500 publications already available via this service. Our young authors’ writing is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an incredible range of publications: national, international and regional newspapers (like the New York Times), breaking news sources (such as Sports Illustrated Online, CBS, and the BBC), and magazines including Air and Space Smithsonian, Discover, Family Fun, Poets and Writers and Teen Vogue. There are a variety of ways to access NFB-NEWSLINE, always free of charge. You can use your touch-tone telephone in your home; you can access the service via the website, receive On Demand emails, or use your portable player or mobile devices. To learn more about NFB-NEWSLINE and to register, please visit www.nfbnewsline.org or call +1 866-504-7300. Please spread the word to friends, family and colleagues who could benefit from these accessible options! Business News Our Santa Cruz web designer has time for us, again! I met with Jordan Iverson last week and will be meeting with him again on Monday. Over the next couple of weeks you will be seeing tweaks to the website. When we finish fixing what we know could use improvement, then we will come to you to ask for direction. Now that the subscription login system has been simplified (you just need your email address) we have started sending out letters to make absolutely sure that those of you who are subscribers know how to get in. We also have a one-month free offer for non subscribers. If you are a newsletter reader, but not yet a subscriber, you may go to our homepage and choose ‘Subscribe’ on the menu bar. This will take you to our order form. Enter MAY18 where it asks

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.