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He licked my fingers and I felt that the model dog didn’t matter to me anymore Illustrator Garrett Landon, 11, for Little Pal by Nikki Morse, 12, in Stone Soup Magazine July/August 2000. A note from William Rubel Jet lag! Traveling is great, but there are side effects! I got back from warm Israel via freezing London (literally) to a rainy week in Northern California. Next week, I’m going to Taiwan for my daughter’s Spring break. So the next Newsletter will be produced from Taipei. Being honest, as I am often working at the last minute, Taipei is actually a great place to be writing the Newsletter as we post it Saturday morning California time which is Sunday in Taiwan. All of you writers will understand that means more time to procrastinate!   Science Fiction Contest reminder Speaking of procrastinating, the deadline for submitting a story to our science fiction contest is 11:59 pm on April 1, Pacific Coast Time. Winners receive Amazon gift certificates of $80 (first place), $40 (second place), $20 (third place), and $10 (fourth place). The prize-winners will be published either in the magazine or on the website. The authors of highly commended stories that do not win prizes will also be acknowledged. Upload your submission the usual way — click on the submission link, below.   Celebrating our Young Bloggers, and a joint adult/kid nature-writing challenge I am very pleased with how our Young Bloggers project is going. Some really interesting writing has been posted.  If you are Stone Soup writing age, which is age 13 and under, and if the Young Blogger posts inspire you, then go to the submissions button and upload an example of what you’d like to blog about. If our editor, Emma Wood likes it, then she will make you a Stone Soup blogger. All subjects welcome. The recent post I am featuring today is “Rain” by Lukas Cooke. I think this is an utterly brilliant piece of writing. It is very difficult describing what you see and experience. Storms are particularly difficult to evoke with words. Lukas does an incredible job describing a rain storm, first from observing it inside his house, and then from outside where he is standing in the rain. I’d like to share this passage with you: “The wind seemed to be whistling a tune, accompanied by the soft percussion of rain hitting the ground and splashing in puddles. Dancing to that tune were the trees, swaying back and forth, rejoicing in the water that so eagerly rushed down to quench their thirst. The frogs too, could be heard from inside the house, their chorus befitting the scene. And the frogs too, were rejoicing in the long–needed downpour.” I am a writer and all I can say is, wow! The wind whistles, the trees dance, the frogs rejoice. This passage demonstrates Lukas’ power as a writer as he takes common ideas–the whistling wind, the dancing trees, and the chorus of frogs–and fleshes them out in a dynamic prose that has emotional depth, grace, and rhythm. Notice how he injects emotions and feelings through the core words and ideas he uses to describe the scene. He speaks of the trees “rejoicing in the water that so eagerly rushed down to quench their thirst.” Lukas’ tree is intensely alive, as is the water that rushes down to it. I find this idea of a dancing tree rejoicing in the rain to be powerfully evocative. One of the most memorable storm scenes in English literature is in a short story, Typhoon, by the great Polish-British writer, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). While Conrad tackled describing a hurricane from the vantage point of a boat in peril on the high seas, Lukas has tackled something that I think may be even more difficult. He describes a storm that is within our experience. Everyone reading his story, whether conscious of doing so or not, will be comparing Lukas’ description of the rain with their own experiences. We know exactly what a storm such as the one Lukas describes is like. A false step would stick out. What I want you to do this weekend, and I am speaking here to all of you reading the Newsletter this week, whether you are still a student or whether you are a parent or grandparent, is to join Lukas in describing  the weather that is right outside your door. I want you to do it this weekend. The challenge is to make something of whatever the day is like when you start writing. If you are together (kids and grownups) then do this together.  When you read Lukas’ complete text you will see that he is clearly thinking deeply about how to say what he wants to say. You can see he worked hard to express the full depth and complexity of his experience. If you feel you are struggling to say what you want to say, then that is good. On your first couple of drafts please let yourself go. Don’t censor what you are writing. Don’t edit yourself. The first words that you write to describe the day may not turn out to be the best words to use. That doesn’t matter. Get the ideas down, make a word sketch, and then later, perfect it. If you end up really liking what you have written, and if you think that you make your readers feel and see the moment of the day you are describing (and you are 13 or under), then please submit it to Stone Soup. You may also send what you have written to me just by replying to the Newsletter. And if you are a kid and actually managed to get an adult to write along with you, then email your joint pieces to me as well. One of our advisors once suggested that we publish work by parents and grandparents, so lets see what comes of this idea. Once I have a few paired works by kids and adults, I’ll have a better idea of what to do with them. And, if you are an adult Newsletter reader but without kids to work with–well, take up the challenge, anyway. What do you see out the window? Until next week,

Stone Soup colleague Jane Levi timing Israeli archeologist David Eitam as he grinds grain in a mortar cut into bedrock 12,500 years ago by people known as the Natufian.March 10th 2018, at at Hruk Musa in the Jordan River valley. Photo by William Rubel.   A note from William Rubel My apologies for skipping last week’s Newsletter. My Stone Soup colleague Jane and I were in Israel completely immersed in preparing and carrying out the experimental archeology project we had come for–milling wild barley using mortars and cups cut into bedrock by a people who lived 12,500 years ago (long before agriculture), and then baking bread. There are 70 mortars cut into the rock at the site known to archeologists as Hruk Musa, located in what is now the Occupied Territories controlled by Israel in the Jordan River Valley. The Israeli archeologist we are working with, David Eitam, has used his knowledge and his imagination to answer the question, what are these rock cuts for? He thinks they were for processing wild barley from grain into bread. If he is right, then Hruk Musa is one of the largest and earliest grain processing facilities that has so far been found. As Jane and I were beginning to work with these stone tools, we both started thinking about how the same skills used by story tellers are often employed by archeologists. As there are few written records from this period, and few artifacts, figuring out what objects like these might have been used for, and then how they were actually used, requires some speculation, but the speculation has to be grounded in what makes sense based on all we have been able to learn about the people we are studying. It occurred to us, as we sat pounding and writing notes on that beautiful hill above what used to be a lake, wild flowers everywhere, birds of prey circling on the lookout for small creatures, that to do the best work we had to try as hard as we could to get into the minds of the Natufian people were were studying: as much as possible, to become Natufians. In other words, to be effective archeologists we had to think like novelists. Whether you end up being a writer, a doctor, an archeologist, a scientist, or a host of other professions, the skills you develop imagining characters and setting them alive on the page are skills that you will find useful. I would like you to write a short story in which place and time are important. The Natufian people that we were studying in Israel had tools made of rock, bone, and wood. They made string and knew how to weave fine baskets and also fine cloth, but they didn’t have pottery. They could walk places, and traveled distances so they could trade for goods. They left behind combs, and needles, and small sculptures, like those of little birds. But what they ate was mostly a mystery, and it is what they ate that we are studying. Last week, sitting on rocks surrounded by mortars feeling the gentle spring wind on our faces we tried to imagine ourselves as them–and that is what I would like you to do with a scenario of your own. Create a space for your characters, then place them in that space, and set them free with your imagination. I am in London this morning. I’ll be back in California tomorrow night. The wind is howling outside the window and it is snowing. Until next week, William   “Hush,” I said, “hush, everything will be all right” From Stone Soup January/February 2009   Where my Family Is   Written and illustrated by Jessye Holmgren-Sidell, 13     I sat alone in the dark, feeling the boat rock from side to side. The hollow sounds the boat made as the waves hit it told me how deep the water was beneath us. “Creaak, Creaak.” What was that noise? “It’s nothing,” I told myself. “It’s nothing.” But it is something: the sound of a woman, starving in the hills, begging by the road for a coffin for her dead child. The sound of a man pulling blackened potatoes from the ground. No, that was in Ireland. We weren’t in Ireland anymore. We were thousands of miles away, in the middle of the ocean. Ireland was where Ma, Da, and Nealy were. They were definitely not here. “Creaak, Creaak.” Ireland was where there was no food, where people were starving. I shifted slightly. Where my family is, I thought. I got up on my knees. “Good God, help me, I’m so hungry.” I grabbed my empty dinner plate and threw up into it. The boat swayed violently back and forth and I leaned back against the hull, feeling my stomach twist like a blade of grass in the wind. “Oh,” I moaned. I threw up again, this time on the floor. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I remembered when I ate grass once. It was on the way to the boat when I had been so hungry. I had taken a handful of grass and shoved it into my mouth, trying to push it down my throat. As I chewed, I was crying. If I had been home I would have eaten potatoes around the fire with my family. We would never have eaten grass. But that was gone now. The potatoes had died and Ma, Da, and Nealy were buried in the empty harvest field outside the house. My brothers were gone, too. They had left for America before me and I didn’t know exactly where they were. “I miss them,” I whispered. “I wish they were here.” I left Ma, Da, and Nealy behind when I closed the door to the house. I walked along the path, past fields of dead potatoes, past families taking refuge in the shadow of stones and dirt dugouts. I began to cry. I remembered how this had all started the night the potatoes had

Forest Creature (detail) by Eva Stoitchkova, 11Ontario, Canada A note from William Rubel I am writing to you from Galilee, where I have just arrived for my adventure in neolithic bread-making. I’ll tell you more about that when I get back in a few weeks’ time! Meanwhile this is a very short letter, as I am on the road.   Magnificent March issue! The most important news for this week is that the March issue is now online. It’s another fabulous selection by Editor Emma of wonderful work by our Stone Soup authors and artists. Thank you all of you who made this issue happen! I urge you all to go and take a look for yourselves, starting with a closer look at this magnificent, creative collage by Eva Stoitchkova that we are delighted to feature on our cover.   Print copies are making a coming-back The next exciting piece of news is that we have worked out a way of printing one-off copies of our beautiful Stone Soup digital issues. The first of these–the February 2018 issue–has already arrived at the warehouse, and the others are coming very soon. You can view them, and place orders and pre-orders in our online store. Until Next Week William   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 it anymore… /more