‘Mist at the Lake,’ Stone Soup cover art, February 2018. Photograph by Brian Qi, 11, Lexington, MA. A note from William Rubel First! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Hana Greenberg, our latest Stone Soup blogger and our first blogger who is blogging a graphic novel! In Hana’s words: This is one of my graphic novel series, “Luxi and Miola.” It is about two 4th grade girls who are twins that have daily adventures and a bit of chaos, and their fashionista 8th grade sister who is sometimes annoying. I hope you like it! Please click through to her blog to enjoy the whole story and leave a comment. Also, if you are a graphic novelist and want to blog a graphic novel to Stone Soup, then please get in touch with sarah@stonesoup.com. Welcome to the new February issue The February issue is out. Look at that gorgeous cover! Thank you, Brian Qi! Everyone with a paid subscription can download the PDF to read on their computer or tablet. The letters section is coming back—so if you have a comment to make on the issue (and you’re age 13 or younger) then please send a letter to Emma using our online submissions form. Before I share with you the letter that Emma has written to introduce the issue I want to say that this February issue is magnificent. The writing is varied, sumptuous, elegant, challenging. While Emma is going to tell you what the issue is about—what she sees as the thematic links between the stories and poems and art she selected for you—I want to emphasize that this is an issue of gorgeous writing and powerful photographs and art. Everyone can access a few free articles a month on our website, so if you aren’t yet a subscriber, check out this month’s issue. It is an issue of creative work by young people at its very best. I’ve said enough! Here is what our Editor, Emma Wood, has to say about this issue: A princess stuck in a tower. A very ill girl confined to her room. A poem that enacts the feeling of being trapped in a love/hate relationship. A young boy whose fear of heights restricts his movement. A poem that describes beauty as “suffocating.” The stories and poems in this issue are about being confined, trapped, restricted, stuck, suffocated. They are about wanting to escape—either physically or mentally— from that “stuckness.” This is the feeling, to me, of February: it is a time of rain, snow, cold, and wind after the novelty of that weather has worn off. It is a month for dreaming of spring, of an escape. If that has whetted your appetite, visit our website to read more! A weekend writing project! Emma’s reference to “suffocating” beauty is taken from the poem The Road to Williamstown by Sophie Nerine. Williamstown is in Massachusetts, in the United States. Sophie writes about the landscape at a point along that road. She also acknowledges in her poem that there is a road through this place of extraordinary beauty—a fly in Paradise, one might say. We all have beautiful places we have been, and even beautiful places that we go to relax. Some you will have special places you visit to be in nature, a private spot. When I was your age I went to a vacant lot in my neighborhood. There were violets and a mulberry tree that I remember, still, although it has been fifty years since I have seen it. I have learned not to try to go back and find these places from my childhood. The lot is sure not to be there, and if it is it is unlikely to be as magical as I remember it. I do wish I had written about at the time and could read that text—a story, a poem, even a diary entry—or see the drawing that I might have made, or the photograph I had taken. Whether you live where February is cold, and (as it does for Emma) includes a dream of spring; or live where I do and are having an unusually warm winter (it has been like Spring the last few days); or if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and this is your Summer, go outside sometime this weekend to a place that has natural beauty, or a beauty that means something to you, and use your words, your art, your camera, to record and explore the place and your feelings about it. As always, if you feel strongly that the work you make is one you’d like to share with other Stone Soup readers, use our online submission form to send what you’ve made to Emma. Until Next WeekWilliam From Stone Soup November/December 2010 Time for Letting Go By Silva Baiton, 13 Illustrated by Zoe Hall, 12 Gina Boston sat with her brother and grandmother at the old, well-used kitchen table in Grandma’s farmhouse. They were eating breakfast, which was mixed cereal, composed of six different kinds. Gina and her older brother, Caleb, were used to this because they had always had mixed cereals when they had lived with their parents. Maybe that’s why Grandma mixes different kinds of cereals—to make us feel better, Gina thought as she pushed her spoon around. She ran her hand over the table’s honey-colored surface (scarred and faded from years of baking and sunlight) and thought about her parents. They had both died in a car accident when Gina was ten years old. Gina and Caleb had not been in the car when the accident happened; in fact, they had been seven miles away, visiting their grandmother who lived in the country in a beautiful old farmhouse, where outside there was a cow, eight chickens, and four pigs. Before the accident happened, in 1967, Gina and her brother had lived in Maple Brook, Alberta, with their parents and the family’s fluffy white cat, Queenie. Gina did not know exactly how or when her grandmother had gotten the news, but it had been late one February night
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Saturday Newsletter: January 27, 2018
“So, Marion, tell us. Does your father work in a grocery store or is it a Chinese laundry?” Illustrator Leslie Osmont, 12, for Speaking Up by Rachel Weary, 10. Published November/December 2004. A note from William Rubel This newsletter is going to be a very short one. I mentioned last week that today i am in San Francisco cooking a restaurant dinner for 40 or so people, and it’s rather taken over my week! I hope you’ll get by with a few updates and a couple of stories this week, with the promise of normal service being resumed next. Science writing contest A couple of weeks ago I issued a challenge to readers to think about science fiction writing. This is a reminder that we want you to enter our science fiction writing contest! Think about ways that you could explore science through your writing. Are there particular scientific concepts that you could incorporate into a work of fiction? Is there a way you could play with an objective fact to make it into something creative and new? Is there something you have learned or imagined about science that you think you could make into a story? We want to read your ideas about science and the world in your fiction. Get thinking and writing, and submit your science (fiction) story to us before 1st April. Until next week! Wiliam Books, books and more books! The first book reviews by Stone Soup readers who volunteered to help us with our book pile at the end of last year have started to come in. Thank you, reviewers! We will be publishing all of them on our blog, in a special new books section, starting next week, so do look out for their comments and recommendations on some of the best new books coming out right now. We are working with some of the big publishers to develop a Book Club for Stone Soup readers, and to get more review copies of books out to those of you who are keen reviewers (first on the list some of those we didn’t have enough books for in the last round). More details on that will come through the newsletter in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, if you think you’d like to get involved with reviewing books, get in touch with Jane or Sarah by replying to this newsletter. Bloggers Have you been keeping up with our young bloggers on the website? We know that lots of you have, because you’ve been leaving some really great comments. If you haven’t had a chance to have a look yet, do check in on the blog page to read the latest from this fantastic group of Stone soup writers, and tell them (and us) what you think. And if you have an idea for a blog you’d like to write yourself, get in touch and tell us about it. From Stone Soup May/June 2001 Tiger, Tiger By Vera Litvin, 13 Illustrated by Haylee Collins, 13 Toly hid among the tall grasses of the tropical forest. He could feel the cold sweat trickling down his face. The tiger was standing close now, so close Toly could feel its pulsing breath. The vibrant black and orange of the tiger’s coat hurt his eyes. It couldn’t see him; only the tiger’s keen sense of smell told it Toly was there. Toly waited for just the right moment and then in an instant, with one smooth liquid movement, Toly found himself mounted on the beast’s back. The tiger was growing more obedient now; Toly felt its warm fur beneath him. “Run!” Toly told the tiger and it ran. Ran fast over crannies and ditches, carrying Toly further and further away from the city. Toly felt the wind ruffling his hair, violently blowing in his eyes, forcing tears to form. He had done it! He was riding the tiger. He was the conqueror. He was . . . “Toly!” his mother’s voice reached him as though it was coming from somewhere far away. “Wake up! It’s nearly seven o’clock!” The beautiful forest, the mighty tiger, the smell of the moist soil; all disintegrated as if they never were and Toly drowsily opened his eyes. “Aw, go on, Mum, five more minutes,” he pleaded desperately. Anything to win him more time. “No!” his mother retorted firmly, and left the room. Toly’s sheets were cold with sweat, but he knew that he had done it; he had ridden the tiger! Toly detested school; no, he feared it. Most of all he feared Derek, the school’s bully. He feared him with a fear hard to describe, a fear that engulfed him like a giant wave, a fear that made his knees give way and his stomach tense up at the mere mention of Derek’s name. By rights Derek should have been a stupid lug whose fist did most of his bidding. But it wasn’t right, nothing was ever right. Derek was cunning, calculating and strong—he was a tiger. Yet the fear Toly felt for the bully and the tiger were different as could be. The fear of the tiger was invigorating, it caused every vein to thrill and stand to attention. The fear of the tiger was rewarding, it made Toly feel a strange sense of achievement. Made him proud. Yet the fear of Derek made Toly feel none of those things. It made him want to crouch down really small and hide somewhere in a dark hole where no one could find him. Ever…/ more
Saturday Newsletter: January 20, 2018
Who were the mysterious performers whose music was so captivating? Illustrator Stanislav Nedzelskyi, 13, for Behind the Curtain by Dylan J. Sauder, 13. Published January/February 2010. A note from William Rubel Hamilton! Hamilton is the first piece of popular culture that my daughter, 11, has brought into the house. How many hours of Hamilton have I listened to? Stella has memorized about forty-five minutes’ worth, so let me just say, a lot. Hamilton is brilliant. It is a massively complex many-layered work of art. The core of the work is the text. And the text is a poem. It is a poem as I am confident most of you know, is about the “The ten-dollar founding father without a father.” For those of you who read this newsletter who are not American: Alexander Hamilton’s portrait is on our ten dollar bill. Hamilton is in the oldest literary tradition, that of the history poem. The Iliad and the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer, written about 2500 years ago, is the history poem of all history poems. Hamilton brings the history poem into our own time. The poem is written in the poetic style of hip hop, set to music and performed. Homer’s work was also originally set to music. Here is someone’s idea about how, roughly, the Iliad and the Odyssey would have sounded sung by the blind poet, Homer. The author of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, performed the opening song at the White House in 2009, when his idea seems to have been that he was writing a hip hop album, not making a Broadway Musical. There is a directness in this performance that I find very moving. I hope you find it direct, and powerful, too. In that first version of what became the opening song of the musical — the song “Alexander Hamilton” — Lin-Manuel Miranda sings all of the parts. In fact, Miranda ended up imagining this first song as sung by many people and so I want you to watch this version, also performed at the White House. I’ve started the clip at around nine minutes. The first nine minutes President Obama is talking. Online, you can find the lyrics to “Alexander Hamilton” published two ways: as a single text the way Lin-Manual Miranda performed at the White House in 2009, and broken up into parts for specific characters to sing, as in the second White House performance. I want you to write a story in the form of a song or songs. Choose something from history or make up the story entirely from your imagination. Lin-Manuel Miranda took years and years to finish his whole play. So, being practical, I’d like you to write one song that tells a story but that is part of larger story that you have in your head. Use any style. It doesn’t have to be hip hop. You may send us your story poem just as words — submit it as a poem — or if you sing it then submit your recording or video in the music section of the submission web page, and also please include with that submission a copy of the words. Until next week! William Dinner in San Francisco? Last week I was asked if I’d like to cook a meal at a restaurant in San Francisco next Saturday, the 27th. Of course, I said, yes! If any of you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and think you might be able to come to the meal — it is a private dinner for forty — click on this link to indicate your interest. The restaurant is on Columbus Avenue, in San Francisco’s “Little Italy.” I’m cooking the meal in the restaurant’s wood fired oven. I wrote a cookbook book in 2002 called The Magic of Fire. The meal is a magic of fire meal — flavors fire-kissed is the meal’s theme. The event starts at 7pm sharp with appetizers around the oven and the barr, followed by a single seating sit-down dinner. I’d love to meet you! From Stone Soup March/April 2004 The Color of Honor By Andrew Lorraine, 13 Illustrated by Noel Lunceford, 10 CHAPTER ONE Byron Jones parked his beat-up, old, black Chevy in the driveway and stared at the house in front of him. All of his hopes and dreams lay before him in this green house with the pale yellow shutters. “This is what I have been working for,” he said to himself, “my own office, my own home.” It was the summer of 1960. Byron was a family doctor. He had been working at a big Philadelphia hospital, when word came that a new doctor was needed in rural Ambler, about twenty-five miles outside the city Old Dr. Carter was tired and sick. He decided to retire and go live with his daughter. The hospital recommended Byron as his replacement and he jumped at the chance. Now, he was finally here, ready to start his own practice. He got out of the car and stretched. He let his eyes wander around the pretty front yard. Neat rows of purple pansies sprouted in a flowerbed near the big, wooden porch. Bright red geraniums bloomed in a pot at the wide front door. There was another pot of geraniums at the bottom of the porch steps and one at the side yard. “Doc Carter must have dabbled in gardening,” again Byron talked to himself. It all looked so homey. His mama would love it. He thought about her and about his sixteen-year-old brother, Keats. Mama loved poetry and had named her boys after her favorite poets, Lord Byron and John Keats. Byron leaned back against the car and let his thoughts wander back to the family he loved so much. Byron had grown up dirt poor. Most of his clothes were hand-me-downs and a couple of sizes too big. They came from the oldest boy of the rich white folks his mama kept house for. Byron never had his own bike, or
