I ran out on stage. All I could think about was dancing Illustrator Rachel Hellwig, 13, for her story Nutcracker Dreams. Published November/December 2002. A note from William Rubel Last Sunday I went to see the ballet The Sleeping Beauty with my daughter, Stella. I had never watched many ballets until Stella was eighteen months old. One morning, in a café, I thought, well, I have a daughter, what about looking up “ballet prince” in YouTube? What I found was the Prince Variation in the wedding scene in Sleeping Beauty’s last act. The Prince is dancing (showing off) for his now-betrothed, Princess Aurora. In this variation, the Prince dances in a circle with lots of leaps and twirls. It is an athletic tour-de-force and seemed to keep my then very young daughter reasonably engaged. So, I bought the DVD of The Sleeping Beauty and that was a real success—at least the scene in which the evil witch gives Sleep Beauty the spindle that will send her into her long sleep. Stella watched that scene over and over and over and over again. And then, she watched it again. I vividly recall her saying “again” and my re-playing the DVD. Over the years we have watched different version of The Sleeping Beauty which means in ballet terms that we have watched the same story with the same music interpreted with dance moves that are slightly different from each other. Seeing the San Francisco Ballet performance with yet another choreography brought to mind the many different ways that choreographers have handled the spindle scene my daughter loved so much as a young child. To remind you what happens in the story. At the very beginning, the King and Queen’s secretary makes a mistake and fails to invite the fairy Carabosse to their infant daughter’s christening. The secretary invites all of the other important fairies, but not Carabosse. When Carabosse shows up anyway, uninvited, she is in a foul mood. She arrives, dressed in black, with demon assistants. She is angry. Very. In ballet sign language she tells the King and Queen that she has come to give their daughter a present. The present is that on her 16th birthday she will prick herself with a spindle, and die. She will die! What a present to bring to a christening! In the ballet story there were twelve fairies invited to the party, and all but one of them had already given her gift before Carabosse gave hers. The one who hadn’t was the very powerful Lilac fairy. So, the Lilac fairy comes forward and tells the King and Queen that while she cannot completely undo the evil witch’s gift of death, she could change death to sleeping until a prince finds her and kisses her, at which point Aurora will wake up. Nolween Daniel as Carabosse with the Paris Opera Ballet. Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Image. Well, you know what happens. However hard her parents tried to shield her from spindles, on her 16th birthday, at a grand dance, the evil witch appears, hands Aurora a spindle, she pricks herself, and collapses. She manages to rise again, but she is in a bad way. She continues dancing, but this time, her dance steps are erratic. In one of the most beautiful and moving scenes in all the ballet repertoire Aurora dances backwards with great speed, but as the poison spreads her backward movement becomes uneven, jerky, and then she collapses unconscious.The way most choreographers handle this scene is to have Aurora dancing erratically and the rest of the court looking on as passive observers. But there is one version in particular, the Sleeping Beauty that is danced by the Paris Opera Ballet, that is different. In their version, when Aurora is dancing strangely, all the people who are watching the dance sway back and forth in sympathy with her staggering back and forth. It is as if the whole world feels for her. I would urge you to watch this video of that particular dance. This weekend’s writing project Reflecting on Princess Aurora, here is this Saturday’s project. I want you to tell a story in which something bad happens to a main character. The character can be a person, a fairy, a sportsperson, a member of royalty, a farmer, a pet, even an object that you might care about—like a stuffed animal. I want you to decide whether the world at large feels your character’s pain, or not. Some years ago I had a friend, who died. He was a kind, brilliant, creative man: a musician, an artist, a poet, and a mathematician. His name was Gene Lewis. The night he died there was a terrific storm. On that night, I was driving back to Santa Cruz from San Francisco. The last twenty miles of that drive is over a winding mountain road. When I got to the base of the mountain, the storm was so bad that rather than drive over the mountains in the storm, I stayed at a motel waiting for the morning. It was during the height of this storm, when the earth went wild, that my friend died. If this were a story about a fictional character who was brilliant and beloved by all his or her friends, then writing the death scene with the world itself howling in protest—the world flailing its arms in the form of thrashing tree branches, and crying in the form of a deluge, you would be reinforcing the emotional sense of your character’s death. On the other hand, the turbulence might all be internal. You could describe a calm world: the cars still driving on the freeways, the night calm, apparently no different from so many other nights. Your character dies. The world doesn’t seem to blink. As always, if you really like what you’ve done, then please send it Emma via the Stone Soup Submissions page. Until Next WeekWilliam Thank you! I just want, briefly, to thank the 215 of you who subscribed to Stone Soup in January. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I like to keep
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Saturday Newsletter: February 3, 2018
‘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
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
