Newsletter

Guiseppe Arcimboldo, ‘Vertumnus’, the Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden. A note from William Rubel Our editor, Emma Wood, is about to send out a call for submissions for the December Food issue. I have copied the letter she is sending to contributors and honor roll recipients, below. Since we are publishing the December issue as part of our Print Annual we have to have all the material selected and designed for print in October. Emma has given October 10 as the deadline for food-related submissions for this food/holiday issue. Emma, in her call for submissions, includes links to images and poetry to give you some inspiration. Please click through to her links. I have included this painting by an Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who was born in Milan in 1527. Arcimboldo is known for his imaginative portraits. Or, one might say, insane portraits! Here is link to all of Arcimboldo’s portraits. I think it is fair to say that Arcimboldo thought “outside the box.” As an artist, a photographer, a writer, a composer, I encourage you to always stretch yourself. If you have an insane idea—follow through on it! I can’t guarantee that Emma will publish it—but you have nothing to lose.This is a Food issue timed for the holidays. So, we are definitely looking for stories that revolve around food. Memories that revolve around food. When I was a child, we would often go to my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. We’d come a couple of hours early. She had a box of marbles. I played with them—not a game with or against anyone—but I always enjoyed looking at them and hitting them against each other. She had a sunroom that opened up onto a back garden where there was pond with goldfish. I spent lots of time sitting on the mossy rocks surrounding the pond looking at those fish. But, my deepest memory is that in that sun room we ate blue cheese—Danish Blue—on Nabisco Triscuit crackers. The smell of that cheese instantly brings me back to being twelve, and to those lovely late afternoon Sundays at my grandmother’s house. For those of you who live in Los Angeles, she lived in one of those big boxy houses on Highland Avenue. The dinners were formal. My grandmother had a cook. The cook always made Parker House Rolls which she served in a basket as she walked around the table to offer each of us one. I don’t recall anything else about what was served except the dessert. The dessert of my memory is a floating island. (It couldn’t really have been every dinner at grandmother’s house, though, perhaps because I liked it so much, it was!) I always sat with my back to a wall of west facing windows. The kitchen door was to my left. The cook entered through the kitchen door bringing the floating island in and putting it in the center of the table. White clouds of poached egg floated in a custard. If you don’t know this dessert, the custard is a basic vanilla custard, called “Créme Anglaise.” I tried to make the floating island recently for my daughter but failed miserably. Frankly, my attempt was a disaster. Poaching those lightly sweetened egg whites that float on the custard isn’t so easy! These Sunday dinners took place fifty, even fifty-five years ago. The blue cheese and the floating island take me back to this time. One aspect of those evenings that I did not understand then is that there was always this tall, stooped, silent older man. I honestly don’t recall ever having said a word to him or hearing him speak. So, I am thinking that he must have been very old and unwell during those years. My parents said that he was my grandmother’s “companion.” I am named after him. Both my first and second names. My middle name memorializes the city he was born in. It is odd, thinking back on it, that I met my namesake, but never really met him. In writing this, I now remember that I’d greet him with the old fashioned, “Pops.” As it turns out, these Sunday meals were the last meals that we all had together as a family. When I was around thirteen, my grandmother, who was a chain smoker, had a debilitating stroke. My mother died when I was in college. My brother, sister, and I all moved away, and, to be honest, moved apart. My father died a few years ago at 93. Some of the strongest memories I have of my family, including silent Pops, is at my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. One thing that is interesting about the Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s is that its meaning has changed with time. Had I written about those meals when I was your age it would have been a story that was in the moment. Of course, you don’t need to write about a meal that has really happened in your life. What Emma is asking for are stories, poems, or images in which food is an important element—and so there may not even be a meal in them, at all. Until next week William Call for Submissions for the December Food Issue Short narratives about your favorite foods, dishes, cooking traditions, or your relationship to food more generally. Tall tales that revolve around a food—think about James and the Giant Peach or Jack and the Bean Stalk! Poems that turn food into metaphors, like this one by Lucille Clifton. Paintings, photographs, drawings, and collages of fruits, vegetables, dairy cows, cupcakes—you name it! And more! Interpret the theme as loosely or as literally as you like. We’d love to see what you come up with! The deadline to submit for the food issue is 10/10 so get writing!  Or maybe you already have a piece that incorporates food in some small way but you aren’t sure if it fits the theme; submit anyway! We’ll consider all submissions for publication in our regular issues as well. Looking forward to reading your work soon! Emma Business Updates St. Louis, NCTE Convention, November 16-19 Your whole Stone Soup

September issue now online! read it here Cover Photograph for the September, 2017 Special Poetry issue. ‘Satyrs’, by Laura Katz, 14 A note from the Editor, Emma Wood I have always been a very competitive person, and I have also always been a reader—which means I have always been a very competitive reader. Every summer as a kid, I tried to return in the fall with the longest reading list in my class. Sometimes, I even “cheated” by reading some very short books! Even so, I was very pleased with myself when I read over a 100 books a couple of summers in a row. Soon, however, I realized that quantity is not better than quality. Instead of reading the most books, I began to aspire to read the longest and most difficult books I could get my hands on. Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy? Um, only three books—really? Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo? Yes, please! (I read the whole thousand-page novel while fighting off a bad fever during a week off from school.) Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? Bring it on! For a few months, my two best friends and I each carried around our own leather-bound library copies of Shakespeare’s collected works. I remember dipping in and out of The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet on the bus home from school. Reading long books made me feel accomplished and adult. I hated to be talked down to, in my real life and in my reading life. My long book obsession reached its peak when, as a fourth-grader, I set my sights on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. War and Peace was, and remains, the epitome of The Long Book, the ultimate doorstopper. I checked out a hardcover copy from the library and began carrying it around everywhere, proudly announcing whenever I could that I was reading War and Peace. This actually caused some issues at my school; the head of the lower school ended up calling my parents to tell them she thought it was inappropriate that I was reading a book so clearly outside of my reading level! My parents felt I should read what I wanted to read and defended my decision. In truth, I didn’t end up getting much farther than page 100. The book was, in fact, over my head. But I’m glad that I ultimately got to make that call for myself. Still, War and Peace must have left some imprint on me, because I ended up studying Russian language and literature in college. Now I’ve read all of War and Peace—in English and in Russian! We’d love to hear from you, our readers, about books that have inspired, influenced, or challenged you. Is there one book you’ve read over and over again? Is there a book that changed you how think about something—yourself, your relationships, the world, other books? Is there a book that sparked your desire to write? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Write a short paragraph about it and send it to me at editor@stonesoup.com. Be sure to include the name of the book, the author of the book, as well as your own full name and age in the email! We might collect these to post on our website. Until next time Emma A note from William Rubel The September Poetry Issue is Published! The September 2017 Poetry Issue is published! This is an issue of firsts. It is the first issue produced by Emma Wood, the first themed issue, the first of our monthly issues, the first issue publishing reviews of poems, and the first issue illustrated with photographs. You can read the current issue on the website here. You get a certain number of free page views, even if you don’t subscribe. If you like what you see, then please support what we are doing with a subscription. We have also produced a PDF of the issue, and I have posted a PDF that contains an excerpt of the September issue. I encourage subscribers to download it. The poetry in this issue is really special. All of the poems will reward you when you read them multiple times. I really hope that all of you will look at the issue online and download the sample PDF to come back to the poems over and over. I also encourage you to read Emma Wood’s introduction to the issue. Recipes I received a letter this week asking about last week’s call for recipes. The question was whether you can use a recipe from a book. The answer is: yes, you can. But, in your headnote–the text that introduces the recipes–please say where the recipe is from. To be clear, it is OK to use the ingredients and quantities from a published recipe, but you should re-write the instructions. The idea is that there are only so many ingredients or proportions of ingredients in a pie crust, for example, so you cannot be expected to come up with an original mixture, but the way you tell people how to mix it is language that belongs to the author, so you need your own words for the introduction and the how-to-make the recipe parts. Until next week, William Weekly Business Updates Sales Reps Wanted: This is a first shout-out for commissioned independent sales reps. If you know anyone–or even a friend of a friend–who reps products to schools, please send them our way. We are looking for reps who specialize in software and literary. Thank you. November convention: As I’ve mentioned, we are exhibiting at the National Council of Teachers of English convention in St. Louis in mid-November. If any Stone Soup educators are planning to attend, please reply to this newsletter to let me know. We will have a staff of four: I’ll be there along with Emma Wood, Jane Levi, and the newest addition to our staff, Sarah Ainsworth. We’d all love to meet you there. School site licenses: Do you know a teacher who you think might want to use

  Deadlines, recipes and a September poem… A note from William Rubel   “OK, Francie, finished changing my books! We can go play Laura now”. Illustrator Alycia Kiley, 13, for ‘Laura’ by Francie Neukom, 13. Published January/February, 2000. Call for Recipes for the December issue As a cookbook author myself I feel very strongly that a well written recipe is literature, and we want to read that genre of literature from our Stone Soup contributors. What we are looking for are Holiday recipes that mean something to you and your family. In addition to the ingredients and the instructions. we are asking for you to write what amounts to an extra short story — a “headnote” — to precede the formal recipe. This introduction to the recipe should be up to 250 words. As Stone Soup is a literary magazine, in selecting recipes we are are giving a lot of weight to that introduction. There is no rule about what that headnote should be like. At their best, headnotes bring the reader into the spirit of the recipe, make the reader understand why the recipe is important to you, its author, and make your reader want to cook it. You can sometimes be direct and say, “This is the best recipe, ever! I love it!” But more frequently, it is best to weave the dish you are writing about into a compelling narrative. The challenge in writing a headnote is that in addition to romancing the recipe — that is one way I think of it — the headnote is also the place where you mention tricky parts of the recipe, an ingredient that is especially important, or a technique that can be difficult. The headnote is a very odd kind of genre. It is where story and technical manual come together. The perfect headnote is like a jewel. As I am writing this asking you to work to a deadline, I am also working to a recipe deadline. I have an article due for a magazine I write for on Monday. The article is on holiday breads and includes three recipes. One of them is a Seed Cake. I start that headnote with a quote from The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins loved Seed Cakes, a common cake in the 1700s. In other recipes, I have written about how the dish makes me think of my mother, who died when I was still in college. What I am trying to say to you is that the recipe headnote is a place for you to be creative — a place to use all of your literary talents to draw your readers into your world and your imaginative space. As holidays tend to be rich in stories, memories, and imagination, our editor, Emma Wood, and I are looking forward to reading what your create for us — and to eating the foods you love. There are detailed instructions on the submissions page. In addition to the headnote the technical part of the recipe must be complete for us to consider the recipe — the list of ingredients and the instructions have to be there. If you list an ingredient, then be sure it is in the instructions. Please test your recipe more than once. My advice is that after you have written it, but before you submit it, that you make it one last time following your recipe exactly as you have written it. While I do want you to write the headnote alone, the way you write stories, it is appropriate to bring in friends or family members to test the recipe and get advice on how to write the instructions so they are clear. We will test recipes ourselves before publishing them. We are really looking forward to tasting your words! Until next week, William P.S. While this is a call for recipes directed at our readers under the age of fourteen, this also makes a good family project in which each family member writes one or more recipes as part of a family cookbook. Deadlines! Stone Soup is now monthly through the school year. The September Poetry issue will be published next Friday. The closing date for the November issue just passed. The next closing date is October 20, for the December Holiday issue. Business News The Poetry issue will be published online next Friday, along with a PDF that subscribers can download that has the same formatting as the print magazine had. This PDF will be one of the year’s issues included in the print Annual that we will be publishing in November. The letters of distress have tapered off considerably, but we are still getting emails expressing dismay that Stone Soup is now publishing digitally. I have replied to many of you — and said here in the Newsletter — that the world has changed. The Village Voice, the archetypal New York weekly, just ceased print publication after 62 years. We have an extra reason for our fellow feeling: in 2005 The Village Voice wrote movingly about a novella we published in 1978, Lee Tandy Schwartzman’s Crippled Detectives, or The War of the Red Romer. I will write about that story, and its author, in a separate Newsletter. We are still getting ourselves stabilized. When the ordering system functions more smoothly,  the new website is up, and we start seeing a growth in orders to schools, then we will begin to focus on new options for print publishing. We will never go back to being a print magazine, but we would like to become a prolific publisher of writing by young authors — hence my recent request for young novelists to contact me. We can also see ourselves publishing poetry broadsides, anthologies, and much more; but just at the moment, that is all too much. I’d like to thank you all for sticking with us through this transition period, and for your help in directing us towards a future that squares the circle between digital and print. Until next week, William From Stone Soup March/April 2007 The Coal Towpath Near Sand Island on a September Afternoon  By Roy Lipis, 9 A solitary autumn leaf rustles on a tree. Slowly, gracefully it floats down, twirling, silently meeting the dense dappled shimmer of still water. Overhead, distant vees of