Newsletter

“Then I started going down slowly to the ground and I stopped at Vietnam” Martin Taylor, 12 Published July/August 2002, illustrating Hungry, by Tran Nguyen, 10 A note from the team William has gone camping in the mountains with his daughter for a couple of weeks, so this week’s newsletter comes to you from Emma and Jane. Drawing dreams This week’s drawing was made to illustrate a story about a dream. Dreams can be such a strange mixture of reality and fantasy, and I love the way this picture combines those two things. The detail of the city buildings, its curving river and tall palm trees, the valley dark on one side and light on the other, all conjure up a realistic and beautiful picture of a town in Vietnam. The sky is bright, with high thunder clouds–but then whatever is that in the top right-hand corner? Why is there a fork sticking out of a pink cloud? It’s unexpected, and that makes me want to look again. It also makes me more curious about the story it goes with. Like lots of great illustrations, this one is true to the words without literally putting all of them into the picture, and that mixture of truth and fiction feels very dreamlike. Dreams can be hard to remember or put into words. A drawing like this that hints at something a little bit strange is a great way to put the viewer in the right frame of mind to think about the dream that inspired it–and their own dreams. What do your dream drawings look like? Until next week Jane Submit to our Cover Contest and a Note About Art in Stone Soup A long time ago, when Stone Soup was first founded, we didn’t commission illustrations. Instead, we published pieces of art that excited us—regardless of their connection to a specific story! We have recently decided to return to this practice. This means, we are no longer commissioning illustrations for the magazine. From now on, we will be accepting standalone art—drawing, paintings, photographs, collages as well as images of sculpture, diorama, ceramics—that we simply love and want to share with all of our readers. Your art will be featured in a special “art” section of our new digital magazine. In addition, we might also choose to pair it with a story or a poem, in which case it would be featured in two places in the issue. Please consider submitting your best pieces of art to the magazine. This is also a good time to remind you that we are running our first-ever cover contest this summer and hope you will consider submitting! Given our new focus on standalone art—art that can stand on its own without a piece of fiction—I encourage you to take the story excerpts and run with them, to bring in your imagination, and maybe even your dreams, to play in your pieces. Think of the excerpts as springboards: where can they launch you? Until next week Emma   Sign up to our mailing list to receive the Saturday Newsletter straight to your mailbox!   From Stone Soup November/December 2000 Memories of Sunset Lake By Mandana Nakhai, age 11 Illustrated by Zoe Paschkis, age 12 It was getting dark. Zoe lay on the hammock on the front porch eating an ice-cream sundae. She looked out at the golden lake thoughtfully. The porch door slammed. Zoe scooted over for her twin brother, Hunter. “Thinkin’?” Zoe nodded. She slurped a chocolate drip off the side of the tall glass. Hunter carefully watched Zoe’s gaze drop toward the other white-picket-fence houses ringing the lake. “I just can’t believe the summer’s over.” Hunter got up and dangled his feet over the porch, brushing some blond hair out of his intense green eyes. “Well, we can come back next summer. We have to go back to school, you know.” Zoe nodded, wishing that the summer would never end. Cool air blew the trees as the twins walked down to the dock. “I just wish we could have done something interesting. All we did is sit around on the dock the whole time.” Hunter rolled up his khakis and dipped his feet in the water, thinking about what his sister had said. “We did lots of stuff. Remember the beginning of the summer? When we first got to the house?” …more

Planet with Five Suns Vika Sycheva, 8 A note from the team William has gone camping in the mountains with his daughter for a couple of weeks, so this week’s newsletter comes to you from Emma and Jane. What I did on my holidays… When I was at school in Scotland, the first thing we had to do when we got back after the summer vacation was write a short essay all about “what I did on my summer holidays” (we had holidays, not vacations there). It always seemed like a chore, and turned everything we’d done into a dreary, long list of “and thens.” But I realize now it doesn’t have to be like that! Maybe we could have treated the assignment as an invitation to write a short screenplay, or a journal entry about a single fabulous day, or a postcard or letter to a friend. What if we’d decided to write poem about just one thing that had happened: how it was on a rainy day in a sunny place, or a hot day in a cold place? We could have focused on a special trip; or someone new we’d seen or met; or even just on what it was like to do not much at all in a new place, or even be at home all day. I’m sure all our Stone Soup readers already have lots of creative ideas about how to celebrate and commemorate things they’re doing this summer. We’d love to hear some of them, and see your artwork too. Send us the short pieces you’ve written, drawn, or photographed telling us who you are and where you’ve been, and we’ll make a Stone Soup Summer Album on our website with a selection of them. We can’t wait to hear what you all did on your summer holidays at newsletter@stonesoup.com! Until next week, Jane Do you want to blog for Stone Soup? We are excited to announce that we are actively looking for writers to contribute regularly to our blog! Do you have a lot to say about a single topic—sports, fashion, art, writing, books, music, animals, science, theater, travel, crafting, movies, tv shows, video games, something else? Would you be able to commit to writing for us once a month? If so, we want to hear from you! Please write a sample post, between 350-600 words, and submit it here. A blog post can be many different things. It can be a review, a reflection, a story, a how-to, an opinion piece, or an account. It can include pictures, diagrams, videos, maps, comics—you name it! Until next week Emma From Stone Soup May/June 2017 As Seen From Above By Jem Burch, 13 Hundreds of feet in the air, the world is In miniature, a scale model made of tinfoil, cardboard, and glue The green water ocean is so smooth you could walk on it Haloed by a ring of white foam, tiny islands poke out of the sea They’re so small none of them have a name You could be the first to conquer them, call them your own more

Rachel Alana Fomer Stone Soup Illustrator Rachel Alana, Artist and Former Stone Soup Illustrator I’ve written recently about two Stone Soup authors who have published their own books. This week, I’d like to introduce you to Rachel Alana, who illustrated several stories for the magazine about fifteen years ago as Rachel Stanley. You can find examples of her work in these links: Hermione and Leafy The Flying Angel Diver Rachel, as she puts it, “has been drawing all [her] life.” You can see more of her work, and learn more about who Rachel is through her website and her Instagram page. I know that most Stone Soup illustrators have several years of serious drawing behind them before their first publication in the magazine. I also now that when you are ten or twelve one of the great questions that you have is, what will I become? My daughter, who will be eleven in two weeks, often asks me, “Dada, what I will be?” Of course, I have no idea, except she has said since she was six that she wants to be a scientist, and I think that is very likely. Some of you reading this will likewise become artists and writers. If you are an adult, and a former Stone Soup writer or illustrator and are still writing and doing art—whether professionally or as a hobby—please let me know by replying to this newsletter. I will be on vacation for a couple weeks, so I won’t respond until mid-August but am excited to hear from you. We are thinking of devoting a place on our Stone Soupwebsite to former contributors and former members of the Honor Roll. I chose to feature this drawing of Rachel’s because it happens to be a drawing of me! Well, not really of me, personally, but it is a drawing of a boy playing with a boat in a French park. One of my strongest childhood memories is playing with a boat in the Tuileries Garden in the summer of 1963. Every time I go to Paris I pause by that place, even when it is winter and the boats are all put away. I will say that seeing the park does make me sad, as does Rachel’s drawing, because my mother died about ten years later, and playing with those little boats with your mother on a hot summer afternoon in Paris is about as wonderful an afternoon as one will ever have. So boys playing in parks with toy boats always makes me think of her. This one of the great powers of art. To take us someplace else. Back in time. Forward in time to a place that will never really exist. Into the lives of others, or back into one’s own life, but a part of one’s life that was long ago. Going on vacation, so until mid-August! William Rubel Founder & Executive Director Poetry Issue Still Open! Send us a poem, write a poetry review! Emma, our editor, tells me that the poetry issue is filling up, but is still open. So, don’t be shy! Send Emma your poems for the special September Poetry Issue. Emma has also asked for reviews of poems. We have never published reviews of poems before, and in fact this is rare in adult literary magazines. I am repeating here what we have published about this previously, but adding an incentive for you to write poetry reviews.The first five people to submit a poetry review will receive a free copy of the 2017 Stone Soup Annual, a lovely book with everything we’ve published in 2017 (regardless of whether Emma accepts your review for publication). You can review Emma’s guidelines for poetry reviews here. Buy Stone Soup for Summer Reading Summer is still going strong. If you haven’t already, please consider buying a Stone Soupsubscription for the reader and creative child in your life. Stone Soup is available online and can also be read offline in app form or as a downloaded PDF, either printed out or on a tablet. Mid-November we will be publishing a print annual for 2017 so you will also have the opportunity to buy a year’s worth of Stone Soup in book form. With a subscription, your child will get access to our archive of Stone Soup issues online—over 2,000 pages of reading material along with the opportunity to submit his or her own creative work to the magazine for free. From Stone Soup May/June 2004 The Flying Angel By Elizabeth B. Smith, 13 Illustrated by Rachel Stanley, 12 “Why am I so dumb, Hobo?” I asked the short, jetblack gelding. I knew he couldn’t answer me, but I knew he could understand. Just two days ago, I had failed my first seventh-grade math test spectacularly, lost patience entirely at an annoying girl who I thought was my friend, and I continued to struggle with the facts of growing up. Now, staring into the eyes of someone I knew I could trust, I spilled it all out. And through everything, the glossy black eyes of my one true friend took everything in. When I ended my period of ranting, my wet eyes met his, and he looked back like always, and winked.I threw my arms around his neck, and breathed in the smell of the horse. It was a smell that you learned to appreciate in my house, whether it was lingering in the car, collecting on my welcome mat, or biding its time on the bristles of one of the many brushes that scattered my floor. If you knew me personally, you’d know (and hopefully not be offended) that I’d switch a moment with you any time, for the presence of a horse. Right now, it was one of those times, a dewy Sunday morning, where the first signs of bitter fall were creeping in. . . .more