Newsletter

“Whenever Bryan was batting, he always had a feeling of excitement burst right through him” Illustrator Alicia Betancourt, 13, for The Montana Summer by Andrew Lorraine, 11. Published July/August 2002. A note from William Rubel I’m back from my California Sierra camping trip with my daughter, Stella. We were camping by a lake at 10,000 feet with surrounding peaks that are over 13,000. There was an unusual amount of snow this year so it was a very different landscape than we were familiar with from previous trips. Besides the huge patches of snow, the lakes were over-full. The lake we camp by has picnic tables by the shore. They were all in the lake. People sat on them to fish! There were large waterfalls flowing into the lake where usually there is no water at all, and the streams coming into the lake and flowing out of it were white with cold rushing water. Wildflowers were plentiful, but except for mosquitos, insects were not. Very few butterflies, bee flies, hover flies, wasps and the many other insects that are usually in so much evidence. Did my daughter and I sit down and write about nature as I had suggested you do? The answer is, no. We had set aside the last days for nature writing and drawing but then Stella came down with strep throat forcing us to cut our camping trip a little short.  Before Stella got sick we were both writing, just not about nature. Stella was working on a novel inspired by Rick Riordan’s Olympian series, and I was working on my bread history. I found sitting in the campsite by a rushing stream both relaxing and stimulating. Ideas flowed and I got a lot of writing done. Sometimes, changing where you are writing can be a big help. There are still a couple of weeks of vacation left. Don’t do like my daughter and I did! Don’t procrastinate! If you go to a beautiful place, don’t wait to the last days to begin writing. And if you have already been to a beautiful place, it isn’t too late to write something and send it to us. As I had suggested before, grownups and kids writing together can send in their work jointly and we will consider the joint submissions for the website. Sport and Art I’d like to say something about this extraordinary artwork of a baseball game. The city skyline, created with simple shapes lacking in detail emphasizes the power and scale of the surroundings. Remarkably, each of the baseball players is depicted in a classic baseball pose — the pitcher winding up to throw the ball, the batsman standing with one leg forward, waiting for the ball, and the players in the field, ready, alert for the action to begin. The players’ body language says it all: the ball is abut to fly. How soon will we hear the crack of ball against the bat? Summer Camp The camp story that is included in this week’s newsletter brings back memories. I went both to a camp I loved, and one I hated. The one I hated had bullying. I wasn’t bullied myself, but a friend of mine, who, like Jake’s brother was a little different to other children, was. I remember how horrible it made me feel to see him hurt by mean children. I vividly remember telling my parents about what happened when I got home. If some of you have a camp story inside you — and particularly if you have gone to a camp this summer — get those ideas onto paper and send them to Emma. Until next week, William Business news We are mostly working this month on making improvements behind the scenes. We are looking into a more robust subscription system, beginning to work with the web developers on redesigning the web site, working with the book designer on the Stone Soup Annual, and re-editing the interviews with Stone Soup authors. I think it will take a month or two before the fruits of this month’s work becomes visible. The September Poetry issue, the first issue edited by Emma Wood,  is now moving into the production phase. If you have poems that you didn’t quite manage to send in earlier in the summer, send them to us now. There is poetry in every issue. We have been told of a couple of other Stone Soup contributors who are now published writers, and heard from others who were illustrators and gone on to a career in art or design. We are getting in touch with them. If you know of anyone who was published in Stone Soup or on the Honor Roll who is now an adult writer or artist, do let us know. We’d love to hear from them.   Sign up to our mailing list to receive the Saturday Newsletter straight to your mailbox! From Stone Soup November/December 2012 Camp Conflict By David Agosto-Ginsburg, 11 Illustrated by Madeleine Gates, 13 My name is Jake. I have brown hair and green eyes, and I’m eleven years old, but most importantly, I’ve always wanted to go to summer camp. Every year I beg my parents to let me go, but they always insist that it’s too expensive. It was the end of the year and I was about to confront my parents about summer camp, when they walked into my room with huge smiles glued to their faces. “This year we’re sending you and your brother off to summer camp!” my mom exclaimed. “Hoora…” I started. “Wait, did you say me and my brother?” I inquired. I looked over at my brother, Chris. He had pale skin, sad brown eyes, and was nine years old. He had given up on the puzzle he was doing because he wasn’t able to assemble the pieces in neat rows. We both looked at my dad anxiously. “Yes, his therapist said it could help him deal with his autism,” my dad replied. Around other people my brother does all kinds of weird things. Going to the same summer camp as him would be a

“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