Newsletter

“Music to my Ear” by Keira Zhang, 11 (Los Altos, CA) Published in Stone Soup January 2021 Illustrating “The Director” by Anya Geist, 13 (Worcester, MA) A note from William Waitlist for the Saturday Writing Workshop: The writing workshop begins next Saturday, Jan. 23. It is going to be a fun class. We are working with creativity and chance. Yes, we will be rolling dice! Enrollment was opened to existing class members last week, and 38 students have signed up. As I don’t want the class to get too big, we have closed off registration. If you want to take the class, then please register as soon as possible. You will be added to a waitlist. We will give priority to students who were in the class but haven’t yet registered. If you are in that situation, in addition to registering at EventBrite, please also write to Sarah at sarah@stonesoup.com. We will allow a few more students in, but only a literal few. If a student drops, we will fill that spot from the waitlist, so you do need to get on it to be considered for a spot in the future. Apologies! But we have to give priority to students who area already enrolled. Art: Firstly, Keira Zhang’s charcoal drawing, Music to my Ears, is just simply gorgeous. Look at it, letting your eye take it in. The drawing is also a technical tour de force. Such a beautiful, warm, and yet odd drawing! That ear! We love this drawing. Which is why it is the cover image for one of our sketchbooks. What else to say? This work is in a very old Western art tradition—the still life used as a learning tool. Studies of this kind used to be standard practice for people learning to draw. The style is now very rare. In fact, it is vanishingly rare to see such a young artist working in this traditional style. Large forms—including basic forms, like in this case a ball—illuminated with a strong light coming from a clear direction so that it casts sharp shadows. What is great about the still life for drawing students is that nothing moves! You set up your object, set the light so it shines on it to cast clear shadows, and then you start drawing: Eye. Hand. The strong light, which you see in this drawing, helps emphasize light and dark, which is what Keira was working with to create the illusion of dimensionality in her drawing. By working with I mean focusing on the light and dark and the tonalities in between to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. The still life is the ultimate training in eye-hand coordination. Keira worked in charcoal. This offered her a medium that produces a rich, warm drawing while also being at least a little flexible. With charcoal, one can lighten patches that turned out too dark and darken patches that are too light. If you choose to use charcoal, you might consider looking at YouTube videos for some pointers on making a still life with charcoal. Weekend art project: A still life is the art project for the weekend. Yes, you can do this as a photograph if you wish. You can choose normal household objects or make something that is a bit odd, like Keira’s combination of a huge plaster ear, a ball, and a violin. Balls, triangles, and cubes are very common in this style of still life. For cubes, think of toy blocks or a piece of two-by-four. Whether you are using a camera or drawing, the lighting is the key. Strong lighting emphasizes volume. Strong lighting helps you, as the artist, to focus on light and dark as the way to render volume. The ball in Keira’s drawing looks round because of the very bright part of the ball in the center in contrast to the darker edges. Starting out just drawing a well-illuminated ball could be a good approach. Pay attention in Keira’s work to the contrast between the deep black and lighter portions of her drawing. There is no way you will achieve a finished charcoal drawing at this level on your first try, so my advice for this weekend it is to keep it simple: set up your scene with a clear, strong light source. More general advice: Stay relaxed! Don’t be overly critical! If you have never ever done this before, then consider seeking advice form YouTube. One suggestion I am sure you will encounter on YouTube is that you block out images with fuzzy lines—not crisp lines like in a coloring book but thicker, more forgiving approximate outlines. This will enable you to evolve the edges by letting you both add shading and pull shading away as your feel your way to the realistic outline. Courage! If you find yourself getting discouraged, then please stop and come back to the drawing later. Writing. “The Director,” the story below, is written by Anya Geist. Anya has been writing for Stone Soup for years and is now a Stone Soup intern. She also won the Editor’s Choice in the 2020 Stone Soup Long Form Book Contest. Anya helps post to the website, develop writing prompts, and is helping develop our forthcoming podcasts. Fortunately for Anya, but sadly for us, Anya is now in high school! I haven’t yet checked with Emma or with Anya, but my guess is that this is one of the last, if not the last piece that Anya will have published in Stone Soup. So, I would like to thank Anya for her fabulous writing and photography. Her contributions to Stone Soup will be long remembered—and will be read for years to come. Thank you! The story you find below, “The Director,” is, also a tour de force, like Keira’s drawing with which it is paired. There is just so much in this story to talk about—and so little space! What I am asking you all to do today is to click on the link

“Invisible to Human” by Emi Le, 13 (Millbrae, CA) Published in Stone Soup January 2021 Illustrating “The Alien Who Copied Everyone” by Dana Yehia, 8 (Sunnyvale, CA) A note from Jane Here in London, our mayor has declared an emergency. We are in lockdown, and our hospitals are full of COVID-19 patients. It’s cold and gray, and the streets are eerily quiet. What better time to be distracted by fiction, and art, especially some that takes me out of our own world and onto another one! There are so many intriguing things about Invisible to Human, the artwork featured in this week’s newsletter. Its title makes me stop and think as I focus on the strange, many-limbed creature on the right—maybe the human can’t see it, even with their flashlight apparently focused on it, but I get the feeling it can see the human! I find my eye constantly drawn into that big, single eye with its blue center, one of the only colorful things amid the different shades of gray. Looking at the whole image, I love the way Emi has used diagonal planes of light and dark to illustrate what is visible to each of the figures and what is not. The alien’s tentacle vanishes into the blackness of the human’s experience while the human steps forward into what they perceive as lonely darkness, behind and unable to see the presence of the creature the viewers are so aware of. It’s mysterious, and just a bit sinister. There is a higher resolution version of Invisible to Human (and all of our featured artworks) at our website, and I encourage you to click the link and view it there to really appreciate some of the details. Dana’s story, “The Alien Who Copied Everyone,” gives us a more lighthearted view of aliens and outer space—her alien eats, reads, and watches TV—with lots of comic touches, like the book the alien is reading called Life Full of Baloney, and crazy deadpan details like trash-throwing possums. But even this story ends on the mystery of a forever unanswered question. This weekend, create something that reflects on the mysteries of the galaxy. Maybe you will invent a whole planet and its inhabitants, like Dana, or draw what you imagine, like Emi. Perhaps you will use this as an opportunity to write something for this month’s Flash Contest (details below and on our website). For those of you who enjoy space facts along with your fiction, why not take some inspiration from this list of planned spaceflight in 2021. Enjoy a trip outside our everyday world, and as always, if you like what you produce, send it in for our editor, Emma, to see. Until next week, P.S. Booking is open for our new series of Writing Workshops and Book Club—more details below! Classes and contests! January Flash Contest This is the first week of January, which means it is Flash Contest week! You have until noon PST tomorrow (Sunday, January 10) to submit your entries. This month’s challenge is to write a short sincere-fiction story about a character that lives 100 years in the future. Click here for all the details, including how to submit. Writing Workshop & Book Club, Winter/Spring 2021 Booking is now open for our next ten sessions of writing workshop and book club, starting Saturday, January 23. You may either buy one ticket for all ten sessions, which works out at a slightly discounted price per session, or select individual sessions if you can’t attend them all. Subscribers attend at half price. For more details, and to book your places, visit Eventbrite. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Lucy, 13, reviewed Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes. She writes, “If you are looking for a book that is thoughtful and thought-provoking, gracious and graceful, smart and spirited and soulful, Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance is a book that you should most definitely check out.” Abhi, one of our frequent contributors, reviewed a movie. Check out what he thinks of 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick.   From Stone Soup January 2021 The Alien Who Copied Everyone By Dana Yehia, 8 (Sunnyvale, CA) Illustrated by Emi Le, 13 (Millbrae, CA) There was once an alien who lived on a planet called Watercolors and wanted to be an explorer. But there was a little problem. The problem was that to be an explorer, you had to explore. But everyone on his planet already knew so much about the planet, it would be almost impossible to find something that hadn’t been explored on Watercolors. He knew he had to do something about it, so he started exploring day and night but couldn’t find anything that someone on his planet hadn’t explored yet. That’s about the time the poor little alien decided to give up. After all of that thinking, he felt a bit of hunger in his tummy. It was that type of hunger that made it feel as if your tummy is saying, “I want FOOD!” He felt like he’d caught the flu—his tummy was killing him—so he went to eat lunch. When he arrived, he saw the menu of his dreams! There was pizza, spaghetti, tomato soup, hamburgers, steak, fries, chicken, asparagus, artichokes, meatloaf, and even his very favorite meal—omelets! So, he got himself a spot in line. He waited for his turn, because that’s what a polite alien does. He waited in line for about ten minutes, but it felt like a hundred million years to him. . . . /MORE     Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.  

“A Glimpse of Winter” by Hannah Parker, 13 Published in Stone Soup December 2019 A note from William If you had ever wondered what it would be like to be part of an event that will be in the history books for hundreds of years—well, now we know. Not much fun. We are starting 2021 the way we ended 2020: in our houses, being careful. Because of the vaccines, we are also entering 2021 with a sense there is “a light at the end of the tunnel.” This tunnel expression is one that most of us know and use. It was an experience on a train a few years ago that gave me a visceral understanding of what this expression means. I would like to share that with you today. A few years ago, I took a tourist in my community from downtown Santa Cruz, California, where I live, into the town of Felton in the mountains a few miles away. As the train leaves the downtown, it goes through a tunnel. The tunnel is reasonably long, and the train goes slowly. There are a couple cars with seats—old train cars from the 1930s—but most passengers ride in open cars to see the view as the train goes into the mountains. There are no lights on the train. There are no lights in the tunnel. It is dark. It was the darkest dark I had ever experienced. It is a darkness that is the absolute absence of light. I can’t explain it, but it is darker than any darkness I have experienced before or since. It is a darkness that is so absolutely dark that it envelopes you in an embrace of nothingness. It is unpleasant. It soon becomes frightening. When will we get out of this darkness? When? And then, way way way in the distance, a speck of light. It is still dark, but one immediately feels better: the journey will soon give way to a brilliant day. The dawn of 2021 breaks with a speck of light in the distance. Like the train in the tunnel, the path is sure. We are going to make it to back to the light. And then. Then what? We party! January issue: Because of COVID-19, our printer was late printing the January issue of Stone Soup. It shipped a few days ago from our mailing house in Bellingham, Washington. They normally ship the issues the middle of the month prior to publication. If the mail system is cleared of holiday mail, you should expect your January issue within a couple weeks. Those of us on the West Coast will get them first. Our apologies, but this was something outside of our control. Writing Workshop: The Saturday Writing Workshop will resume on Saturday, January 23. Registration will go out soon. We are limiting the class to 45 students; existing class members will be given the opportunity to re-enroll, and then we will open it up to everyone else. Saturday Writing Project: Please look at the photograph A Glimpse of Winter by Hannah Parker. Firstly, notice that there are really only two planes—a foreground and a background. If you were to think of this image set up on a stage, then you have a bird feeder up near the audience and then at the back of the stage a backdrop painting of falling snow. You would also have a front curtain with an oval opening so that you only see the bird feeder and the snowy curtain behind it, and nothing else, not even the stage floor. Hannah framed her bird feeder in an oval. In photography, this is called a vignette. Portraits, for instance, are often framed as vignettes. The next time you go to a store that sells frames, you are likely to find some that have mats that are cut as an oval. Photographic vignettes focus our eyes onto the single most important image—in Hannah’s photograph, the bird feeder, but usually a person’s face and upper body. While I want to use this photograph as a prompt for this Saturday’s writing project, as a bonus project you can also use it as inspiration for a photograph of your own. Take your phone or camera for a walk around your house, yard, or neighborhood looking for things to photograph that are organized in the way the bird feeder and backdrop of snow is organized: foreground, background, and nothing else. To add to the complexity of this project, you might also try to find a situation where this foreground/background image is closed in in a way that further emphasizes the foreground image. In other words, try to find a natural photographic vignette frame through which to take your photograph. For the writing project, I want you to think of the bird feeder as a character, the falling snow the backdrop. This holiday, I have been watching lots of anime with my daughter. In one of the shows, they often show the face of a character in the foreground, like where the bird feeder is, and then behind that character, where the snow is, there is an image of, for example, bursting stars. The background of bursting stars conveys the character’s inner state: Wow! Surprise! Many of you will have read a book in which a character is feeling very emotional while at the same time there is a storm outside. It is a common literary device to link a character’s inner state, the way the character is feeing, with the external world: A happy person, a happy day. A tumultuous event, a thunderstorm. I would like you to write a short short story. For today, let’s say under 125 words—so like half a typed page. This gives you space to create a character whose inner state is either reflected in what is happening outside—happy person, sunny day—or the opposite—the sun is shining, but her heart is breaking! Lastly, “Cafe Terrace at Night”: This is a great, great story. I hope all of you will click through to read the entirety of what Aoife O’Connell has written. For an extra project to close out this holiday break, please focus on the first paragraph: