Newsletter

A note from William Thanksgiving best from everyone at Stone Soup! It is a calm Thanksgiving this year, but to be honest, I am enjoying the weekend with my daughter and my garden. Open House! You are all invited to our first-ever Stone Soup open house on Tuesday, December 1, at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern. For the first time, the whole Stone Soup community—adults and kids—comes together Tuesday for our open house. It’s a free event, but you do need to register through EventBrite. Please register. The whole Stone Soup team is looking forward to meeting you!This first open house is about you meeting us and also you meeting each other. It is the first of more community-wide events that we have planned into 2021. But more on that at the meeting. All of us at Stone Soup will be at the meeting, along with our board of directors. We will introduce ourselves, and those of us who work on Stone Soup will briefly talk about our accomplishments in 2020 and our plans for 2021. We will keep our remarks short as we want there to be plenty of time for the adults and kids attending get to know each other. Bring questions to ask. If Stone Soup has meant a lot to you, then you may want to be prepared to talk about you and Stone Soup. This open house is taking place in the context of Giving Tuesday. One parent has just joined us as a Stone Soup patron and given us a $10,000 50% match. So, one purpose of the meeting is to answer questions about giving to Stone Soup, to help us bring in new patrons to achieve this match—and our larger fundraising goal for the year. The best way to prepare for the open house is to watch the interview between Anya Geist and Lena Aloise that is posted at the top of this newsletter. Anya is a former Stone Soup author and artist, as well as a brilliant photographer—and now that she is in high school, a Stone Soup intern. Meanwhile, Lena is one of Stone Soup’s current stars. She is an Honor Roll winner, Flash Contest winner, and a creative force at the Saturday Writing Workshop. Anya and Lena are both good examples of what Stone Soup is about: introducing young people to the best of their peers, standing back, and watching them bloom. William’s Weekend Writing Project Take inspiration from Lena’s piece for a recent writing workshop on nature writing, “The Plum Tree,” for Thanksgiving weekend’s writing project. You can read it below. Lena’s prose is exquisite. The paragraph that starts with “There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye . . .” includes prose that is so beautiful it gives me goose bumps. Two of the most remarkable aspects of Lena’s story are how she so quickly establishes a caring relationship between the two characters, and between us and the tree. Note how effectively Lena uses personification—the literary device whereby you give nonhuman creatures, in this case a tree, some human ways of being. When Lena speaks of the tree’s “boughs reaching towards . . .” she animates the tree. She gives it life. Gives it a sense of purpose. Also, I think because we can imagine ourselves making the same gesture as the tree—reaching—Lena draws us into imagining we are one with this very alien being. Another example: Lena writes, “The tree sat there, calmly, waiting for the worst.” Effortlessly, we are drawn into the story’s imaginative space. We are standing there with this thinking, feeling tree, waiting “for the worst.” For your nature writing this weekend, I’d like you to spend some time quietly observing a piece of nature. Which, given the circumstances, can be observing a pet. Let your imagination do its work so that the characters in your story, whether a dog, or a tree, or wind, take on the warmth of life. And as always, if you are happy with your work, consider sending it to Emma, our editor, to consider. Until next week—on Tuesday, we hope, as well as next Saturday in the newsletter! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Jane, 12, wrote a poem about the way COVID has stolen the sense of normalcy. We published a travelogue documenting Mahati’s pre-pandemic trip to Whittier, Alaska. Learn more about the unique community by reading Mahati’s post. Nora, 12, reviewed The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer. Find out why Nora enjoys the fairy-tale-with-a-twist book series so much. “How cool would it be to live inside a book?” Pragnya asks at the start of her review for Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale. Read what Pragnya thinks of the book where the main character finds herself lost within the books she reads. Becca traces her experiences of Yom Kippur throughout her life, ending with this year’s very unusual celebration. Read Becca’s post to learn what her take-away is. Lena Aloise, 11Harvard, MA From the Stone Soup blog November 2020 The Plum Tree By Lena Aloise, 11 (Harvard, MA)   He was happiest early in the daytime, when the sky was painted over crimson and violet, when the crisp breeze flushed his cheeks a rosy red, when the birds sang their soft melody, whimsically conversing. Nowadays, there was nothing that brought him more pleasure than such a beautiful silence and he was content to be alone, for the most part. Human company depressed him. There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye. She sat on her throne of grasses, boughs reaching towards an infinite expanse of sky, bearing leaves of olive green and sagging under the weight of her indigo fruits. She bore the look of not a queen, but a mother, like the ones he had only read about in story books. He could not help feeling a twinge of jealousy, looking upon the spherical children that she loved so dearly. Why could not someone hold him with such tenderness? It brought him

“Squash Fest” by Taeyi Kim, 11 (Seoul, South Korea) Published in Stone Soup November 2020 A note from Emma How are you all doing? I have to admit that I am burnt out. I am tired of teaching my students over Zoom, tired of staying six feet away from others, tired of doing everything alone. 2020 has worn me down! I am hopeful that the news of a vaccine is accurate and that we will be able to resume something closer to our pre-pandemic lives soon. Lucy Hurwitz’s short poem in the November issue really captures how I have been feeling most mornings. It reads: Wrong side I wake up on that side of bed. My leg’s my arm, My arm’s my head. I love how Lucy takes a common idiom—”I woke up on the wrong side of the bed!”—and pushes it farther. It’s not just that the speaker woke up “on that side of bed” (the missing “the” is perfectly disorienting) but that she is somehow “wrong” herself: “My leg’s my arm, / My arm’s my head.” At the same time as it perfectly captures this feeling of waking up “off,” it’s also funny! This weekend, I challenge you to write a short poem like Lucy’s that is inspired by an everyday idiom. Here are a few you might consider using: It takes two to tango Let’s go back to the drawing board That’s the last straw I’m pulling your leg I’m bent of shape Time is money Her head is in the clouds And, since this is the last note we’ll write you before the holiday, I hope you all have a happy, delicious, safe Thanksgiving holiday! Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Mahati writes a lyrical farewell to summer, with tons of sensory details. Jessie, 8, reviews Out of My Mind by Shannon M. Draper (which we’ve published reviews of before and also was a Book Club pick!). Read about why Jessie recommends it. Check out the update from our 28th Writing Workshop, which was all about word choice. Pragnya, one of our new Book Reviewers, has another one for us! This time, she reviewed When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, which she says has a “perfect balance between reality and fiction.” Olivia, 10, reviewed The Doughnut King by Jessie Janowitz. She starts the review with this compelling line: “Warning: Once you open The Doughnut King, you’ll be stuck in the story for eternity.” Did you hear who won the Nobel Prizes this year? Mahati gives us a helpful roundup of the winners on the blog, plus some background on the award itself. Lucy Hurwitz, 10Newton, MA From Stone Soup November 2020 Wrong Side By Lucy Hurwitz, 10 (Newton, MA)   I wake up on that side of bed. My leg’s my arm, My arm’s my head. . . . /MORE from the November issue   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.

Shattered Landscape (iPhone 7) By Leah Koutal, 12 (Wayne, PA), published in Stone Soup November 2020 A note from William Congratulations to Abhi Sukhdial, winner of last year’s Stone Soup Book Contest. His book, Three Days Till EOC, has been nominated for Cybils Awards (Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards). Read his great book! Support a young author. Buy a copy at our Stone Soup Store. I would like to call your attention to the new Stone Soup design. We implemented a revised home page a few weeks ago, and now you will find a completely revised navigation system and design for the interior pages. The Refugee Project portal has been designed and will soon be implemented. Please check out the new design. Many thanks to Carlos, Carly, Daniel, Ravi, and the entire staff of c2cg for their patience and the quality of their work. Annual Drive I will try to mostly keep the Annual Drive correspondence in separate emails so that the newsletter remains appropriate for our young readers. I do want to say, however, that we absolutely need more of you to contribute to our Annual Drive than ever before or we will not be able to continue. The simplest, easiest way you can help us—and a way that costs you nothing—is to order through the AmazonSmile program. You will see where you choose your charity. Our official name with the IRS is Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup. Type that in and then accept that we are the charity you want to help and then 0.5% of what you spend will be given to us. It uses the same password as your regular Amazon account. Your orders, wish lists, and etc. will all be there. It takes a little getting used to to go to the smile.amazon.com site every time you buy (even for me), but Amazon will sometimes remind you to go there. In the spirit of Stone Soup, every little bit each of you contributes adds up. At half a percent, it does take a lot of you to make a difference. If Stone Soup is important to you, then please make the effort to do your holiday shopping through the AmazonSmile site. Thank you. Art project Shattered Landscape. What an interesting photograph. Cubism is the modern art movement that worked with shattered perspectives. This image is of Pablo Picasso’s 1910 Girl with a Mandolin: You can read about cubism on Wikipedia and look at cubist works or art online. For the project this weekend, I think most of you will want to work with your camera. By using mirrors, reflections in glasses, windows, and polished surfaces, create a photograph that explores illusion, broken perspectives, and dreamlike visions. As always, if you like what you create, please send it to Stone Soup so editor Emma Wood can consider it for publication. Stay safe! Until next week, Congratulations to our November Flash Contest Winners Flash Contest #25: Write a Story that begins with “Once upon a time in a land far away . . .” and ends with “. . . and they all lived happily ever after.” What a difficult task we had judging these entries! We could see that all our entrants had fun with the idea of playing with and subverting the fairytale form, and we loved reading the range of imaginative journeys everyone took. While we enjoyed many stories involving the more traditional witches, royalty, dragons and other magical creatures (not necessarily in traditional mode, though!), we also encountered aliens and were transported into outer space—and even entered the mind of a roll of toilet paper (look out for that one, plus one other, on the COVID-19 blog)! A huge thank you and a hearty well done to everyone who wrote a piece and submitted it to us. In particular, we congratulate our honorable mentions and our winners, whose work you can appreciate on the Stone Soup website. Winners The Alien by Benjamin Fraenkel, 8, Mansonville, Quebec, Canada The Queen and the Tiara by Samantha Lee, 11, Thomaston, CT The Bookcase by Iago Macknik-Conde, 13, Brooklyn, NY The State of Matter by Maya Mourshed, 8, Silver Spring, MD The Forest of Mystery by Areesha Nouman, 12, Westlake, OH Honorable Mentions Happily Ever After by Isabella Bixler, 13, Fairview Park, OH The Witch’s Journey by Lorena Manrique, 11, Fort Worth, TX Dragon Tales by Georgia Grace Hoover, 11, Forth Worth, TX The Naughty Princess by Atalie Lyda, 11, Portland, OR My True Self by Michelle Peng, 10, Scarsdale, NY  Selected for the Stone Soup Blog Pecky’s Bravery Saves the Forest by Elise Cheung, 8, Danville, CA The Toilet Paper Roll’s Quest by Charlotte Zhang, 12, Portland, OR Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Salma, 11, writes a poem on the powerful feeling of loneliness and how we have to fight against it during the pandemic. Aarush reviewed Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Going Solo, on the blog. Read why Aarush thought the book was “easy to connect to” and a “page-turner.” Rex, 10, read quite a few books for the Oregon Battle of the Books, but was particularly struck by Out of Left Field by Ellen Klages. Check out Rex’s review to learn more about the book. Trevor, one of our new bloggers, wrote an exciting blog post titled “Aiming High” about a rock climber. Sydney Burr, 13Chino, CA From Stone Soup November 2020 Regrets and Broken Gas Pumps By Sydney Burr, 13 (Chino, CA)   I’m pumping gas in the summer sun but the only gallons I can think about are the gallons of sweat that I’m sweating although it doesn’t make a difference anyhow and there are no good movies out and the flock in the sky has wandered to float far away above the mountains so there’s nothing to stop anyone from frying an egg or themselves on the sidewalk. The dull lifeless hot air is not stimulated until a breeze awakens but the breeze is even hotter and the skating rink is closed for refurbishment and the darned pump isn’t working so I collapse into the driver’s