Newsletter

“Rainbow Lake” by Sage Millen, 12 (Vancouver, Canada). Published in Stone Soup September 2020. A note from Sarah I want to start off this newsletter by highlighting Sage Millen’s breathtaking photograph from this month’s issue. I encourage you to spend some time taking in the mesmerizing, almost otherworldly landscape that Sage has captured. Then I also want to remind you that if you’re interested in helping out with our new Publicity and Outreach Community, we’d love to have you! You can fill out the Google Form here to let us know your contact information and how you can help. I’ve been working the past few months on developing the Stone Soup podcast, which is very exciting. Hopefully it will be released soon for everyone to hear! This work has meant that I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting a lot of the stories and poetry read aloud on our Soundcloud account. Reading aloud is not as easy as it may seem. It’s a skill that requires a lot of practice. For your weekend project, I suggest that you take a piece of writing—maybe something you’ve written or a piece that you really enjoy—and read it aloud a few times. Try not to rush yourself. Read it deliberately and carefully, keeping in mind a listener who may be hearing it for the first time. Think also about what kind of inflections suit the story or poem. If there’s dialogue, do you give each character a different voice? A different accent? Or do you want to maintain the same tone throughout the story? These are things you can consider when reading a story aloud, and it changes the way we understand and interpret a piece. Listening to audiobooks might give you a better idea of different ways that reading aloud can be done. Make a note of which elements of audiobooks you like, and think about how you could incorporate them into your own reading-aloud technique. You can record yourself reading—or not, if you don’t yet feel comfortable. If you’re feeling ambitious, maybe you can organize a Zoom reading between your friends, family, or classmates. Let us know how it goes! Until next week, Stay Tuned for Next Month’s Flash Contest Every month we hold a flash contest based on one of our weekly creativity prompts. Take a look at this month’s prompt and the winner here. And keep an eye out for next month’s contest! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! In a diary-style post, Prisha describes her experience marching in a Black Lives Matter protest. She talks about what it was like and what she learned in “Spread Love Not Hate.” Olivia, 10, reviewed the book King of Shadows by Susan Cooper. Read Olivia’s review to find out what she thought of the book and why she says it was about so much more than acting. Read an update from the writing workshop from last Saturday, where we learned about dragonfly narratives from two guest facilitators. Leila Lakhal, 12Seattle, WA From Stone Soup September 2020 Our Blanket By Leila Lakhal, 12 (Seattle, WA) Everyone has their own opinion. But it is not okay To say to me that I am wrong. That I am bad. That I have no place here. Because I just said that I am Muslim. We are not terrorists. Not the Awful people the media depicts us as. Every group has people who don’t follow the rules. The Islam I know teaches me: Don’t harm a hair on their head. No matter who they are. No matter what they say. But it is not okay to tell me that I have to say sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Saying sorry for all those rule breakers that gave you a false image. Tear that image away. Underneath you will see something beautiful. . . . /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 Man’s Friend” by Hanna Gustafson, 13 (South Burlington, VT)Published in Stone Soup September 2020 A note from William First of all, thanks to all of you who signed up for the Saturday Writing Workshop and Book Club. The shift from a free class on Fridays to a paid class on Saturdays went without a hitch. Last week, the first Saturday class, had 42 students! In terms of geography, they ranged from Saudi Arabia to the West Coast. It really is the miracle of Zoom. This Saturday, 9am Pacific, the class was taught by guest teachers, Denise Donnio and Jennifer Rinterknecht. Their workshop, “Dragonfly Narratives,” was fabulous. They were Zooming from Strasbourg, France, where they teach. You can still sign up for the workshops at EventBrite. Registration is week-by-week from now through December 16, which will be a performance reading via Zoom for all of you. The last week of each month is the Book Club for Writers session, so that is what you could join next week. We need your help! Please consider joining our new Outreach and Marketing Committee. This is a call for adults, but if you are a student, and think that you have some  ideas and skills that could help us bring Stone Soup to more people, then you are free to attend the organizational meeting, as well. Addressing our adult Newsletter readers more directly, if you have the skills and the time, please join the organizing meeting. The first meeting is Saturday, October 2, at 11 am Pacific. It is a Zoom meeting. You will receive the link when you express interest in coming. We need a ton of help! Stone Soup has always been strong on good programs, and weak on marketing. Please fill out this questionnaire. Thank you! We need help with marketing and promotion to a wide range of audiences, and through a wide range of media. Obviously, we will need to focus. What we focus on will, in part, depend on the skills you bring.  In addition to help with marketing ideas, and with the nitty-gritty of carrying some of them out, we also need help managing this committee. So, if you don’t have marketing skills and are a brilliant organizer and people person, and have the time, then please come to the meeting on October 2. Please visit our website to look at the new blog posts that are linked, below, and to explore. Blog authors always appreciate comments, so if you like what you read, please take the time to let the author know. We give everyone a few free views per month, and unlimited viewing if you take out a digital or print subscription, starting at $4.99. It does take money to run Stone Soup, so all subscriptions are appreciated. Thank you. For this Saturday’s project I’d like to refer you to the 117 writing prompts that are posted on our website. There are so many fabulous prompts written by Stone Soup staff and by Stone Soup writers that I am sure that you will find something to inspire you this weekend. As always, if you are super happy with what you do, please submit it to Stone Soup so editor Emma Wood can consider it for the magazine. Until next week, Monthly Flash Contest Deadline tomorrow, Sunday September 13 Congratulations to this month’s Flash Contest winners! Flash Contest #23: Create a piece of flash fiction written from the perspective of the first object you saw when you woke up this morning. Your narrative should be no longer than 250 words. For our first monthly version of our regular Flash Contest we decided to request a piece of flash fiction from an unusual perspective: that of a random object. Given that we asked for the perspective of the first thing the writer saw when they woke up in the morning, we gained a lot of insight into the inner lives of lamps, pets, curtains, toys, clothing, bedding, books and magazines, desk items like pens and pencils, and many other stalwarts of the bedroom. It was so much fun to read the various lively and perceptive voices you gave to these inanimate (or non-human) objects. Many of them seem to take a very dim view of the humans they have their silent eyes on most of the day (or night), especially all the things they witness that they would rather not see . . . Congratulations to our Winners and Honorable Mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “The Silent Stalker” by Chloe Chan, 12, Bellevue, WA “Worst Fear” by Scarlet He, 9, Scarsdale, NY “Travails and Humiliations of a Cotton Shirt” by Iago Macknik-Conde, 13, Brooklyn, NY “Wanted” by Daniel Wei, 13, Weddington, NC “Woes of a Blanket” by Lacole Yang, 13, Irvine CA Honorable Mention “Story of the Bed” by Vaishali Andukuri, 10, Oakland, NJ “Day of a Pencil Box” by Judah Davidoff, 9, Brunswick, MD “The Proud Life of a Blanket” by Lucy Kershen, 13, Norman, OK “The Life of a Lamp” by Chloe Mancini, 9, Glenside, PA “New and Improved” by Sanvi Patel, 11, Midland, MI “Morning from the Eyes of a Doll” by Joycelyn Zhang, 10, Oakland, CA Remember: the next monthly flash contest will be based on the first weekly prompt of October! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We published a pandemic-themed poem from Luca, 12, called “The Invasion.” Simran, 9, wrote a powerful poem about Black Lives Matter called “Why are we so silent?” Does your room represent you? Julia Marcus, 11, writes a poem about her room and how it is “embedded with her personality.” “The Tyrant Virus” by Benjamin, 11, is a hopeful poem about the pandemic. Read about last Saturday’s writing workshop here and join us next time! Here’s a link to our Eventbrite page. Check out Pragnya’s review of Gordon Korman’s book The Unteachables, which she says is full of “twists and

“McArthur Lights” by Oskar Cross, 10 (Oakland, CA). Published in the September 2020 issue. A note from Jane The first copies of Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella Three Days till EOC have been delivered to readers, and we are already getting some amazing feedback. The chief of United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) included a review of the book in his latest message on the UNAI website, and other readers are already posting positive reviews on Amazon. Congratulations, Abhi! Abhi has been interviewed by his local paper, the Stillwater News Press, for publication tomorrow (Sunday, September 13). Also this week, we were delighted to publish a review of his book by Anya Geist, 14, on our own website. Besides writing a thoughtful review, Anya also recorded an interview with Abhi over Zoom. They had a great conversation about Stone Soup, as well as about Abhi’s book. It’s a great chance to (virtually) meet the author and gives real insight into his ideas, his writing process, and the work that went into crafting Three Days till EOC. I urge all of you, students and adults, to watch the video. I learned a lot about writing from their conversation, and I think you will too. And get your copy of the book in our store or any other bookstore: it’s a really great read! There was a problem with our website last week, and a large number of people experienced problems, especially when try to subscribe. We are very sorry! Everything is fixed now, so do please try again if you suffered with this problem. We have decided to extend our Labor Day 15% off offer through the end of the weekend to thank you for bearing with us (discount code: LABORDAY20). Over the summer Anya Geist, the author of the review and Stone Soup contributor, has been interning with us. It has been such a pleasure for us to work with Anya, and we wanted to acknowledge her incredible contribution and say a public thank you to her in this newsletter. Anya has achieved so much over the last two-and-a-half months. She managed a project to conduct and record Zoom interviews with a dozen of our contributors and Workshop and Book Club participants. You are seeing the first of these—the interview with Abhi Sukhdial—this weekend, and there are more to come. We would not have these great videos, which are an important record of a moment in time as well as a really interesting insight into young writers’ processes and motivations, without her. In addition, she has worked hard behind the scenes on all sorts of production tasks (on the blog, on contests, on writing workshops, on new project ideas, and more). Everything we do at Stone Soup is about encouraging and celebrating the brilliant work and mature contributions that young students can make in terms of creative work. Having the opportunity to work with Anya added a new dimension to realizing our mission, and we hope that with the help of our supporters we will be able to set up a more formal internship program in future. Thank you, Anya, so much! We are excited to continue working with you for the rest of the year at the Writing Workshop and the Book Club, and we wish you every success at high school! Finally, now that our flash contest is happening once a month instead of every week, the closing date for entries has moved to Sundays at noon (Pacific time). This means you still have time to write and send in your entries, so please accept this week’s writing prompt as your weekend writing challenge. Full details are below, and at our website. We can’t wait to read what you write.Until next time, Monthly Flash Contest Deadline tomorrow, Sunday September 13 Every month we hold a flash contest based on one of our weekly creativity prompts. The deadline for entries is Sunday at noon Pacific time, so you still have time to create or polish your work and send it in to the September contest! This month’s challenge: Create a piece of flash fiction written from the perspective of the first object you saw when you woke up this morning. Your narrative should be no longer than 250 words. Five winners will have their winning writing published at Stonesoup.com, and all the winners and honorable mentions will be posted there and in this newsletter. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Chloe, 9, created a lovely piece of digital art called Fall of Silence. We posted another art piece, this time by Aya, 13. Aya titled her work COVID Isolation. Does this piece reflect how you feel about isolation? Leave a comment to let us know. April, 13, wrote a poem about a place that many of us have gotten familiar with these past few months: our bedrooms. Read “Perfect for Me” for eloquent descriptions of April’s room and how it makes her feel. As Jane mentioned above, Anya wrote a wonderful review of Abhi’s Three Days till EOC. Here’s the first paragraph of Anya’s well-written review: “When you are an avid reader, or anyone who reads books at all, there comes a point when all of the stories start to blend together. You pick up, say, a new dystopian book at the store, and sigh, because you know it’ll just be a new version of The Hunger Games or Divergent or a million other books, with the same plot, same characters, same villains. It’s inevitable. Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella, Three Days till EOC, is different.”   Yesterday we published another travelogue from Vivaan, our prolific travel blogger. This time Vivaan visited Warsaw, Poland, and detailed his experience visiting two museums. Allen, 5, wrote a short and sweet piece about his classmate’s birthday and how it was celebrated over Zoom. From Stone Soup September 2020 Liv Baker, 11Seattle, WA Everything I Love By Liv Baker, 11 (Seattle, WA) The ride up the mountain The thousands of trees The pine and bark Smell Makes me feel Like I am Relaxed and calm The rain pattering Against