Newsletter

“Peering Out” by Delaney Slote, 12 Published in the July/August 2018 issue A note from William Call for Bloggers Are there ongoing protests in your city related to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement? How about public art? We’re asking for blog submissions related to BLM in your town. You can submit art, writing, music, or whatever you’re inspired to create. We’re also looking for readers who live in Portland, OR to write about what is going on there. If you have anything you’d like to say about the situation, please submit it to our blog category. To our readers in Portland—please stay safe. Book Contest Warning! Warning! Deadline of August 10 approaching for Stone Soup’s Second Annual Book Contest! I know that a good number of you are on top of the deadline, and some of you have even submitted your manuscripts already. Congratulations! As a writer who is often running late, I can tell you that the ability to write to the deadline is a life skill that is (almost) as essential to the craft of writing as writing itself. Art and Poetry Peering Out, the featured artwork in today’s newsletter, is by Delaney Slote. What a difference time makes! In the Summer of 2018, when we first published this photograph, it made us at Stone Soup smile. Two girls looking out the window into the sunny outdoors planning an excursion. It is a photograph that suggests possibilities. At least it did in 2018. If this had been sent to us today, we would have read it as the opposite: As two girls looking out at a world shut down, one in which they are not quite prisoners but also very much not free. A world in which looking out the window reminds them of the danger we are all in, and what we have lost. This is a great lesson in how the meaning we find in art shifts with our experiences. I want you to keep this photograph in mind as you grow older. There is no question that at some point in school you will be assigned to read a book that you find totally boring but that has an outsized reputation as a brilliant work of art. This happened to me once with a novel by Charles Dickens I was assigned in high school: David Copperfield. What an utterly stupid book, I thought! And then, forty years later, I re-read it for a book that I was writing. I was amazed! What a deep and profound book that novel that I thought stupid really was. As a reader I had needed more experience, like having been divorced, to find the heart of the story. There needed to be a different William, not a sixteen-year-old William but a William that had more to bring to the book. Delany’s photograph is magnificently composed. Look at the arcs made by the girls’ arms. Pay attention to the shapes defined by the way their arms and bodies divide up the space. The part of the photograph I like the most is how the girls are together but separate, but also linked by how they are holding onto the curtain. They will both be feeling the pull of the other. Friends, sisters, cousins, sharing a moment together. Last year, there were two second place winners in our book contest, both poets: Analise Braddock and Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer. For those of you who subscribe to Stone Soup, you will have received both of their books in your Summer Special Poetry Issue. This week, we are featuring a poem by Analise in the newsletter. In a future newsletter, we will feature a poem by Tatiana. Their books are both available in the July/August edition of Stone Soup, which you can buy via our online store, and they are each available as individual ebooks, which you can also purchase for $4.99 at our store (and/or at Amazon). Please scroll down to the bottom of the Newsletter to read Analise’s “The Heart of the Earth” from her book The Golden Elephant. This poem is so powerful. So perfect. I just want you to read it. Please read it aloud. Thank you, Analise. I want to close today by sending you all to the Stone Soup website, Stonesoup.com. Follow the links to the fabulous work that has been posted this week. If you are not a subscriber, please, please subscribe—and tell your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Subscription dollars are what makes our work possible. The work our print magazine features is magnificent—worth re-reading—and the magazine itself is a pleasure to hold in your hand. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #16 Weekly Flash Contest #16: Write an unsettling poem. The week commencing July 13 (Daily Creativity prompt #81) was our sixteenth week of flash contests, with a sinister challenge set by contributor and writing workshop member Liam Hancock, 13. It seems everyone had plenty of scary stuff to get out of their systems: We had an absolute record number of entries this week. More than 70, in fact! Well done, Liam, for setting such a terrifically inspiring challenge, and thank you for all your work helping us read and judge our huge pile. It was really fun working with you. We were looking for the creepiest, most unsettling poems for our winners’ list, and we certainly found them! While all our winners had slightly different subjects, all of them built tension through their poems to a frankly terrifying end. And they showed us that while sinister, creepy, eerie things often come at night, these feelings can be evoked in broad daylight too. The honorable mentions were equally varied, moving between suspense, nightmares, death, unexplained disappearances, and even managing to make a butterfly into something sinister. 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 “In the Light of the Red Moon” by Katherine Bergsieker, 12, Denver, CO “Something Peculiar” by Fern Hadley, 11, Cary,

A Wish for a Brighter Tomorrow (IbisPaint on IPad)By Chloe Mancini, 9 A note from Jane Book Contest countdown has commenced! We can’t wait to receive your manuscripts, and we’re sure many of you are taking this part of the summer to work hard on your books—maybe revising, adding some finishing touches, or even adding a whole new section or group of poems. The deadline is midnight PDT on Monday, August 10. Happy writing! One of the things that has brightened up the past few months for me has been working on the Stone Soup COVID-19 blog. You have sent us poems, stories, journal entries, commentaries, cartoons, photographs, and artwork. Some are hopeful, some are sad; some are reflective, others issue a challenge; many are beautiful, and some even make us laugh! It’s so interesting to look back and see what our contributors were thinking and saying about this situation three or four months ago, and what they are saying today—some things have changed, and a lot has stayed the same, and everyone’s feelings are shifting around all the time. But the fact that you are all using this time to create and reflect is really inspiring. We hope you will continue to send us your work and read it on the blog every day, as well as enjoy all the great work in the magazine. Chloe Mancini’s artwork, above, is a terrific example of the power of many of the pieces on our COVID-19 blog. It takes real skill to make digital artwork like this, where you actually sense the emotion of the subject. We all know that feeling when your eyes are just brimming over with tears. I really feel for this girl as she stands in the moonlight wishing on a glowworm (or at least that’s how I read it!), and I sincerely join her in her wish for a brighter tomorrow! Andrew Li’s story, below, is another of this week’s special pieces from the blog. What a creative leap it is to take the perspective of a surgical mask as a way of reflecting on the current situation! We have spent a lot of time talking about perspective and characterisation in our Daily Creativity prompts and at our writing workshop, and this is  a really lovely example of taking a quirky perspective in order to look at a known situation in a new way. For this weekend’s activity, I suggest we follow Andrew’s lead and look at the world from the perspective of an inanimate object. It doesn’t have to be anything to do with COVID-19! I think I might try writing something from the perspective of one of my kittens’ toys (Kimchi, now almost 4 months old). When she isn’t jumping on my keyboard or tracing the tracks of my mouse pointer on my screen with her paw, she can chase a ribbon for hours. If that piece of red satin had feelings, I’m sure it would be both exhausted and upset to have been (slightly) shredded by those claws . . . Have some fun with this exercise, and if you are happy with what you write, please send it to us! Until next time, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #15 Weekly Flash Contest #14: Write a story or poem inspired by a Renoir painting. Our entrants wrote a story or poem inspired by Renoir’s painting this week. We received more entires than we expected and, as always, enjoyed reading all of the writings that were submitted. It was fun to see how differently many of you approached imagining going into the scene in the painting: the judges read everything from mystery stories to poems written from the perspective of the lamps in the trees (a couple of our Highly Commended choices)! One of our winning writers this week also sent an updated version of the painting, apparently made for her by Renoir himself, to go with her story (thanks, Ruby!). Winners “The Brendon Disappointment” by Lucy Berberich, 11, Oxford, OH “Paris in a Painting” by Fern Hadley, 11, Cary, NC “Let There Be Cake!” by James Hou, 10, Short Hills, NJ “Summer Day” by Samuel McMullin, 10, Portland, ME “A Taste of Bal du Moulin de la Galette” & its illustration, Travelling back to Moulin de la Galette, by Ruby Xu, 10, Annandale, VA Honorable Mentions “Lost Lisette in a Crowd” by Joyce Hong, 10, Oakville, ON “Allia T. and the Case of the Disappearing Violinist” by Naomi Kap, 11 “An Atypical Guest at the Moulin de la Galette” by Amruta Krishnan Srinivasan, 9, San Jose, CA “Mama’s Mask” by Michela You, 11, Lexington, MA “The Journal Entry of a Pessimistic Person” by Charlotte Zhang, 11, Portland, OR 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. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Amruta, 9, answered the Daily Creativity prompt where we asked you to imagine COVID-19 as a supervillain. Take a look at her illustration on the blog. Callum’s poem “Static” plays with the two meanings of the word. Read the poem and Callum’s explanation of his time in quarantine. Read Anya’s update from the 12th and 13th meetings of the Stone Soup Book Club. Most recently, the book club has been discussing Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed, and the next book on the list is Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson. Daniel, 10, reviewed Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. Read what Daniel thinks about the book that deals with family, grief, and basketball. Saanvi, 8, wrote an adventure story with an evil Captain Corona as the villain. Can you guess what the character represents? Have you ever been to Portugal? Vivaan continues his travelogue series with a post about his visit to the European country. Check out the post to read about Vivaan’s experiences and see some photographs of notable sights. We published an artwork by Chloe, 9, titled A Wish for a Better Tomorrow. What kind of emotions does the piece evoke for you? Read some of

“Orange Landscape” by Eli Breyer Essiam, 10 (Cambridge, MA) Published in Stone Soup July/August 2018 A note from William A quick note to begin: the second session for the Stone Soup and Society of Young Inklings summer writing camps is still open. If you might be interested, check out the schedule. The classes are starting again soon. “Wildfire.” The elegant poem by Karinne Ulrey we are featuring today, paired with Orange Landscape by Eli Breyer, speaks to the power of words to change the world. But it also speaks to the need to remain focused with one’s message—a single word, a single sentence, may not be enough. This is true whether one is thinking about changing society as a whole or in just changing oneself. And, of course, sometimes the spark never actually takes. The pairing of Eli’s painting with Karinne’s poem helps me see it as a complex work of art: The painting’s focus is on orange. Eli has done a beautiful job of working with orange tonalities. Imagine the painting with blues, or greens, or yellows. It would then be a very different painting. Paired with the poem, we read the orange as fire. But one can also read it as a landscape bathed in the hopeful light of dawn or the dying light of a vivid sunset. The sky can be read as smokey flames or as the orange light of sunset glowing in the fog, a common sight where I live in coastal Northern California. Eli’s landscape is well imagined and alive with detail—the trees on the crest of the hill, different styles of building, roads, a windmill. One can get lost in this painting: a dreamscape. Saturday project When an artist works in a limited palette, it is called working in a monochrome—mono meaning “one” and chrome meaning “color.” Artists rarely limit themselves to a single color; rather, like Eli, they work in a range of hues within a limited color range. This weekend, I want you to use colored pencils, markers, pens, or paint to create a scene with a single dominant color. Like keys in music, your choice of color will affect the feelings and emotions that your painting evokes. As always, if you like what you do, go to our Stone Soup website and send it to our editor, Emma, to review for possible publication. Refugee Project news To remind you. Several of you generously donated money toward Stone Soup’s Refugee Project. Our goal had been to have a special issue of Stone Soup made up of work by refugee students this past spring. It isn’t just the pandemic that has caused the deadline to slip. It is taking time to build the relationships we need to bring in the work that will speak to the world. Laura Moran, who is in charge of this project, is doing a fabulous job maintaining momentum. We are talking with our web designers about designing a section of the website for some of the material we have received. To be honest, our web designers are very slow!  We are working with them on a general redesign of the site, including a space for refugee material. All I can say is that we are more impatient than you to see the site improved. Though some of what has been sent to us is exceedingly disturbing, and we have several poems in Arabic that we are having translated, I think we will be able to start sharing material with you within a couple months. Subscriptions The very best way to support Stone Soup is by subscribing. If you aren’t a subscriber, please join with us this weekend. Inspired by the poem “Wildfire,” I am asking you to join with us in all the great things we are doing with and for young writers and artists. Thank you. Until next week, Winners from Weekly Flash Contest #14 Weekly Flash Contest #14: Write a poem or a story where a sudden change in the weather provides a pivotal point. The week commencing June 29 (Daily Creativity Prompt #71) was our fourteenth week of flash contests—and we would not have guessed so many of you would be inspired by the weather! We had a record number of entries (more than 50 this week, and we were, as usual, very impressed). Everyone brought to life various weather events, from blizzards to rainstorms, in varying forms—from poems (including concrete poems) to prose. The judges had a hard time battling through all that weather, but in the end we emerged, windswept and drenched, into the warm sunshine of decisions made. Well done to everyone who entered, but particular congratulations to those who made it with us through the storm as honorable mentions and winners. You can read the winning entries for this week (and previous weeks) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “Cabin Catastrophe” by Isabel Bashaw, 10, Enumclaw, WA “Michi and Kieto” by Lucy Berberich, 11, Oxford, OH “Transformation” by Sofie Dardzinski, 9, Potomac, MD “A Line of Cars” by Wesley Moniz, 9, Belmont, MA “The Hotel of Angels” by Emerson Swift, 12, Mill Valley, CA Honorable Mention “The Flower’s Lesson” by Audrey Fan, 10, Cary, NC “Driftwood on the Sea” by Meleah Goldman, 10, Oakland, CA “Rain” by Misha Nasarpuri, 12, Portland, OR “Rose After Rain” by Amruta Krishnan Srinivasan, 9, San Jose, CA “The Money Rain” by Cici Zou, 11, Concord, MA Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! In her cartoon “The Virus Should Bring Us Closer,” Rebecca, 9, notes that even though we can’t physically close to others, we can still connect virtually. Michaela, 12, writes her story “The Writer, Artist of Words,” about a writer struggling in quarantine, in the unusual second-person narration style. In her blog post, Vivian writes about how schools should step up and offer gender-neutral bathrooms for their non-binary and transgender students. Manasi, 12, wrote about about how coronavirus has changed our lives: “Something feels different, go away COVID-19.” Though we’ve published reviews of the entire Harry Potter series,