Newsletter

“Eyes on You” by Rebecca Wu, 9 (Medina, WA) Cover art for the April 2020 issue A note from William First things first. As our fabulous editor, Emma Wood, puts it herself in her now-switched-on out-of-office message: “I am busy welcoming our first child (and future Stone Soup contributor!) to the world.” We all wish her the very best of luck as she embarks on the greatest adventure of all: becoming a mother. This week, our fabulous new April issue was released, and we have lots of news on our new projects to help our young readers and writers through the current COVID-19 situation. Yesterday (Friday), we held our first Stone Soup Writing Workshop. Thanks to each of you who participated. Where the participants wish to, we will be posting work produced from the session along with our summary of what we did. I can tell you that what these young writers produced in half an hour was incredible, so I hope all of them decide to share their work with you via our website! Look out for that next week. Also, do consider joining the Friday workshop. It is held from 1pm to 2pm Pacific Time. The group is open to Stone Soup subscribers and those of you who have signed up for the Creativity Prompts mailing list. All you have to do to get on the list is click the link. Every weekday the newest COVID-19 Daily Creativity prompts are posted to our website. Even if you are on the list for daily emails this is an easy reference and archive to refer back to for teachers and all of us now-homeschooling parents. Ten prompts have been published already, and there is a new one every weekday, so there will be 15 by this time next week! Starting last Monday, the first prompt of the week is a Flash Contest. Pick up the prompt, and submit your response by the end of Friday. We will choose our top 5 early the following week, and publish them our blog and announce the winners here in the Saturday Newsletter. All the details are on our contest page. We supply some free content, but the entire website is accessible to all subscribers. Subscriptions start at just $4.99 per month for a digital subscription. This includes access to all current issues, 25 years worth of back issues, dozens of writing and art activities, and the right to submit work to Stone Soup for free. Subscribers also receive the daily Creativity Prompts and the right to join our online Zoom workshops. Month-to-month subscriptions, both print (which includes digital) and digital only, can be cancelled at any time. If you are not a subscriber, and have not already signed up, then sign up for the Daily Creativity prompts by clicking on the link. We have developed a good looking page that you can print out each school day morning. We are being told by kids who are using them that they are helping to keep them focused and keep their morale up. Kids on this list are eligible to join our writing groups. William’s Weekend Project: Keeping a Journal Jane recommended keeping a journal as the project in last week’s Newsletter. I want to reinforce this project by repeating it today. These are historic times. What you write about your experiences as they occur is something you will want to revisit when you are an adult. If you have already started a journal then skip this paragraph. If you haven’t started, then here is my advice. Start. Like, now. And no later than this evening. A journal is different from a memoir. A journal is a contemporaneous record of your life. It is what you write today about today. A memoir is what you write about today next year, or in twenty years. Journal writing is crisp, sharp, full of the confidences and uncertainties of the moment. The only day you can write about today when it is today is today! So. How are you feeling? Whats going on in your life? What did you do today? How are you feeling about the coronavirus pandemic? Are you sheltering in place? Are you safe? Are you afraid? Are you bored (see this week’s poem, below!)? Do you see friends? If so, online, only, or if in person with some rules? A journal is an open ended project – and what we have right now is lots of time and the need to keep focused. I started my journal yesterday. Until next week, April is National Poetry Month Did you know it was National Poetry Month? The Academy of American Poets is celebrating in a few different ways: Dear Poet, an annual education project featuring videos of our award-winning Chancellors and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows reading their work, and to which students can respond through letter writing. They will consider all letters for publication on Poets.org beginning in May 2020, and our Chancellors and Fellows will reply to select letters of their choosing.  Poem in Your Pocket Day: Their interactive PDF can be downloaded for Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is happening April 30 this year. We’re encouraging the sharing of poems throughout the day at schools, bookstores, libraries, offices, and on social media with the hashtag #pocketpoem. Downloadable Poster: This year’s poster features artwork by tenth grader Samantha Aikman as part of our national student contest. Anyone can request a free copy of the official National Poetry Month poster on Poets.org for their library, classroom, or home. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Marco, our science fiction and fantasy, reviews one of his favorite books on the blog: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. Read the review to find out about the book’s unconventional setting, and why Marco thinks it’s such a fascinating story. Sabrina Guo, a Stone Soup author, has started the initiative LILAC (Long Island Laboring Against COVID-19) to raise money for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in hospitals. We’ve linked the fundraiser in the post and encourage you to

Mountains with Trees (oil pastels)Enoch Farnham, 12 (Edmond, OK), published in Stone Soup, March 2020 A note from Jane Pandemics are not something new. Sheltering in place, which many of us are doing by not going out of our houses except to get exercise or food, is also an ancient human practice. The great British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) spent two extended periods between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667 holed up in the countryside at Woolsthorpe. He had left the city of Cambridge to escape the bubonic plague that was ravaging the UK in the year 1665–66. That year of Newton’s life is referred to as his Annus Mirabilis—his “Year of Wonders.” In later life, Newton himself said that during this time in self-isolation, he was able to concentrate in ways he hadn’t before. Newton’s plague year was one of the most creative of his life. This is where and when he did his foundational work on optics (using a prism); the laws of motion and universal gravitation (watching an apple fall from a tree outside his window); and calculus (“fluxions,” or early calculus). We might not be able to produce work with the brilliance of Newton’s, or as much of it! But we can all use this time for sustained creative projects. And Stone Soup is here to help you in all our usual ways, and a few more for this particular time. We have brought forward the launch of our Annual Book Contest—you have the whole spring and summer to work on your novel, your poetry collection, or whatever long-form work you want to submit. For shorter projects, we are posting Daily Creativity prompts to help challenge or stimulate you to do something creative—writing, drawing, singing—every day. You can sign up here and below for our daily newsletter, and check back on the previous prompts at our special COVID-19 page. Starting Monday, we are making the first Daily Creativity prompt of every week into a Flash Contest! You’ll find all the details of that on the page on Monday morning. Last but not least, we have had our first Zoom meeting with volunteers who signed up to brainstorm with us on new adventures for this strange time—thank you SO much to all of you who joined, there were lots of great ideas and constructive suggestions! And we were very excited to meet some of our readers and writers almost-in-the-flesh! Everyone–watch this space and our COVID-19 page for exciting updates and new initiatives next week. For those of you who don’t want to write a book, or on the days you don’t feel like the daily prompt is for you, why not use this time to start a journal? It could become an important historical document in its own right one day! The world will look back on this time, and people in the future will want to know what you did and how you felt as you lived through this experience. Like Newton, maybe you can use this time to make some creative history. Stay safe and well, everyone. Until next time, Daily Creativity Prompts Last week, we launched our new series: Daily Creativity. Every day, we add another idea for a writing or art project, or another kind of creative act that you can take part in. We have made a page at Stonesoup.com where you can pick up the new suggestion every morning, or you can just visit once in a while to choose something that sparks your imagination. If social media is more your thing, you can find them there (see links at the bottom of the newsletter). And, if you want us to poke you every weekday morning, sign up for our new daily newsletter and we’ll send the Daily Creativity activity direct to your mailbox every weekday morning! We hope you enjoy these mini projects, and that you share them with anyone else you think might like them as well. They are a free resource for everyone. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Himank, one of our young bloggers, wrote a tribute to Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball player who recently passed away, along with his daughter, in a helicopter accident. Read about Bryant’s accomplishments and how people are honoring his life. We published another post in Marco’s series on science fiction, this time on “Fantasy: High, Dark, and Everything in Between.” Once again, Marco explains the subtleties of the genre in an accessible and engaging way. Bargain Back Issues! Did you know that we reduce the prices of Stone Soup back issues in our online store? Any issue published over six months ago is reduced by 25%—that’s $5 per issue instead of $7.50. And issues over 12 months old are half price, just $3.75 each. The cover date may be 2018 or 2019, but the content in Stone Soup never gets old, and you can’t beat the feeling of holding one of our beautiful magazines in your hands. Why not give the print edition of the magazine a try, or build up your collection of back issues, at a bargain price? Also in our online store: our themed anthologies, and copies of our 2017, 2018, and 2019 Annuals, while stocks last! Mail will take a little longer than usual to arrive, but the store is currently still open. From Stone Soup March 2020 Mountain By Zeke Braman, 9 (Acton, MA) Illustrated by Enoch Farnham, 12 (Edmon, OK) Pine needles cover the ground, Life chirps and peeps from cracks in the Earth. These mountains rise high, Scraping space. Lizards and bugs infest the leaning trees, The elder branches of the oak, Fir, And birch Wave their spidery fingers at the sky As if waiting for an answer to a prayer. Paths twirl and unfold like ribbons, Tracing the past generations’ steps to the peak. Clouds encircle the summit as if dancing. Markers are set to tell you that many people Have been here to rise above. Trees make a thin blanket against the buffeting winds That scour everything And withdraw suddenly.

“Admiring Ocean” by Nataly Ann Vekker, 12 (Towson, MD), Acrylics Published in Stone Soup March 2020 A note from William On behalf of Emma Wood, our editor, and the rest of our Stone Soup staff, I want you all to know that we will be here for you during these difficult times. My daughter, who is in eighth grade, and I have been in voluntary lockdown for a week already. We each are going to have to dig deep to find the personal resources to maintain our spirts! Art is a treasure that becomes even more valuable in bad times. Stone Soup can offer you images that can take you to an evocative place, like this extraordinary painting of a wave by Nataly Ann Vekker, and fabulous stories, like “Slaying Monsters,” below, both in our current issue. Stone Soup can also offer you inspiration and goals for your own creative work. During this extended crisis when all of you are unexpectedly home from school, we at Stone Soup, with your help, intend to offer you a range of activities and opportunities to get creative and remain focused. Yesterday morning we had a staff meeting via Skype to discuss ideas. We have come up with a few projects we can start next week, and have notions about others that are a little more complex. Before deciding on everything, we also want first to hear from you. This means all of you—those of you who are 13 and under and parents, grandparents, teachers, and former Stone Soup authors and readers. Please fill out our questionnaire! Use the questionnaire to rate our ideas, tell us yours, join a focus group later in the week, volunteer to help with outreach, and lots more. If questionnaires are not your thing, then simply reply to this email with ideas or to volunteer and I will fold you into the focus group that we are organizing for later in the week. Starting Monday we are expanding our offering: Daily writing and art prompts will be posted at Stonesoup.com, on our Facebook page, and announced via Twitter. Let us know in the questionnaire if you would welcome a daly email about this as well. Our entire Blog section will come out from behind our paywall, giving all visitors to Stonesoup.com unlimited access to our collections of book reviews, opinion pieces and other prose by kids, our activities pages, multi-media collections and more. The monthly limit of free material from the Magazine available to non-subscribers will increase from 4 to 8 for the duration of the crisis. We will implement a new Resources page at Stonesoup.com, of other websites to visit for creative inspiration, and We are also bringing forward the launch of our second annual Book Contest. Please share this news with other kids, parents, educators, grandparents and other relatives, community groups, and educators–anyone who you feel would benefit from the combination of reading material, writing activities and creative inspiration Stone Soup can offer at any time, and especially during this crisis. Rather than suggest a new project this week, I’d like to refer you back to Editor Emma Wood’s thoughtful letter from last week’s newsletter. Her birth-year history project is a big one, and appropriate for this time. You can also make the most of all the Activities already on our website, Stonesoup.com, under the Blog section. Stay safe! Look out for our first new project Monday and every day for your own use—or to forward to other young people who you know would appreciate it. 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! We published a short piece called “Observations on COVID-19” by new blogger Sofia, 9. It’s a scary time right now, without our normal routines. Take a look at Sofia’s blog and use the comments section to share what you think. Sascha reviews the book Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga. Read what Sascha thinks about the book, which revolves around a young Syrian refugee who moves to the United States. Do you have more time than usual on your hands? Are you getting a bit more reading done? Consider reviewing a book or writing a blog and submitting it to us! From Stone Soup March 2020 Slaying Monsters By Liam Hancock, 11 (Danville, CA) Illustrated by Nataly Ann Vekker, 12 (Towson, MD) The usual morning fog is persistent today. The long jetty near Pillar Point is swallowed by the soupy grey, seemingly disappearing into the abyss. Through the panoramic view of my bedroom window, I see Half Moon Bay coming to life in the early morning. A man is taking a jog down the steep beach with his stumpy bulldog. A couple of early commuters’ headlights are slicing through the fog and heading into the overshadowing mountains. The occasional surf shop is lighting up and un-shuttering its windows. The ocean is roaring today, and an excitement bubbles up inside me as I remember that today is Mavericks. I hear the hissing of bacon hitting the frying pan and the hum of the espresso machine. My mouth waters as I stumble down the stairs. Mom is plating up my breakfast. A pink box is set in the center of the table. Wait, a pink box? I settle into my chair. “Donuts, Mom?” I ask, shocked. I open them up . . . My favorite—maple bars. “C’mon. An athlete doesn’t eat donuts on a day like this. My stomach will weigh me down more than the waves themselves!” Mom gives me one of those mom looks. “Now, last time I checked, donuts don’t weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I spent good money on these, so eat. Mom’s orders.” I groan, then my wall caves in. If William Morgan has one weakness, it’s maple bar donuts. I dig in, cover the donuts with that greasy bacon, and feel that amazing feeling of a future heart attack. I swear, if this is what they eat in Vermont, I’m gonna