‘Free as a Bird’Mixed media collage by Sage Millen, 11 (Vancouver, Canada). Published September 2019. A note from Sarah Ainsworth I am a big fan of collages and all of the artistic possibilities they represent. If you look at the fine print to see what medium they are, it usually says “mixed media.” The category of “mixed media” has always struck me as an unfair standardization of such varied artwork. But at the same time, those two words do give the artist room to explore—after all, there are so many media you can mix! Plus, it lends an air of mystery to artwork, as a viewer is often left wondering what materials they did mix. I was excited to see two of Sage Millen’s collages published in this month’s issue (one of them featured in last week’s Newsletter). In the one featured above, Free as a Bird, can you identify all of the materials that Sage used? How many “layers” of media are there? My challenge for you this weekend is simply to create a collage. You can begin by assembling the materials you’d like to use, like magazines or colored paper. Is there anything in your recycling bin that you could use (and is clean enough to handle)? Maybe you want to incorporate some natural elements, as Sage does in her pieces. Then the fun begins! If you create a collage you’re proud of, please send it to us via Submittable so we can consider it for publication! Happy weekend, Fundraising Update: the Refugee Project has almost reached its target already! We are overwhelmed. Within days of launching our appeal for donations toward our Refugee Project, you had already donated almost all of our total goal! We set $5,000 as our target, thinking it was a huge stretch and that we’d be lucky to get even halfway there. But we only need $300 more to make it. Yes, our readers and supporters have already donated an incredible $4,700 to this project. You are all just amazing. Thank you! It’s obvious that this initiative means as much to our readers as it does to us. Besides being delighted to have the funding in place to support the creative journeys of kids in refugee camps, the whole Stone Soup team is really buoyed up by knowing that you, our extended Stone Soup family, are in this with us. This is our fall fundraiser, and the season has barely begun. That $5,000 target is clearly in view, and maybe we are going to beat it! Click the button below if you want to join in supporting this project. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Take a look at the beautiful artwork that former contributor Jessica Libor creates in the interview we published with her from Tuesday. Jessica illustrated two stories from 2000, “A Strike for the Wind” and “A Christmas Wish,” and wrote and illustrated “Seventeen Years,” from 2001. Her interview is full of great advice. From Stone Soup, September 2019 Trenza Francesa, French Braids By Alina Samarasan, 12 (Brookline, MA) Illustrated by Sage Millen, 11 (Vancouver, Canada) “¡Ven aquí, Carlita! ¡No puedes ir a la escuela así! Tu cabello es un desastre!” Come here, Carlita! You can not go to school like that! Your hair is a mess! I walk into the room and sit down so Mamá can reach my hair, wishing that she spoke English. Then I wouldn’t be so embarrassed at school. Then no one would tell me to go back to Mexico. My family’s from Cuba, not Mexico, and I wasn’t even born there. I was born here, unlike most of the kids at school, but that doesn’t really matter. Don’t be like them, my big brother said. Don’t fall to their level. You’re better than them, Carlita. And make that known. …/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.
Newsletter
Saturday Newsletter: September 7, 2019
‘The Golden Brick Road’ Mixed media collage by Sage Millen, 11 (Vancouver, Canada). Published September 2019. A note from William Rubel I have been looking through the submissions to our recently closed contest for a book-length manuscript. A lot of you entered! I’m impressed. It isn’t just that there are so many entries, it is that the quality of the entries is exceedingly high. As a fellow writer, I can see how much work you put into the submissions. It seems like a lot of you are interested in writing book-length works, whether that is a single work of fiction or a collection of stories or poems. You have to think differently when working at this larger scale. We are pleased to see so many of you are rising to that challenge. A grocery store a block from my house has a sign board facing the street. This week the message reads, “Summer should get a speeding ticket.” That is certainly how I feel. Where did it go? Those of you who keep a journal are in a better position than most of us to answer that question. I am sure that at the beginning of summer I suggested (as I always do) keeping a journal. Did you? If so, please look through it to see whether there is anything there that you think we’d like to publish or post and, if there is, please submit it to the blog section in Submittable so that Stone Soup’s editors can read it. Rather than give you a new project for this Saturday I’d like to encourage you to go to a portion of the Stone Soup website that we know many of you haven’t noticed. That is the section of the website with writing and art activities. Subscribers who are logged in to their accounts have unlimited access. I’d like to say how much I like Sage Millen’s artwork, “The Golden Brick Road.” It is on the edge between art that is representational and art that is abstract. The colors draw me in. I want to follow that golden brick road. You? And if so, where to? Below, also from the September Issue, you will find Layla Linnard’s poem, “Us Three.” Wow! So simple. And so not simple. Until next week Our Current Fundraising Appeal: the Refugee Project This past week we sent out details of our late Summer/Fall fundraiser: raising funds to support the production and publication of creative work by children in refugee camps around the world. We want to raise a total of $5,000 to support workshops run by and for kids in camps, a Special Issue of Stone Soup, and associated projects–and you, our generous readers and supporters, have got us off to a terrific start. Within a few hours of our first letter going out, you had donated almost $500. That’s already enough to cover the first kids’ workshop being run by 3 talented teens living in Za’atari Refugee Camp. Please share the news of this appeal, and help us raise the money to continue this work. You can read more about this initiative at our website and help us by sharing the link with others. Thank you. Click here to donate to support our refugee project. Customer service and online accounts Last week we launched a new Customer Service FAQ which we hope you are finding helpful. We wanted to remind you that our previously published customer service email address(es) and telephone numbers are no longer functional, and we do not currently have a facility to take telephone queries. We intend to reintroduce a phone facility within the coming months, and for now we ask you please to email us with all of your requests and questions at subscriptions@stonesoup.com. We will keep you informed about improvements to our customer service as we work on it over the coming weeks. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Are you familiar with Kabaddi? Blogger Himank walks us through the basics of the sport this week. Plus, stay tuned for a more in-depth post about Kabaddi, coming soon! From Stone Soup, September 2019 Us Three By Layla Linnard, 11 (Weston, MA) I liked it a few months ago It was just us three There was no sharing my room There was no screaming baby I at least slept when It was just us three It was just us three I at least slept when There was no screaming baby There was no sharing my room It was just us three I liked it a few months ago 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.
Saturday Newsletter: August 31, 2019
“Bird in the Clouds” Photograph by Hannah Parker, 13 (Burlington, VT), published in Stone Soup Magazine, May 2019. A note from Emma Wood As a teacher of literature, I am constantly thinking of new ways to categorize ways of writing, so that I can say to my students, “Poetry is this,” and “Fiction is that.” Since I love to organize and arrange, these kinds of neat categories are very satisfying to me. However, reading—and especially reading submissions for Stone Soup—serves as a constant reminder that these categories can be both limiting and unproductive. There are short stories that read like poems, poems that read like stories and look like art, and art that tells stories. Often, art that crosses these generic boundaries (meaning, the boundaries of genres) is the most powerful and the most creative. This weekend, I encourage you to create outside of the usual boxes. For writers: Instead of sitting down with the intent to write a story or a poem or a personal narrative, sit down to simply . . . write. Since some structure is always helpful, maybe set a timer for 10 minutes and look at Hannah Parker’s stunning image “Bird in the Clouds” (above) for inspiration. Try to write without stopping for the whole 10 minutes, letting the words and your mood lead. For visual artists: instead of taking photos of a picturesque scene or an interesting object, think of creating your own scene. How might you tell a story with an image? How much can you convey without any words at all? Similarly, if you paint or draw, challenge yourself to draw a story, rather than a thing. I encourage you to look at the paintings of Pieter Bruegel for inspiration. Alternatively, think of ways to incorporate text into your visual art. Maybe that means using watercolors over a newspaper story or adding text to a photograph. Whatever you do, do it in the spirit of experimentation and play! Until next week, Customer service and online accounts This week we launched a new Customer Service FAQ to answer some of the questions we have been receiving most often in the last few weeks since launching our new website and order-processing functions. The FAQ starts off with advice on how to log in to the new “My Account” facility and moves through more detailed questions about checking your subscription details, updating your payment information, and more. If you have been wondering about how something works on the new site, take a look! Plus, you can always write to us at subscriptions@stonesoup.com with any questions about your account or our services in general. We love hearing from you and we want to help. Do you have an outstanding query with Stone Soup? In the past couple weeks, we have become aware that our former fulfillment house has for some time been taking messages and answering customer queries even though they no longer work for us. Some of the information given out to subscribers was incorrect, other issues were not followed up on as promised, and they had not been passing any details of the messages or calls on to us. If you have an open query with Stone Soup, especially one left by phone or sent to an email address with the letters “icn” included in it, would you please resubmit it by writing to us direct at subscriptions@stonesoup.com? We will deal with it for you right away. Thank you. Please note that any old customer service email address(es) and telephone numbers that you may have noted are no longer functional. Please delete them from your records. We do not currently have a facility to take telephone queries. We intend to reintroduce that facility within the coming months, and for now we ask you please to email us with all of your requests and questions at subscriptions@stonesoup.com. We will keep you informed about improvements to the site and to our customer service as we work on it over the coming weeks and months. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We’ve published another short interview with a former contributor to the blog. Siena DeBenedittis wrote the story “Illuminated,” which was published in our March/April 2015 issue. Now she’s a college student studying environmental studies and English. Her interview is full of great advice, including, “Rejection is an opportunity to improve.” Read it here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson Reviewed by Kate Choi, 14 (Seoul, South Korea) What is hope? Why do we feel hope? And why is hope so important to us? In a story from Greek mythology, hope was famously the only item to remain in Pandora’s box after it released the evils of the world, demonstrating just how valuable hope is to us: had hope escaped from our possession, humanity would have been unable to survive the evils of the world. Emily Dickinson believed in the power and value of hope just as strongly. Famously reclusive, this 19th-century American poet remained largely unpublished during her lifetime, by her own choice. After her death in 1886, however, her poems were discovered and published by her close friends and family. Since then, Dickinson has grown to become one of the most mysterious, emblematic, and loved poets of all time with her short but powerful poems. Much of her poetry is devoted to exploring the nature of life, death, and what she called the “Circumference,” the boundary where the reality that we know meets that of the sublime—God, for example, or for the less religiously inclined, Truth with a capital T. Dickinson was the first poet to really capture my attention when I was younger, and she is now one of my all-time favorite writers. In her beautiful poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Dickinson explores the power of hope and what it means to us as humans. …/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,
