“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,
Newsletter
Saturday Newsletter: August 24, 2019
“Class, I would like you to meet Kenta.” Illustrator Gordon Su, 13, for “Conrad and Fate” by Nate Sheehan, 12. Published January/February 2015. A note from William Welcome back to school! If you are like my daughter, then you’ve just finished one of those incredibly long (and yet at the same time incredibly short) summer vacations. At the start, it seems you’ve got ages—and what a relief to not have school! By the end, it flew by, but even so school can’t start soon enough. Everyone here at Stone Soup wishes all of you a fabulous, successful, and creative school year. We are looking forward to seeing your creative work in the 2019/20 terms. The September issue was shipped this week, so subscribers to the print edition will be receiving it soon. (The digital version will be online on the first of the month, as usual.) If you want Stone Soup delivered to your door, then you have to subscribe, and there is no better time to do so than now, at the start of school. William’s weekend projects Art I’m really impressed with Gordon Su’s illustration, “Class, I would like you to meet Kenta.” What impresses me are the many gestures. It is clear that everyone isn’t exactly paying attention to the teacher. One boy is looking over at his friends, one of whom has his back to the teacher. Like a snapshot taken with a camera, the artist has captured a moment in time. For this project, make a drawing from memory of some place at school—a classroom, the cafeteria, the library—in which there are several people doing different things, looking in different directions, and carrying on different conversations. Or, make a drawing of family or friends at your house or in your yard who are at the same time together as a group, and doing individual things within the group. Writing The story “Conrad and Fate” is about prejudice based on a student’s ethnicity. This story, set in the late 1950s (when I was in elementary school) is about prejudice against Japanese people, something that was very strong in in the United States during and some time after World War II, which ended in 1945. Perhaps some of you have had personal experiences of prejudice of these kinds—I have. It has been 55 years since I was in middle school and bent down to pick a penny up off the concrete in front of a classroom only to discover it was glued down and that I was surrounded by a group of boys shouting “Jew!” and laughing. This memory is fresh, like it happened yesterday. This week, I want you to write a story from the viewpoint of a person who is thought of as “other,” like the Japanese boy in the story included in today’s newsletter. What does it feel like to be mocked, teased, excluded, or worse because you are not seen as a person by other students? This is a story, so show us what it feels like. Visit our website to read and follow the whole activity. As always, when you complete your story or any art you are happy with, send what you create to Stone Soup’s editor, Emma Wood, via our Submittable links. Until next time, Contest, partnership, and project news This week we are excited to tell you that the winning stories and the dramatized readings of the winners of our Podcast contest have been published! You can read all of the winning and placed stories on the blog, and hear winner Olivia Park’s “No Longer Blue” and Sabrina Guo’s honorable mention “Lilith’s Quest” in dramatized form by following the links in the blog section below, as well as on the contest winners’ announcement page. Thank you to our friends at By Kids, for Kids Story Time Podcast for this fun collaboration and their amazing work. It’s exciting to hear our writers’ stories in dramatic form. It gives them a whole new dimension. Have a listen and tell us what you think! In other contest news, our summer book-writing contest is now closed for entries, and the judging has begun! Congratulations to everyone who finished something to enter into this contest. It’s a real achievement to have written a long-form piece, and we cannot wait to read what you’ve written and announce the winners in late September. Finally—we always like to challenge you with a contest, and we will be publishing all the details of our next contest in early September. Watch this space! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! As mentioned above, this week we published the winners of our Climate Change Stories podcast contest on the blog. Olivia’s “No Longer Blue” won first place in the contest and examines the potential for people to exploit climate change for their own gain. Claire’s “The Dreamer” imagines a dystopian future in which climate change has changed all aspects of life on Earth. “A Splash of Water,” by Tara, tells the story of a girl accompanying her father on a climate change research trip. Gemma’s story, “Back in the Days,” also takes an interesting perspective, incorporating time travel. Sabrina’s story, “Lilith’s Quest,” explores climate change from the point of view of animals. Check out all the incredible winning stories on the blog, and leave a comment to let us know what you think. From Stone Soup January/February 2015 Conrad and Fate By Nate Sheehan, 12 Illustrated by Gordon Su, 13 PROLOGUE I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to move to America on July 17, 1956. My life was perfect in Japan. I had good friends. I had finally made the baseball team. Everything was perfect, but then I had to move to the US. The same country that fought a war against Japan. The same country where everybody who looks Japanese is an enemy. Learn a new language. Make new friends. So, basically I had to start over when everything had been perfect. “Perfect” was the only word going through
Saturday Newsletter: August 17, 2019
“Lilly knew it promised to be an amazing read.” Illustrator Tina Splann, 11 (Providence Village, TX) for “Words,” by Elia Smith, 10 (Santa Monica, CA). Published September/October 2014. A note from Jane Levi We know that our Stone Soup readers and authors are kids who love words! Every kind of word lover is represented in the world of Stone Soup: engaged readers, thoughtful reviewers, poets and storytellers, topical writers, and entertaining speakers and dramatists. This week’s writing selections from the current issue and the archive are focused on the power of words, in all their forms. From the July/August issue we are highlighting this week a review of The Book Thief, contributed to by Ananda Bhaduri (see below). Besides giving us an excellent example of a book review that makes you want to read the book for yourself, Ananda also got me thinking about the power of words. They can be used to manipulate and persuade as well as transmit information and develop learning. I’m sure you can think of examples in your own lives when particular words have had an impact larger than themselves. This book is a great reminder that the more we know about words (and the more words we know!), the better we can understand the truth of what others might be saying to us. In Elia Smith’s story “Words,” from the Stone Soup archives, a girl’s love of words helps her to engage with and enjoy a nursing home volunteering project. But words don’t just help to move the action forward. They provide the expression of the characters’ personalities, and they skillfully move us through the arc of the story. The hero, Lilly, is a girl of whom one might say, “She’s swallowed a dictionary,” which means that the story is richly peppered with splendiferous words. But one of my favorite things about the story is the way that in the end (and in contrast to the rest of the story) Lilly’s real feelings are best expressed in just a few, very simple words. It’s a lovely piece of writing that skillfully highlights the importance to writers of choosing just the right words to express emotion as well as meaning, and how to place them for maximum effect. There are so many ways to express a love of words, and the power of words, and so many ways to use those words to express ourselves and to enrich our experience of the world. When you have something you are proud of—a poem, a play, a story, a reading, a blog post idea—share it with us. We always want to know how you are playing with words. Until next time, Contest, partnership & project news We’re in the final days of our current contest: finish writing that book! Keep working on your entries for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. The extended deadline for entries is Aug. 21, so you still have a few days left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Do you know about light pollution? This week on the blog Thee Sim Ling, 12, gives us an overview of the phenomenon and what you can do about it. Continuing our interviews with former contributors, this week we talked with Grace McNamee, whose story “Pennsylvania” was originally published in Stone Soup in summer 2007 and was the featured story in our July 13 Newsletter. Grace now works as an assistant editor at Bloomsbury Publishing. Check out her answers here. Looking forward to next week on the blog We promised to publish the commended and winning stories in our recent Podcast contest on the website, and we’re excited to say that they will start appearing on the Blog next week. Check in through the week using this link to read all five brand-new stories on the theme of climate change. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Reviewed by Ananda Bhaduri, 13 (Guwahati, India) A snow-clad cemetery in Germany a few months before World War II. A girl cannot believe her brother has just died, as she and her mother witness the burial. A black book drops to the snow without the owner’s knowledge. The girl picks it up and clings to it. Her debut in the career of book thievery. Some hours later, the girl and her mother go their separate ways. The girl goes to her new parents. She does not know where her mother is going. Liesel Meminger (the aforementioned girl) is adopted by Hans and Rosa Hubermann of 33 Himmel Street. The Hubermanns are not rich. They decide to raise Liesel because they are getting an allowance for it. Despite this, Liesel could not have a better father than Hans Hubermann. Hans comes to Liesel’s room after her frequent nightmares and comforts her, or sometimes plays the accordion for her. The same cannot be said of Rosa. Though she loves Liesel, she is constantly addressing her as “pig,” often accompanied by a beating. Liesel soon adapts to life in Himmel Street, befriending Rudy Steiner, one of her neighbors. Liesel and Rudy play football with the other kids, go to school together, and also go on thieving adventures. (Their loot mostly consists of food and an occasional book.) It is Hans who discovers Liesel’s first stolen book. (She was lucky it wasn’t Rosa!) Liesel never learned how to read, and Hans has little education. Yet, they manage to finish the book, with Liesel learning how to read in the process. Perhaps these reading sessions develop a love for reading in Liesel. And perhaps this is the reason Liesel feels a compulsion to steal books. The narrator of The Book Thief is Death. What does Death have to do with a girl stealing books, you
