Newsletter

Girls outside one of the classrooms at Remot School, Westgate, Samburu District, Kenya, April 2019. A note from William Rubel Summer birthdays . . . Getting older is a very strange process. My daughter, Stella, is turning 13 in a few weeks. I will be turning 67 a few days later. In many ways we are both experiencing changes in our bodies and in the way we think that are noticeably profound. For myself, I have known for years and years that I am the person who always does at least one thing too many. Whatever the situation, I always go beyond the obvious place to stop. In terms of what I can manage, I have certainly reached my limit! I won’t list all the projects that I am in the midst of! But I am for the first time becoming comfortable with this trait. Partnership with a Kenyan school As regular newsletter readers know, I have been doing research into the foods, customs, and lives of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I have been doing this for the last 25 years. Along with my Kenyan friend, Haile Selassie Lesetho, and my partner, who you also know through Stone Soup, we have created the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, a place that people can visit to study the effects that climate change and globalization are having on the culture of the Samburu. Traditionally pastoralists—in Biblical terms the children of Abel—the modern world is closing in on the Samburu and their culture is rapidly changing. There is a need to carefully document what remains so we can remember how they lived before they become just like us, people who live in permanent houses with Wi-Fi, credit cards, and jobs in offices rather than people who live entirely off of their cows, goats, camels, and sheep. Our research station is developing a relationship with a local school—Remot Primary School—which serves pupils of elementary, middle, and high school age. The school’s headmaster, our friend Boniface Nakori, has asked whether we can get science books for his school. Jane and I have both visited his school and told you about our attendance at the opening of a new classroom earlier this year. It is in a beautiful place located near Lengusaka, but it lacks so many things we take granted in our schools—like, there are very few books! Books are used and used and used until they fall apart. Books are so scarce and valuable that they are locked up in a trunk! Boniface has asked me to ask you to please donate books about science for his students. What he needs is anything. Honestly. From Little Golden Books to the lovely DK series on science subjects, and everything in between. Books about insects, snakes, trees, the human body, the stars, dinosaurs—anything at any grade level and in any condition will be used and read over and over and over again by teachers and students who want to learn. Primary education is mandatory, and most (but not all) children get at least some schooling. But their life is hard, and it is not uncommon to have a child who is 14 in fourth grade. The land is dying, and the children are not going to be able to live as their parents have. The difference between living a life of urban poverty or joining the fast-growing Kenyan middle class depends on getting educated. I can tell you that these are motivated, smart, excited students, but without books it is very very hard to make it all the way to a university. The boy whose picture I am sharing with you here is holding a container for milk. His house is in the background. This student is typical of the students at the school I am asking you to help with books. Not a single student in the school lives in a house like we do. They live in small circular huts made out of sticks that are not tall enough for an adult to stand up in. There is no electricity, so there is no light at night, as this school serves families who don’t have enough money for a solar light. On behalf of this boy and his friends, Boniface the headmaster, and all of us at the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, we thank you for whatever books you can send. If you don’t have books to send but would like us to buy books on your behalf, then please click on the Stone Soup website’s Donate button, note that your donation is for Samburu Books, and we will will purchase appropriate books for the school. (We will let you know which books and when they are delivered.) We are hoping, over time, that the Remot students will start writing a science blog for Stone Soup. We have our first university group arriving at the research station in early July, so Jane and I will be flying to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to meet them on July 4. We will take with us any books that you can send our way before July 2. Please write to Jane to confirm the address they should be sent to. Thank you. William’s Weekend Project Which brings me (finally!) to today’s project: science and art. We have talked about science fiction in previous newsletters. I’d like to talk of other ways you might incorporate science into something you write or draw this weekend. To save your email inboxes after this long message, I’ve posted the activity idea to our website here. Do take a look, and if you are ever stuck for something to do this summer, check out our activities pages for some more creative ideas! As always, send what you come up with from this activity or any other projects to our editor, Emma Wood, via our Submit button, so she can consider it for Stone Soup. Until next time, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. This week on the blog, four-year-old Prisha Gandhi records a cheerful song she wrote on a rainy day.

“Fawn in a Clearing.” Chalk drawing by Meredith Rohrer, 10, published June 2019, illustrating “The Four Seasons” by Grace Jiang, 11. A note from Jane Levi Summer journals Last summer, William challenged our readers—adults and kids alike—to keep a summer journal. Let’s make it an annual tradition! William suggested lots of approaches: It could be a record of what you are doing, your impressions of any new experiences you are having during your break from school routines, or a place to capture your dreams. It could be the book where you think thoughts and develop them by writing them down or where you write notes on what you are reading. Perhaps it is a sketchbook. Maybe it’s a place to work on poems, fragments of writing, or even whole stories. Sometimes it could just be a central place for a to-do list, or notes to jog your memory, and a note of a new favorite recipe. It might be, like my own notebook, a combination of all those things! It’s your journal—it can be whatever you want it to be. Our message is: use the summer to make a resolution to start a journal, or enrich it if you already have one. You can use any kind of book or notebook for your journal. You probably have something already lurking around your house. Or perhaps you’ll find an inexpensive book in a local stationery store—or a fancier one at a bookstore, museum store, or somewhere you go on a  summer outing. We have a few blank and lined notebooks and sketchbooks in the Stone Soup Online Store, currently at half-price (from only $2.50) to encourage you to get started! Like last summer, if you would be willing to share a few pages with us and with your fellow Stone Soup readers, send us a photo or a scan of a few pages and we’ll feature them on our website. Submit your photos via our Bloggers category on Submittable, and use the words “Summer Journal” in your title. We look forward to learning more about what all of you are up to this summer! Store problem fixed We discovered today that our online store’s credit card processing wasn’t working properly, and we have fixed it. If you tried to purchase a subscription within the last week or so and couldn’t get the transaction through, please try again. Everything is now up and running—including our new print subscriptions delivered worldwide. We will start mailing the July/August print issues next week, so get your subscriptions set up now! This week’s featured art and poetry This week’s featured art and poem are teasers designed to encourage you to read our June 2019 issue. We loved Meredith’s beautifully worked chalk drawing of a fawn in a clearing, with shafts of light filtered through unseen trees. The fawn seems to have just noticed that we are looking at it—ears pricked, neck curved, a sidelong look. What will it do next? Will it run away? Or can we imagine it might trot toward us to feed from our outstretched hand? This apparently simple artwork really stimulates the imagination. What does it make you think and feel? Emma paired the fawn with Grace Jiang’s evocative poem about the seasons, which carries us from fall though winter, spring, and summer, and back to fall again from a woodland animal’s perspective. Perhaps, like Grace, you’ll have time over the summer to think about the natural world around you and the behavior of the animals in it as they, like you, enjoy the season and prepare for what is coming next. Happy summer, and happy journaling. As always, we cannot wait to see what you make. Contest reminder: write a book! Summer is prime time to work on your entry for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. (We have extended our usual age limit for this contest.) The deadline for entries is August 15, so you have two whole months to keep working 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. 25% discount on Stone Soup books through the end of June Summer vacation is a great time for reading, and our series of themed anthologies (the Stone Soup Books of…) are a great place to start. Don’t just take our word for it: we’ve been getting some great reviews at Good Reads, LibraryThing and Amazon! We’re offering a discount code for all of the Stone Soup Books of… that is valid through June 30 in our online store. Enter the code READSUMMER19 for 25% off your purchases. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Haeon Lee offers listeners a transporting clarinet trio that explores the sonic chaos of life in New York City and how it relates to the tranquility of an open sky above. Titled “Right Beneath the Clouds,” Haeon describes her inspiration thus: “Skyscrapers, bridges, Central Park, and construction outlined the melody of my piece, given to the clarinet. Shadows and overlaps between these structures formed the cello and piano parts for the first movement.” Read more and listen here. Check out Summer and Yelia’s “Balancing Technology” podcast, where they interview their school’s tech specialist and librarian on the complexities of children’s relationships with technology. They discuss technology’s impact on social development, the benefits of access to such a versatile resource, and the importance of moderation and boundary-setting. From Stone Soup June 2019 The Four Seasons By Grace Jiang, 11 Art by Meredith Rohrer, 10   A golden leaf falls on Little Deer’s nose, he jumps around playfully, “Fall has come! Fall has come!” he calls. His father bellows, “We must go find more food or the cold white sheet will bury it all!” Little Fox jumps around in the white powder, that once had millions of flowers in it. Now it is cold and wet. He whines to his mother, “I must go play with Brown Bear!” His mother whispers, “You must wait till spring.” Spring has come! Little Horse is only a month old,

“I am already breaking away, but not quite as rapidly as I would like.” Illustration by Olga Todorova, 12, for “Flying” by Margaret Bryan, 12. Published in Stone Soup March/April 2007 and The Stone Soup Book of Sports Stories (2018) A note from Emma Wood I am a runner. I usually run at least five miles six days a week, rain or shine, whether I have time or I don’t. I make the time. Or it’s more like that time doesn’t “count” to me—I have to run, so I find a way to do so. I recently ran my sixth marathon, but I didn’t really think of myself as a runner until I was training for my fourth marathon, in the spring of 2018. At some point during those four months leading up to the marathon, in the middle of what runners call a “training cycle,” I realized that running no longer felt like a chore. Ever. It was, in fact, usually the best part of my day. I love being outside in the beautiful Santa Cruz landscape, either running on trails through the forest or by the ocean. I love that it allows me to step away from my computer, from my work, from my mind, from myself, and simply be. I love running alone and with friends; I love having friends to run with; I love running with my dog, seeing her joy at simply running and trying to mirror it myself. Most of all, I love that it serves as a constant, humbling reminder that every day, I am starting over again—that it doesn’t matter how far or how fast I had run last week or last month. It is always about showing up and putting in the miles. In this way, running reminds me of writing. One of my writing teachers in college and a famous poet, Jorie Graham, once said to me, “Your next book isn’t going to write the next one for you.” I wrote her words on an index card, which I have taken with me and tacked to my bulletin board every time I’ve moved since then. Though I don’t have a published book yet, I do have a couple of manuscripts that I have been submitting and trying to publish. It is gratifying to finish a project after months after writing—just like it is gratifying to finish a marathon after months of training. But the last marathon won’t run the next one for you: you still have to lace up and put in the miles every day; every mile, whether it was hard or easy, makes you a stronger runner and brings you closer to your goal. With writing, too: you have to sit down and put in the words. Every word you write brings you one word closer to your goal. Even if you end up cutting it from the piece in revision, the writing is making you a better writer. I encourage you to try to sit down and write at least six days a week this summer. Maybe you want to write for 10 minutes. Maybe you want to write one page a day. Regardless the goal, remember it is about showing up, putting in the time, and doing the work. Anyone can be a runner, and anyone can be a writer. But you have to be willing to work. Until next time, Big news for our overseas readers – print copies now delivered worldwide! At last, we’ve done it: we are set up to deliver print issues of Stone Soup magazine all over the world! And in the process, we have managed to reduce the price for our Canadian subscribers. Whether you are in the UK, China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, India, Korea, or anywhere in the Americas or Europe, if you have a mailbox, we can deliver Stone Soup to it. The prices are quoted in US dollars, with shipping included, by region: $89.99 a year for the USA and the UK, $119.99 for Europe and Canada, and  $129.99 a year for Asia, Australia, India and the rest of the world. Visit our online store to see all the options, and to buy your subscription today! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Do you play the popular video game Fornite? On Monday we published a piece that discusses whether or the not the phenomenon is to dying down. See what Daniel has to say here. Lukas reflects on happiness in his post from this week: “As I thought back, I realized that in all the times where I had fun, had joy, there were people surrounding me.” Is this true for you too? Leave a comment and tell us what you think. Tara reviews the classic Ramona Quimby series of books. Why does she enjoy them so much? “Maybe it’s because author Beverly Cleary developed the characters so well in our minds, it’s as if they are your best friend. Maybe it’s because the adventures Ramona gets into are so relatable and funny.” Read more of Tara’s thoughts here. Contest and partnership news Contest: Write a Book! Why not use Emma’s writing tips to finish your entry for our summer contest? We are looking for book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under (we have extended our usual age limit for this contest). The deadline for entries is August 15th, so you have the whole summer 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. From Stone Soup March/April 2007 Flying By Margaret Bryan, 12 Illustrated by Olga Todorova,12 STARTING LINE I roll my head from side to side in an attempt to be nonchalant. My teammates look at me questioningly, and then ask, “Can we go now?” impatiently I