Newsletter

“The rosy color of dawn spreads all over the sky” Photograph by Julia Li, 12, Mason, OH Published September 2017 A note from William Rubel Friends! Jane Levi and I are both in Lengusaka, Kenya, at our friend’s camp. His name is Haile and the camp is called Haile’s Camp. We are here setting up a research station for studying pastoralism and the ecology of the Samburu lowlands. Our camp is under a canopy of acacia trees by a dry river bed. Monkeys live in the trees—very cute but also very mischievous! Thousands of birds live in the trees also, and as I write this a huge flock of small birds has arrived back at our trees from a day out foraging in the nearby mountains. Goats, sheep, chickens, and the household dog and cat roam the grounds. We are very far from home, but at the same time we are at a home away from home; I have been coming to this part of the world for 26 years. In the coming weeks we will have news for you regarding an exchange program we are setting up with a small, remote school (appropriately named Remote Primary School; it’s motto is “To be strong and focussed like a lion”) in the Samburu District’s Westgate Conservancy. Jane and I went to the ceremony for opening their new classroom building on Wednesday. I can say now that they don’t have any books, so we will be collecting books to bring to them when we return here in July. Details will follow. Good news! I have some really fabulous news to share with you. Our book agent for Asia has just sold the Chinese-language rights to our anthologies to Beijing Yutian Hangfen Books Company, the most prestigious Chinese publisher of foreign-language children’s books. Here is an article in the American professional magazine Publishers Weekly that tells you something about this company. We are going to use money from this rights sale to improve our website. Can’t wait to see the anthologies in Chinese! William’s Weekend Project For this Saturday project, I’d like you to write a poem that is 8–12 twelve lines. Don’t write anything today. Just live your day. When you are in bed, before going to sleep, think back on your day. What most stands out? Poetry is often exploring essence—the inner core of a thing. As you fall asleep, let what stood out from your day play in your mind. Feelings, thoughts, colors, sounds, images, music, words—let them all be tumble. Tomorrow, during the day, think back on those thoughts and let your words flow. As always, this writing project is for newsletter readers of all ages, but if you are 13 or younger, if you write something you are super pleased with, then please send it to our editor, Emma Wood, by going to the Submit link on our website. Follow the instructions for how to submit your poem. Until next week, William To celebrate National Poetry month we are offering a discount on the wonderful Stone Soup Book of Poetry, a collection of 120 poems published in Stone Soup between 1988 and 2011. Pick up print copies at 25% off, and eBook editions at half price in the Stone Soup Online Store, throughout April 2019. And, for more poetry ideas, don’t forget to visit the Academy of American Poets’ website–especially, check our their “Dear Poet” initiative.   Our spring contest and partnership news Write for a podcast: Closing date April 15 Our current contest, in partnership with the By Kids, for Kids Story Time podcast, to write a short story about climate change or other environmental theme. Your work could become a dramatized reading, broadcast on the podcast, and be published in an issue of Stone Soup! All the details about entries and prizes are on our website contest pages. Summer writing mentorship program for 9th-graders and up: Application deadline April 15 We’ve partnered with The Adroit Journal, a literary magazine for teens. The applications for their Summer Mentorship program, which takes place from June to August, are open now. This program pairs young writers in grades 9 through 12 with an experienced writer who helps them learn more about the creative process. We know this is for an audience older than ours, but if you are a former reader or contributor, or know any teenagers who are aspiring writers, encourage them to apply! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Check out blogger Mirembe’s interview with Kid Beowulf: The Rise of El Cid author Alexis E. Fajardo! Here’s an excerpt: Mirembe: What was your process for writing the storyline and making the art? Alexis E. Fajardo: There are lots of different ways to make comics, and each cartoonist has their own method. For me, I like to write out full scripts that I then draw out. There are several stages to creating the art: pencils, inks, color, and letters. I pencil and ink on paper, after which I scan the artwork into the computer and color and letter digitally. I also have a colorist who helps me color the book. Comics are deceptively complex to make. It’s sort of like putting together a giant puzzle. From Stone Soup, September 2017 My Tenth Summer Part One: What I Learned About Hard Work By Zoe Lynch, 10 I’ve learned this week, Something I knew already But not well My mother, She sits at her desk. Typing. Writing. Scribbling furiously. I felt sorry for her. I thought she hated it. My father, He used to sit at his computer, Frowning. He’s good at numbers, But he’s tired My mom hates to build trails. He helped her. He learned. He’s still learning Everyone is. Me, I found two things, They are sort of one, Violin and poetry. They go hand in hand It takes a long time to do either I love projects We, Found something Something we loved to do As long as each of us are happy, We all are We work at our joys, Have fun, Daydream. Now I understand It. Makes. Sense

“Color City,” paper collage by Adhi Sukhdial, 7 Illustration for “The Juggle Man,” a poem by Analise Braddock, 7 Published April 2019 A note from Emma Wood Although I love to read in all genres, I am always particularly excited to read the poetry submissions to Stone Soup since I am a poet. For me, the “wow factor,” the main thing that makes me sit up straighter in my chair as I read poetry submissions, is not beauty or even emotion but strangeness. The poet Wallace Stevens once said, “A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” What does this mean to you? To me, this means that a poem should operate just on the edges of reason and rational thinking. It should tell me something that I don’t quite understand. The poem should force me to spend time with it, to read and reread it, and, with each rereading, to come closer to my own understanding of it. When I was in school, I was taught to see a poem as a puzzle I had to decode. I’m not advocating for that kind of reading. However, the best poems are the ones you want to reread, and that grow and change as you do. With this in mind, I wanted to highlight a poem from the April issue: “The Juggle Man” by Analise Braddock, who wrote it at age seven. You can scroll down to read it at the end of this letter. “The Juggle Man” is dark and funny and weird. It is separate from my reality—from the world I live in and the way I think. It is up to something… but what exactly? That is a question I am still asking myself. I didn’t understand this poem when I first read it, and I still don’t—even after reading it maybe 30 times. It was precisely because I didn’t understand it that I knew I needed to publish it. But what does it mean to “understand” a poem? In school, we tend to learn that this means “finding” a “hidden message” or moral. We want to get something out of a poem—some wisdom or an idea. We want to use the poem. But, as another poet, William Carlos Williams said: “Don’t try to work it out; listen to it. Let it come to you. Sit back, relax… Let the thing spray in your face. Get the feeling of it; get the tactile sense of something, something going on…Don’t attempt to understand the modern poem; listen to it.” And as Stevens also said, “People should like poetry the way a child likes snow.” This weekend—the first weekend of National Poetry Month!—I encourage you to read some poems, and I give you permission to simply enjoy them. Whisper them to yourself. Declaim them to your parents after dinner. Sing them to a tune of your own making. Try to really feel and hear the language. Only after that should you try to write your own poem. One place you might start is with your own dreams. Dreams, like poems, operate within their own unique world, filled with bizarre images and nonsensical rules. Start by describing a dream, and see where the poem takes you from there. Once you’re done, send what you’ve written to us at Stone Soup.   To celebrate National Poetry month we are offering a discount on the wonderful Stone Soup Book of Poetry, a collection of 120 poems published in Stone Soup between 1988 and 2011. Pick up print copies at 25% off, and eBook editions at half price in the Stone Soup Online Store, throughout April 2019. And, for more poetry ideas, don’t forget to visit the Academy of American Poets’ website–especially, check our their “Dear Poet” initiative.   Our spring contest and partnership news Write for a podcast: Closing date April 15 Our current contest, in partnership with the By Kids, for Kids Story Time podcast, to write a short story about climate change or other environmental theme. Your work could become a dramatized reading, broadcast on the podcast, and be published in an issue of Stone Soup! All the details about entries and prizes are on our website contest pages. Summer writing mentorship program for 9th-graders and up: Application deadline April 15 We’ve partnered with The Adroit Journal, a literary magazine for teens. The applications for their Summer Mentorship program, which takes place from June to August, are open now. This program pairs young writers in grades 9 through 12 with an experienced writer who helps them learn more about the creative process. We know this is for an audience older than ours, but if you are a former reader or contributor, or know any teenagers who are aspiring writers, encourage them to apply! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Rizwan takes us through A Day in the Life in the Amazon Rainforest. Macaws, jaguars, ants and more! Click on the link to read Rizwan’s account a day in a bustling ecosystem. In Being a Fan, Thomas describes the emotional experience of watching his favorite team compete in the Copa America: “A sinking feeling tried to penetrate my confidence, but I wouldn’t let it. I had believed in this team for too long for them to let me down now.” From Stone Soup, April 2019 The Juggle Man By Annalise Braddock, 7 One day I went to the juggle place and on a shelf sat the juggle man. He said to me you took a juggle now give it back to me. The owner of the juggle place said to go home and then she called the police. The police said outside there is young poor Sally with balls in hand but cannot juggle. Then the police said on a Monday you took a suitcase on Tuesday you took a toothbrush and on Friday you poured milk. What a bad girl you have been. You can hear Analise talking about how she came to write her poem at Soundcloud   Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall,

“Jenna would love it here, Adrian found herself thinking” Illustration by Ashley Burke, 13, for “The Baseball” by Katie Russell, 13. Published in Stone Soup, September/October 2006 & in The Stone Soup Book of Sports Stories (2018). A note from Jane Levi This week’s featured story is actually one of a pair of stories, both published in Stone Soup more than 10 years ago, about the same character—a girl called Adrian—and telling the story of the same event—a baseball game in the park—from different perspectives. In “The Baseball,” we learn about Adrian’s inner life and the story of her family, especially her troubled older sister, who gave her the baseball of the title. The other, “Adrian,” tells the story of the appearance of this new girl, Adrian, in the baseball game being played by a group of friends. In that story, we learn about the girls in the group, their response to Adrian’s arrival in their game, and how wrong we can be when we jump to conclusions based on superficial, surface appearances.* Originally, we published these two stories in the order the author sent them to us: “Adrian” first, “The Baseball” second. Presented in this order, Adrian is the titular hero from the beginning, but she is actually as much of a mystery to us, the readers, as she is to the group of baseball-playing girls. We are left at the end of that first story wondering where she came from, how she got to be so good at baseball, and whether she will become friends with the rest of the girls. It is only in the second installment that we start to understand who Adrian is, what she is going through, what baseball means to her, and how she came to that baseball game on that particular afternoon. Re-read some of your favorite books and you will see how often authors use this device—switching perspective—to help their readers develop intimacy with the hero of the story, and how frequently they will imply who the hero actually is by giving you insight into their minds earlier in the story, or more often. When we chose these two stories for The Stone Soup Book of Sports Stories, we had to think really carefully about which order to present them in. It was an interesting dilemma, because the story works both ways, but the reader’s perspective on the wider tale changes with each part. Sequentially in time, the second story actually comes first, and in it we learn more about the lead character than the other characters know. We almost reversed them in the collection, but in the end kept the original publication order. Reading them again now, I still wonder whether we should have flipped them around and subtly changed readers’ experiences of the stories. When you write stories with several characters, how do you decide what to reveal about them, and at which stage of the story? When you read these two specific stories in a different order, does it change the way you feel about the story? If these stories were chapters in a book about Adrian, which order would you put them in? If you think you would have made a different editorial decision for The Stone Soup Book of Sports Stories, please write and tell us why! Happy reading, *The other girls made some harsh judgments about Adrian, based on her clothes, which are described (and illustrated) in the 2004 story “Adrian.” In the 2006 illustration for “The Baseball,” her green nail polish is shown because it is mentioned in that story, but the illustrator invented the rest of her clothes. Our spring contest and partnership news Write for a podcast: Closing date April 15 Our current contest, in partnership with the By Kids, for Kids Story Time podcast, to write a short story about climate change or other environmental theme. Your work could become a dramatized reading, broadcast on the podcast, and be published in an issue of Stone Soup! All the details about entries and prizes are on our website contest pages. Summer writing mentorship program for 9th-graders and up: Application deadline April 15 We’ve partnered with The Adroit Journal, a literary magazine for teens. The applications for their Summer Mentorship program, which takes place from June to August, are open now. This program pairs young writers in grades 9 through 12 with an experienced writer who helps them learn more about the creative process. We know this is for an audience older than ours, but if you are a former reader or contributor, or know any teenagers who are aspiring writers, encourage them to apply! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Mirembe, 12, reviews Kid Beowulf: The Rise of El Cid, the third graphic novel in a series by Alexis E. Fajardo. Here’s the start of the review: “Attention! Calling all young readers! Are you an adventurous middle grade reader (ages 8 to 11) who would love to travel throughout the middle ages? Do you find medieval battles thrilling? Do you want to fight for justice? If so Alexis Fajardo’s graphic novel Kid Beowulf: The Rise of El Cid might be perfect for you.” Read more of Mirembe’s thoughts on the blog. (Plus—keep an eye out for an interview of the author we’ll be publishing soon!) From Stone Soup, September/October 2006, & The Stone Soup Book of Sports Stories (2018) The Baseball By Katie Russell, 13 Illustrated by Ashley Burke, 13 Adrian stared at the ball in her hand. It was old, obviously well-used and well-loved. Dirt and grass had been ground into it, its once shining whiteness now a muddy, undetermined brown. The laces had been worn down, rough and rusty red. When Adrian held the ball, her hand could feel familiar bumps and dents that had come from years of use. Adrian could remember when her sister, Jenna, had first handed her the ball and taught her how to play baseball. The ball had been new then, just-bought-from-the-store new. Its creamy outside had promised exciting adventures that the two would face. Adrian loved the ball. It had been years since Adrian last