Newsletter

A note from William Rubel This week the newsletter coincides with the release of our new December issue: our second annual food issue! It is filled with evocations of food in all its possible guises, and some fully tested (delicious) recipes that you might want to try over the holidays. There is so much to like about this issue that it’s hard to know what to call out. I’ll focus on the photography and mention Ula Pomian’s photograph, “In the Land of Bananas”. As with all of Ula’s work, you can see that she has a very clear point of view. Brilliant! The wrap-around cover photograph, “Snow in Clouds”, by Hannah Parker, also the photographer of our much-loved June cover (“Red Fern”, the goat), is beautiful with a complexity that makes this an image you can come back to many times. I urge you to click the link to see the whole picture. The image is of snow falling through bare tree branches at night. But I could also see the clouds at the top of the photo as interstellar gas clouds, with the snowflakes being stars. Thank you, Hannah. I’m not going to try to improve on Editor Emma’s introduction to the complete issue: During the holidays, when cookies, cake, and hot chocolate seem to be everywhere, we tend to think of food as a comfort and as a delight. We don’t often talk publicly about the many anxieties surrounding food, about the allergies, intolerances, and religious or ethical dietary choices that can make it difficult to enjoy a meal with one’s friends and family. In this year’s food issue, some of our young writers explore this darker side of eating, alongside its joys. We also have six delicious recipes to share with you, and hope you will enjoy sharing your kitchen with each other and with Stone Soup this holiday! Print subscribers should be receiving their issues now (they were mailed in mid-November: ours arrived yesterday), and digital subscribers can log in now to read the full issue. And you can always order additional print copies in the Stone Soup online store. Don’t miss it. Joaquin Garcia-Magallanes mailing out the first copies of the Stone Soup Annual 2018. Shipping News! The 2018 Annual, along with the new fully revised, expanded, and redesigned Stone Soup Books of… are all shipping out to those who preordered them, as I write. All products are mailed out within two days of your order. One of the pleasures of a small business is that you develop personal relationships with suppliers. The Annual and other books and products in our online store are shipped by my now longtime friend Martha Macambridge. Martha and her team have been mailing Stone Soup on and off over the last 40 years! The photo shows one of her assistants, Joaquin Garcia-Magallanes, stuffing the 2018 Annual into envelopes earlier this week. Thank you, Joaquin! For holiday gifts: All print subscriptions and other book and product orders ship within two days of being received. Print and digital subscriptions, monthly or annual, via our website and fulfilment house Annuals, anthologies, notebooks, and sketchbooks in the Stone Soup online store Food For Thought This week, I’d like to focus on one of our regular bloggers and Stone Soup author Sabrina Guo, who just posted an extraordinary essay. Sabrina, as those of you who follow her blog posts know, often writes about Syrian war refugees. In this post she really outdid herself. She actually set up Skype calls with Laura Doggett, who runs a photography and filmmaking collective with Jordan refugee camps. Through Laura she spoke with a couple of young women caught up in the Syrian War. In her own introduction to her blog post Sabrina writes, “Through speaking with them, I began to see the importance of storytelling as a way of connecting and forming bonds with others.” In a profound way, this is what Stone Soup is about. Storytelling as a way of making sense of your own life and of making connections and bonds with others. I don’t want to summarize what Sabrina wrote—please read it yourselves here: “Amplifying Voices with Another Kind of Girl Collective”. It’s an important piece of work. Inspired by Sabrina’s work, we have decided to have a special Stone Soup issue in 2019 featuring the creative work of children caught up in war, wherever they are in the world. We will plan the issue in more detail in the early part of 2019, and we will reach out to those of you who may want to help with the issue. In addition to the special issue, we will create a dedicated space on our website where the voices of children caught up in wars can be heard. Donations made for our refugee project will be dedicated to this important work. Until next week, The first free subscriptions have already been awarded in our 45th birthday promotion! Congratulations and thank you to K. Newlands! Stone Soup was 45 years old this year. We are celebrating that birthday and celebrating being back in print with an offer to our loyal readers. Can you help us meet our target of 1,000 new print subscribers by the end of the year? We are offering free subscriptions and extra prizes at various points along the way, all tied into our age. Every 45th subscriber will receive a free subscription (and we are so close to the next threshold, it could be you this weekend!) The 450th and 900th subscribers will receive a free subscription, plus copies of all ten of the Stone Soup books in our collection (8 anthologies and 2 Annuals). And, the 1,000th will receive all of that, plus a free site license for the institution–school or public library–of their choice. It’s easy to subscribe: visit this page. This particular promotion will continue until we meet our target or get to the end of the year, whichever comes first. Please share this with everyone you think would benefit from joining the readership of Stone Soup. Partnership news Miacademy We have an exciting partnership in place with Miacademy,

“Teary Eyed Giraffe”, painting by Aevahaadya Arun, 6, Ontario, Canada. Published in Stone Soup, January 2018. A note from William Rubel Our best Thanksgiving greetings from all of us at Stone Soup. Whether or not you are American or Canadian (Canadian Thanksgiving was last month), the end of the year is a good time to remember others who may not be in as happy a situation as you are. Where I live, in Santa Cruz, California, smoke from the massive Camp Fire that destroyed a town of 27,000 and has killed many people has reminded all of us here how lucky we are. The Stone Soup spirit is that when each of us gives a little, something great can be accomplished. I encourage you all to give something, even $1.00, to help someone who is in need right now. I just gave money to the UNHCR, the United Nations agency that helps refugees, and to the American Red Cross to help people caught up in the Camp Fire. I don’t think you will ever regret giving to help others. When we were at the California Library Association Conference two weeks ago we were surprised by how many librarians were interested in Stone Soup as a place where their patrons could not only read great work, but also get published. That got us thinking. That got us thinking about Stone Soupas a bridge between being a consumer of literature–a reader–and being a writer. All writers are readers, but all readers are not writers. I love to write. I feel most alive when I am writing. In that sense, for me, writing is its own reward. That said, I have many things I want to say that I want to share with others. While I don’t “write for publication” in the sense that I the only reason I write is to get published, having my work read by others is at the center of all of my writing. I tend to think of everything I write as a letter to a friend. In fact, the first book I wrote, The Magic of Fire, was started as a letter to a friend. But, when the letter got to about sixty pages I realized that the letter form wasn’t going to work–five years later that letter, by then a large book, was published. I decided I would be writer after visiting a friend of mine who was already a writer. He showed me a fan letter that had recently arrived. I was blown away! The fan letter impressed me because I saw that my friend’s writing had touched this person’s heart. And I thought, there and then, nothing could be better than enriching the lives of total strangers. Writing is where you, the writer, find your inner self. I think that ideas are best developed through writing. When you put words on paper you are forced to confront deep truths–do these words mean what I want to say? What is it, exactly, that I do want to say? In my experience as a writer, the act of writing itself is where I discover my voice. The trick is that to actually be a writer you have to write! We all have busy schedules and most of us are also distracted by our digital recreations. I am struggling with this in my own house with my own daughter. When she writes she is fully engaged with the writing, but more often than not, the lure of another episode of something on Netflix has her transfixed. We are working towards one or more video game- and movie-free days simply because it is so hard to stop playing or watching once one has started. If you are also struggling with how to balance digital entertainment in your life, or have advice for me and my 7th grader daughter, let me know by replying to this Newsletter. I’ll put together some of your replies to share with you. Replies from parents are welcome! A very brief reference to holiday shopping… Holiday shopping craziness is upon us! The one way you can best help Stone Soup thrive is to subscribe to the magazine via the Stone Soup website, look for gifts in our online store, Stonesoupstore.com, and encourage your friends to do the same–you never know, you or they might get their subscription for free in our 45th birthday celebration! (see below). Thank you. This week’s art and story In this week’s newsletter we wanted to highlight a particularly beautiful painting made by one of our younger contributors that we published this year: Aevahaadya Arun’s “Teary Eyed Giraffe”. What an achievement! Do take a closer look, and read some of the comments that tell you more about her work at our website. Also, don’t miss out on reading (or re-reading) Natalie Warnke’s story below, also published in January. It’s always exciting when a genre is turned on its head, and Natalie does just that with her clever twist on a fairytale princess. Until next week, The past week on our blog It’s been a great week on our blog – three new posts from young bloggers were published. In ‘Big Family: A Memoir’, Daniel Wei tells us about his experience as an Asian-American boy visiting China for the second time in his life. Maya V talks about ‘Sad Books’, and her difficulties with reading them. I’m sure lots of us share her feelings! Have a read and leave her a comment to keep the conversation going. And last but not least, Keshav Ravi muses on the joys of a fort: for play, for contemplation, as an escape, and as a place to read. Help us reach 1,000 print subscribers by the end of the year!   Stone Soup was 45 years old this year. We want to celebrate that birthday and celebrate being back in print with an offer to our loyal readers. Can you help us meet our target of 1,000 new print subscribers by the end of the year? We are offering free subscriptions and extra prizes at various

“Mountain Dweller”, by Eva Stoitchkova, 11, Ontario, Canada. The cover art for the Stone Soup Annual 2018. A note from William Rubel It’s Thanksgiving in the United States this Thursday! We hope you all have a wonderful time. We have received the proof copies of this year’s Stone Soup Annual. It is so exciting to hold the whole year’s published work in our hands in one fat book! We are very excited that we will soon be able to send it out into the world and into your hands. We also loved being able to look through a year of writing and art on the pages of the magazine. You have made such wonderful work this year, all of you. Congratulations. This week I want focus particularly on the fantastic artwork by 11-year-old Eva Stoitchkova, “Mountain Dweller,” that makes the striking cover for this year’s Annual. We used another of Eva’s collages, “Forest Creature,” as the cover of our March 2018 issue, and I urge you to visit it at our website to look closely at that one too. Every time I look at Eva’s beautiful images, I’m impressed by her bold, expressive lines and the creative way she uses collage to both create and embellish the picture. She uses the underlying found images in the usual way, to add color and texture to her work, but at the same time she chooses those images to add meaning and contextual references as well. It’s both clever and beautiful, and all of us at Stone Soup are so proud to be able to share Eva’s art with you. Thank you, Eva!                     Copies of the Stone Soup Annual are available for pre-order now in the Stone Soup online store, and will ship in the first week of December. There you can also find back issues of the 2018 magazine in print. What we learned this week We attended the California Library Association conference in Santa Clara, California, last weekend. Truly great response to our renaissance! Librarians loved what they saw. Here is the takeaway idea from the conference: we should think of Stone Soup as a bridge between being a consumer of literature—a reader—and being a producer of literature—a writer and an artist. While every writer is a reader, every reader is not a writer. Childhood is the time to get into the habit of being a creative person—a writer and an artist. Stone Soup is there for kids to help them synthesize their reading and personal experiences through creative writing and art. William’s Weekend Project Which gets us to today’s project: a close-up portrait of an animal. I mean “animal” in its largest scientific sense, the kingdom Animalia. We are mammals. Flies are insects. Along with fish, birds, and other types of creatures, we are all within the group of organisms scientists classify as animals—“Animalia.” When you stare into a dog’s eyes, the dog stares back into your eyes. There is human-dog bonding through the eyes. There is no bonding between humans and flies. With most other animals it is unclear to us humans just exactly what the eyes we’re looking at are actually seeing or communicating. But eyes are so important to how we humans interact with each other that for us, a face with the eyes always captures our attention. Even when it is the face of an insect. Working from pets or domesticated animals you may have access to—dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, chickens, cows, pigs—and from animals you can usually only see up close in photographs—elephants, flies, fish, etc.—I want you to make a drawing or painting that fills the entire page just with the creature’s face. I’m thinking of a full-on, face-forward portrait that fills the entire page. Most animals display symmetry—the left and right sides of their faces mirror each other. Eye-migrating flatfish like flounder are an exception. Both of their eyes are on the same side of their head! The illustration you see in this newsletter is the face of “Mountain Dweller” created using collage by Eva Stoitchkova. Be bold. Be brave. Fill the entire space. As always, if you create something that you are happy with, send it to Emma via our submissions portal. Be bold! Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Keep up with the latest posts on our blog. In Santa Cruz, where Stone Soup is based, we have been very aware of all the fires in California over the past weeks. They are hundreds of miles away from us, but the smoke fills the atmosphere, so we are constantly thinking of those for whom it is closer to home. Our blogger Lukas Cook wrote a thoughtful piece, My Soccer Game Went Up In Smoke, on the fires, their causes and effects, this week. Don’t miss it. Have you ever seen a poetry animation before? Have you experimented with Scratch? Check out the animation that Vandana R made and posted this week. Plus, the latest review by Nina Vigil: this week, of a documentary film called Science Fair. On the basis of Nina’s review, we can’t wait to see it! Partnership news Secret Kids contest Did you know the Secret Kids Contest was mentioned in the New York Times this week? We hope that means we will get lots more entries to this fantastic competition for young, long-form authors that we are running in partnership with Mackenzie Press. All of the details are on our website–suffice to say, that if you are under the age of 18 and working on a book-length piece of writing, you should be thinking about getting it ready to submit by the end of the year to be in with a chance of winning one of the amazing prizes–a publishing contract. Miacademy We have an exciting partnership in place with Miacademy, the interactive learning site for K-8th grade. Writing from Stone Soup is being featured on their site, and Miacademy subscribers have the opportunity to submit their work to us. As part of