Newsletter

I held them like they were a bouquet of yellow flowers Illustrator Anna Dreher, 12 for Frustration, Happiness, and Pure Amazement by Isabella Widrow, 12. Published November/December 2015. A note from William Rubel Mushrooms! Chanterelles! Delicious and commonplace wild foods for the taking! How I love foraging. Berries, fruits, mushrooms, watercress, wild lettuce, dandelions—it is rare that a week goes by when I don’t bring something back from a walk. All these wild plants and more can provide creative inspiration, and some of them even something to eat. Now, I want to say right away that you must learn about wild foods and think very carefully about the conditions you found them in, before eating anything you pick. The rule for all wild foods, especially mushrooms, is the same: “In case of doubt, throw it out.” Mushrooms come in many colors: red, yellow, orange, grey, black, brown, white, and even green. I think of mushrooms as the flowers of the forest floor. The carpet of yellow chanterelles depicted in Anna Dreher’s drawing is realistic—but this is also the find of a century! I’d be talking about such a find for years afterward. When you collect wild foods, whether those are apples from a city tree that overhangs a sidewalk, watercress in a neighborhood stream, or dandelion from a lawn or piece of disturbed ground in a parking lot, you bring home a story. For this weekend, I’d like you all to at the very least take a walk in your neighborhood. You can expand your quest beyond edible plants and fruits to include flowers. (I am not talking here about picking from your neighbors’ yards, or from rare collections of special plants, of course!) Keep your eyes peeled for herbs, fruits, and flowers that are growing in the public part of streets and lots. You will be surprised at what you find once you start looking. But to write about what you bring home, to talk about the bouquet of yellow flowers from wild lettuces—something I am pretty sure you will find in bloom right now—you need to be able to recognize what you find. Novelists and story writers, like historians, often have to do research to support their stories. When you write about mushrooms or plants, it is helpful to be particular. “We walked through a forest” is less evocative than “We walked through a pine forest.” Just being able to say “pine” helps readers visualize the shape of the trees, imagine walking on trails covered in needles, and smell the unique smell of pine. So go out foraging this weekend. Ideally, go with someone who has some knowledge of plants and fungi, and check with an adult before you pick anything. Look closely at what you find, and learn about it. You can draw the plants you find and press leaves and flowers to dry them. And you can write about it. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of capturing everyday experiences in writing. Finding wild foods and flowers to pick and bring home is a completely different experience from going to the grocery store to pick up fruits, vegetables, and a bouquet. Everything you forage yourself comes with a story. I want you to record this weekend’s foraging stories; then, when you are writing fiction, think back on this exercise to find something you can use to bring life into your fictional story. Until next week Seeking new bloggers and reviewers! We love the book reviews and blogs that we have been publishing lately. We see this work as being on the same level as what’s published in Stone Soup. The blogs let you, our Stone Soup writers, write in genres and styles that don’t quite fit into Stone Soup the literary magazine. We are always looking for more bloggers, so if you are interested, please submit a sample of what you have in mind by going to our online submissions page. I’d like to encourage teachers and homeschooling parents to submit sample pieces too; we are also looking for adult bloggers. Up to this point the online book reviews and blogs have been free for anyone to view. We have just submitted the work order to our programmer to fold the book reviews and blogs into the Stone Soup paywall which will limit the number of free views. By doing so, we are saying to you reviewers and bloggers that your work has value and that it is an important part of the work we publish. The 2018 Stone Soup Annual is nearly ready The 2018 Stone Soup Annual is in production and will soon go to the printer. Sarah Ainsworth has made the selections of reviews and blog posts to be included in that volume. Impressive work. Congratulations to all our artists, writers, reviewers and bloggers! Thank you! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at stonesoup.com! Are you excited about Halloween? Thinking about your costume? Do not miss Antara’s post with 4 incredible ideas for Halloween costumes you can make yourself. We particularly love the jellyfish (though they are all terrific)! As we move into fall, we also look back at summer with some colorful, inspiring pages from Claire R’s summer journal. Plus, we have another guest post from an adult blogger, this time art history student Sarah Lynn talking about ‘No Boundaries’, the beautiful work of art by Christian Goh, age 9, that we used as our May 2018 cover.   From Stone Soup November/December 2015 Frustration, Happiness, and Pure Amazement By Isabella Widrow, 12 Illustrated by Anna Dreher, 12 How I Found Chanterelles Rain splattered against ice-cold windows, and fat, foggy, clouds hung low. I was in my dad’s twenty-one-year- old Honda Accord, zooming along the highway. It was four-thirty, and I had just gotten out of the two-hour Chinese School that I attend every Sunday. My dad, sister Mia, and I were on our way to a place in the middle of nowhere to find… mushrooms. Chanterelles, to

Julian slowly reached out his hand to the kitten’s fur Illustration by Joe Lobosco, 13, for “Creamsicle” by Bonnie Robinson, 11. Published in Stone Soup, November/December 2002. A note from William Rubel William’s Weekend Projects Photography: Material World–#WhatsInMyBackpack Would you like to be featured on Stone Soup’s Instagram account? We’re running another Instagram photo project. I mentioned this photography opportunity a couple weeks ago, but I’d like to feature the project more fully. The project itself is super simple. Just take everything out of your backpack, photograph it, write up a sentence or two about what you keep in your pack and why, and upload the photo and text to our website in the appropriate submission category. If editor Emma Wood likes it, she’ll post it to our Instagram account. This project is inspired, in part, by the work of Peter Menzel, an American photojournalist. One of his most remarkable projects is his Material World project. He chose 30 families, mostly from different countries, that were each statistically “average”—thus, within their own country, neither rich nor poor. He asked people to take all of their possessions out of their houses, down to the last spoon, and display everything in front of their houses so he could photograph them posed with their possessions. The book he made out of these pictures is called Material World. What we own says something about each of us. Our possessions tell a story. As students, all of your backpacks will tell a student story—the binders, exam notebooks, pens, pencils, and so on say “student.” There may be objects that suggest you are in a particular grade, or can’t leave the house without a special snack. Or, something that suggests you are a musician or a sportsperson. When I was at school, my binder was always a horrible mess. It was often filled with loose pieces of paper because I wouldn’t put papers into it properly. In high school, one of my teachers took my notebook, threw it up in the air, and as the notebook and papers fell to the ground, said to the class, “Rubel’s rubble!” Indeed, as my colleagues and any visitor to my house will confirm, I am something of a messy person still. So there may be a little of your personality revealed in these photos too. If you are age 13 and younger, you may send us up to three images, so be creative in your photography. Play with the lighting, camera angle, and how you lay out the objects. On the simplest level, this is a documentary project—a snapshot of what is in your backpack on a given day at a given time. But you can use the way you display your backpack objects, the light, and the camera angle to create images that catch your viewers’ eyes—images that make them stop and think. I’d like you to make this your weekend project. If you get into it, then you could document other containers filled with possessions—your closet, desk drawer, your dresser, bathroom cabinet, the floor of your room. Anything you like! Adults reading this should take part in the exercise too. Writing a play As I mentioned last week, we are in the process of revising our anthologies. “The Bear,” by Lena Boesser-Koschmann, was in the original Animals anthology and will be in the new edition. A large portion of the story is told as a discussion among four people. I am linking you here to a playwriting project inspired by this story. I hope at least a few of you will take up the challenge to write a play. As always, if you like the results, send them in! Until next week, Partnership news 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 this partnership, our friends at Miacademy are offering generous discounts to Stone Soup subscribers: 20 to 40 percent off, depending on which type of subscription you purchase. To find out more about Miacademy and explore the various services on offer, visit their website and read the information for parents. If you choose to join, simply enter the code STONESOUP2018 at the checkout to receive your discount. Secret Kids contest As readers of this newsletter will already know, we are running a contest in partnership with Mackenzie Press: the Secret Kids Contest. All of the details are on our website–suffice to say, that if you are under the age of 18 and working on a long-form 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 prizes of a publishing contract. Highlights from the past week online   Don’t miss the latest content from our book reviewers and young bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Be inspired to read more with Nushu Shri’s post, ‘Getting Closer to your Goals’, on using Goodreads to reach and exceed your reading targets, and a challenge to keep a reading journal. We also have the first in a new series of guest posts by older readers and writers: Kat J.’s ‘The Big Split’, about Stone Soup story ‘Seeing Over the Side of the Boat’ and how such stories can inform adults and help other kids going through the experience of family break-up. Plus, two new book reviews: 13-year-old Lin Lynn Tao tells us her thoughts on Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now, while 12-year-old Michael reviews Scythe by Neal Schusterman.   From Stone Soup November/December 2002 Creamsicle By Bonnie Robinson, 11 Illustrated by Joe Lobosco, 13  It’s dead. That was twelve-year-old Julian Horowitz’s first thought when he spotted the kitten in the white-blanketed woods when he was walking home from school. The kitten was vividly orange and bright white colored, reminding Julian of a Creamsicle ice cream bar. It (Julian didn’t know whether the kitten was male or female) was

‘Steam’, by Sabrina Guo, winner of our 2018 Concrete Poetry Contest A note from William Rubel Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! In last week’s newsletter we announced that print is back. Over the past week, orders for home delivery of the print Stone Soup have been coming in, and October print issues will shortly be winging their way through the mail to those who have signed up for the new print subscription. Thank you. I know that not all of you read the newsletter every week—so if you didn’t read the newsletter last week, that is the news. You can order your print subscription at our website. We have also received lots of questions about print (and other subscription-related things) from people replying to this newsletter. We try to respond to everyone who writes to us, but our customer service team has more of the answers. They also have direct access to all the systems needed to confirm your subscription status and make any adjustments. You can contact them here: Email: stonesoup@icnfull.com (response usually within 24–48 hours) Phone: 215-458-8555 (between 7:30 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday) What’s coming up? There will shortly be more items available in our online store. My colleague Jane Levi has been revising our themed print anthologies and working with our fabulous London book designer, Joe Ewart, to redesign them. New editions will start going to press next week, so we will soon be able to offer them for sale. Jane has merged old and new volumes and added material not included before—for example, there are fifty more poems in the Stone Soup Book of Poetry and eighteen additional stories in the Stone Soup Book of Friendship Stories—which we think has improved them. We are also working with a local (Santa Cruz, CA) printer to refresh our art print program, which offers beautifully printed copies of our extensive collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children’s art for your home. And we have plans for lots of products that we at Stone Soup would like to have for ourselves, such as cards and bookmarks, so we hope you will like what we come up with. We will keep you informed. You will find the project for this week—for newsletter readers of all ages—in a separate box below. Plus, of course (it being the first week of a new month), don’t forget to check out the wonderful October issue of Stone Soup, available now on our website and in the print edition at our online store! And now, over to our editor, Emma Wood. Until next week, Announcing the winners of the Concrete Poetry Contest! First Place “Steam” by Sabrina Guo, 12 Second Place “Moonlight” by Ashley Xu, 13 Third Place “Octopus” by Marco Lu, 12 Honorable Mentions “Snowflake” by Emma Almaguer, 13 “A Tree” by Andrew Lin, 8 “The Cloud” and “Disappearing” by Madeline Nelson, 12 “Seeing the Sea,” Maya Viswanathan, 12 Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who participated; we all had fun reading and simply looking at your creations. The pieces that ended up standing out to us were the ones that not only showed us the writer had a clear understanding of the concrete poem but that used the shape of the poem to emphasize and illustrate the text. For instance, in “Steam” by Sabrina Guo, a poem in the shape of a steaming cup of tea, the word “interrupting” is itself interrupted by the handle of the mug: “interrup” is on one side of the handle, and “ting” is on the other. In that poem, Guo writes of “slow curling spirals” of steam, just as the text itself spirals around, forcing the reader to turn the page, creating a dizzying effect. What I love about the concrete poem is that it brings the relationship between the form (or shape) of the poem and its content (or text) to the forefront. Sometimes when we are writing, we simply default to the “usual” form without thinking about it. But in the best pieces of writing, the form is something that emerges from the ideas and narratives represented in the text. You can usually tell if this is the case by trying to rewrite the poem or story in a different form. If your poem feels the same in prose as it does in stanzas with lines, then it probably doesn’t need to be in stanzas! I hope you will try this with a piece of writing you are struggling with, and see if it opens up more ideas. We will publish the winning submissions in Stone Soup in 2019. Best,   William’s Weekend Writing project Where I live, in Santa Cruz, CA, we have what is called a Mediterranean climate. This is the climate around the Mediterranean Sea; around Cape Town, South Africa; and here, on the California coast. We have a single rainy season and then no rain for most of the year. This evening, as I write this, the air is heavy with moisture. Smelling rain, I looked online and, indeed, the first rainstorm of our rainy season is supposed to come tonight. Wherever you live in the world, whether in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore, South Africa, India, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Sweden, or Kenya—I am mentioning here the home countries of Stone Soup readers—the weather is changing. Here, in the northern hemisphere, from warm to cool or even to cold, and in the southern hemisphere, from cool to warm. For the writing project this week, I’d like each of you—and this includes adult newsletter readers—to sit down to write about how you observe the changing seasons. I don’t want to suggest anything programmatic. I want you to feel free to write what you want. If you are totally stuck, then start by writing about your observations of how the season is changing. Then, let yourself be free. If you like what you write, and you are under the age of 14, then go online to our submission page and send us what you wrote.   On