Newsletter

“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

A note from William Rubel These are the first four volumes of the revised Stone Soup anthologies! The next four are being printed this upcoming week. What can I say? Jane Levi, who has been responsible for this project has done a spectacular job. Revised content, completely new look, every volume expanded (the poetry volume alone has 50 additional poems), and every book is now over 200 pages. They are all available right now as forthcoming titles at our online store. The official publication date is November 15, though, as you can see from the picture, half of them have already arrived, so we can start shipping those ones earlier in the week. We love libraries! This weekend Jane, my daughter Stella, and I are presenting Stone Soup at the California Library Association conference in Santa Clara, CA. We have a booth. We’re very excited! Getting back in print lets us get back to selling print subscriptions to libraries once again, and a library is one of the absolutely best places for Stone Soup. And, of course, we will be selling anthologies and copies of the Stone Soup Annual. We hope to see them in every library soon! William’s Weekend Project I want to call attention today to the poem posted on our blog this week. It is called “Searching for Han Solo” and was written by Isabella Posel. This poem speaks to me as a parent, and it speaks to who I was as a child. This poem asks questions about today’s world—where it’s headed and how can it be saved from the direction it’s going in. So, yes, this poem is about global warming, and it’s about leaders who lie. It is always disconcerting for me to go into my daughter’s middle school to see all the banners hanging in the hallways about integrity, honesty, and acting toward others as you would want others to act towards you. Every time I go to my daughter’s school and read these banners or listen to the principal speaking at the assembly about the school’s values, I wonder what is it like to be a child today when so many of our leaders offer such a profoundly bad example. I’m so happy that Isabella has contributed this poem to Stone Soup. It is really an important one, and I hope you all will read it. To make it easier, it’s included below in the former ‘Story from the Archives’ section. Isabella’s poem achieves something that is very, very difficult. And that is to turn contemporary history and politics into a work of art that transcends the moment. Note how Isabella draws on classical myths, American comics, and today’s real world as sources for her work. It’s a poem to make you think. So what I’d like you all to do today is to start poem or story that explores the big world and national issues of today in a literary way. In other words, you are not writing an essay. You are not writing an opinion piece. You are using the techniques of poetry and storytelling to draw out what you feel about the big global and national issues of your childhood, right now. I can say that when I was a child my fears were about nuclear war. That was a huge concern. But when I see all of the issues that are on the scale of nuclear war that you are having to deal with today, I just can’t imagine what is going through your heads.This is a project where you can use your literary skills to talk to your peers and to talk to us adults about how you are feeling. Isabella proposes the idea that you children are all getting ready to fix all this mess. I can say to you that I sincerely hope you will. And thank you, Isabella, for contributing your poem. So, thinking about this poem, you know the drill. If you write something that you want Emma to consider printing in Stone Soup, then go to our online submissions form and submit it under the category of poem or story. If you would like your entry to be considered as a blog post, then please submit it to the blog category, where Sarah will contact you. Blog posts are published fairly quickly upon acceptance, whereas it takes longer to publish something in the magazine because we work many months in advance. In every case, I look forward to reading what you produce. Until next week,           Partnership news Secret Kids contest This is our regular reminder to young, long-form authors that 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 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 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 STONESOUP2018at the checkout to receive your discount. From the Stone Soup blog, November 6, 2018 Searching for Han Solo: A Poem By Isabella Posel Riddle me this And Make My Day Who has taken all the heroes away? They are not in the papers Or on TV Not anywhere, sadly, that I can see Maybe King Arthur got lost And James

The waiting room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop Illustration by Frances Burnett-Stuart, 13, for “Marcella’s Miracle” by Abigail Johnson, 12. Published in Stone Soup, January/February 2015. A note from William Rubel Jane and Sarah did it! The 2018 Stone Soup Annual is going to print. We will start shipping the last week of November. This year, the Annual comes in at 411 pages and weighs 1.75 pounds! People who know me know that I cry easily. So, yes, I cried when I saw the proof. We made the Annual last year because we didn’t have a print magazine to offer you, so we thought, “Well, we can make the year into a book.” As you all know, we are now back in print (since early October). But it turns out that pulling all the issues together into a single book and adding the best of our online book reviews and blog posts creates something awesome. Truly awesome. The sum is greater than the parts. This is a book to take to bed with you, to take in the car, to take on vacation. Hours of reading and re-reading. Lots of inspiration for your own creative work. In the Annual, you hold in your hands the Stone Soup soup of 2018. November issue out now! The magical, animal, and natural November issue was officially published on our website on Thursday, so those of you with digital subscriptions can go to it now. Digital subscribers will also find PDF copies of Stone Soup on our website. New print subscribers—welcome! Your issue is in the mail. We are sorry it didn’t arrive on the first of the month, but please rest assured it is winging its way to you as you read this newsletter—and December’s copy will be mailed in two weeks, so your next issue will definitely arrive on schedule. Finally, a reminder for everyone: you can buy single issues of this and back issues at our online store, Stonesoupstore.com. William’s Weekend Project For today’s project I want to talk about this evocative drawing of a waiting room. This is a project for both child and adult readers. Most of us experience waiting rooms primarily at the doctor or dentist. While this is a drawing, you could also memorialize a waiting room experience in writing. This image, like most of the art we have been featuring in the newsletter, was originally commissioned as an illustration for a Stone Soup story by our editor emerita, Gerry Mandel. We at Stone Soup, and the larger Stone Soup community, are indebted to Gerry for her fabulous accomplishments drawing such evocative work from so many artists. Look at the window blinds! To me, the single bent blind is a stroke of genius. It transforms this from “a waiting room” to “this waiting room.” In the introduction to the upcoming 2018 Annual, editor Emma Wood mentions “sense of place.” I am sure I’ve written about this idea in previous newsletters. It is the specific observed (or imagined) details that artists and writers bring to their settings that help us engage our imaginations. This drawing offers a treasure trove of observational detail: the bent blind that I’ve mentioned, the art on the wall, the layout of the room, and, of course, the many individual people sitting there, each apparently in their own world, each displaying their own body language. I’d like you to draw, or describe in writing, a place with lots of people. Artists have used photography since photography’s early days in the mid-1800s. So, if you can’t sit someplace to sketch lots of people—like in a waiting room—then consider taking a photograph to remind you of the scene as your draw or write. Note people’s clothing—their costumes, their gestures, the kinds of details that both make each person different from the others and that may convey something about character. The teenager sitting with rounded shoulders staring into a little screen, the rail-straight young woman (is she a dancer?), the man wearing a business suit, and the man in a track suit, and so on. As in this drawing, capture the time and place. Looking back at the drawing or reading what you wrote ten years from now, I hope this creative work triggers your memory: Wow! I remember that! Wow! It looks so 2018! As always, kids age 14 or under, if you think your finished work is publishable, upload it to Emma using our online submissions form. If you are an adult and want to share what you did with me, send it to me by replying to this newsletter. Until next week, Partnership news 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. 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. Highlights from the past week online   Read the latest content from our book reviewers and young bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We published Sabrina Guo’s inspiring piece, Taking Flight with Soman Chainani, in both our young bloggers and book review sections this week. It isn’t exactly a