Newsletter

MaCall, I don’t feel like I’m on a magical island”. Illustrator Zoe Hall, 12 for Sisters by Cameron Manor, 11. Published March/April 2010. A note from William Rubel There are four projects for today, one new one and three that we’ve been reminding you about for a little while: a new Instagram project, a recipe with headnotes for the December issue, a last call for the Concrete Poetry contest, and a look back to summer journals. Instagram #whatsinmybackpack I’d like to encourage all of you to follow our Instagram account and to contribute to it. We have images from our archive and images related to current content, and many of you recently sent us images for our #whereiwrite campaign. Thank you! You will see those entries when you go to go to our Instagram account. We are now starting a new hashtag program. We know that nearly every one of you wears a backpack to and from school. We want to know what’s inside! Please send us photographs of #whatsinmybackpack. There is an entry category for this Instagram project here, on the Stone Soup online submissions page. Whether you include the pack itself in the photograph is up to you, but I think it will make a more interesting photograph if it is included. I also think that however you compose it, you will find your own photograph more interesting as the years pass. It has been more than forty years since I unpacked my seventh-grade pack for the last time. It would be amazing to have a photograph of what had been in it! Recipes: December food issue deadline extended to September 20! Thank you to those of you who have sent in your recipes. We are working through them and will get back to the recipe writers very soon. We also have some really nice writing about food (or related to food), without recipes, thank you! To the rest of you—OK. We get it. This is not a good time to think about holiday cooking. I know it is September, and December and holiday eating seems far away. But, we have deadlines to meet, so we have to think about it now. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Years—December is holiday time in lots of places. That means family visiting time. It is eating time. It is the time of year when nearly every family is in the kitchen, cooking. So. What foods mean something to your family? Favorite holiday dishes—favorite cookies—favorite main dishes—favorite homemade drinks and snacks. Or, maybe it isn’t even a food you like very much, but it is a fixture in your family and so has some good stories surrounding it. Remember: we are not a food magazine, and we are international. Just because the issue is being published in December, it doesn’t have to only contain winter recipes for a cold climate—you can send us anything at all, and it will be online in all the other months of the year too.  As I’ve said in previous newsletters and as you can see by looking at last year’s food issue, all recipes must be preceded with a story that talks about the recipe or the food in some way. A great recipe without a great story won’t get published, but something the other way around just might! Concrete Poetry We extended the deadline to midnight, September 15. Poems are coming in—thank you!—so there will not be a further deadline extension. First prize is $50, second prize is $25, and the third prize is $10. I’ve written about this contest in previous Newsletters and you all know the drill. Go to the submissions page, find Concrete Poetry, and click on “more” to read the contest guidelines, or go straight to submit here. Journals! I have not forgotten about the Summer Journals. We have a few in the wings waiting to go online. Are any more of you ready to share yours? Please send me images of a few pages from your journal, along with a passage that you’d like to share. Do this by replaying to this email, or submit to our blog category. I’ll be writing more about journals in another Newsletetter. Until next week What’s behind the paywall? Here is the business news. We at Stone Soup are all extremely pleased with the number and quality of book reviews being sent to us each week. There are new reviews being posted weekly. There are also new blog posts every week. We love the work these Stone Soup writers are doing and feel they are good enough to be folded into the larger Stone Soup literary project.  Up to now, access to the book reviews and blogs has been free. And, they are still free today! However, I have just asked our programmer to include them into the Stone Soup paywall so there will be a limit on how many you can read for free. So, non-subscribers—please check out the extraordinary work being done by our reviewers and bloggers. Today, I read the two book reviews—of To Kill a Mockingbird and Beasts Made of Night—posted this week by our young reviewers. They are both interesting reviews—very topical in these turbulent times. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at stonesoup.com! This week, it’s all about books. You’ve read lots of great book reviews by Vandana R over the past few months. This week, she has written a lovely piece about her book collection, and why some of her books mean so much to her. Are you a Jane Austen fan too? And which books are in your backpack (or locker?) Don’t miss Mirembe Mubanda’s topical review of the exciting and thought-provoking Beasts Made of Night  by Tochi Onyebuchi. Have you also read this book? Leave a comment and tell Miremebe and us what you thought. And, as William mentioned above, we have Maya Viswanathan’s review of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. If you haven’t read it yet, be inspired by her review. If you have, leave her a comment on the blog! “MaCall!” I screeched, snatching up my favorite

‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, 13, a work in colored pencil, ink and watercolor. A detail of ‘Parker’ is the cover of our September 2018 Science Issue. A Note from William Rubel I am so proud to be able to introduce to you Stone Soup’s Science and Science Fiction themed September issue. As always, to download the full issue and to read all of the contents you have to be a subscriber. Single copies of the print issue can be ordered from our online store. This issue marks the first anniversary of Editor Emma Wood’s first year with Stone Soup, and a continuation of the program of special themed issues that she initiated with her first issue last September, which was poetry. A huge thank you to Emma! The art in this issue is particularly fine. Emma commissioned illustrations for this issue, to complement our Science Fiction contest winners’ work. I’m going to write more about Emma, and our staff, and our plans for Stone Soup this school year in next week’s Newsletter. But, for today, I’d like to keep the focus of the Newsletter on this extraordinary September science issue. ‘Parker’, by Kate Duplantis, is the cover illustration. Look at the detail! This is classic science fiction in visual form. Real science—precise observation of nature—underpins the animal and plant forms. The bark on the trees is at once believably bark-like and exotic. The bird is clearly a bird—but not one living on earth today. Is it a throwback to the age of the dinosaurs, a future mutation, or something real as yet undiscovered? A real tour de force! This is what Emma wrote to introduce the issue: I’m thrilled to finally share the winners of our Science Fiction Contest with you, in this special Science Issue of the magazine. Each story is inventive, strange, suspenseful, and “scientific” in its own way. “Middlenames,” the winning story, imagines a society that assigns you a middle name—which determines your identity for life—at birth. “Young Eyes” explores the dangers of technology, while “Mystical Creatures of Blue Spout Bay” and “Sunk” take on the environment. This issue also features nonfiction writing on scientific topics—from the solar eclipse to organ transplants—as well as three poems that engage with scientific topics and ways of thinking. I hope this issue serves as a reminder that writing and literature don’t happen in vacuum; they aren’t separate from other subjects like algebra, physics, or biology. As you read, I want you to think about your largest, nonliterary passion. How can you engage it in your own writing? As always, send the results of your experiment to Stone Soup! This issue really challenges the boundaries we place on writing. Our own labels of fiction, science fiction, literature, science writing, etc. are conveniences. They are ways of packaging writing. And, of course, when you sit down with a book or a magazine article it is good to know that what you are reading is fiction or nonfiction, as that helps determine how you think about what you are reading. On the other hand, lots of great fiction writing and lots of great nonfiction writing cross genres. For example, while one of the most famous American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), is clearly a work of fiction about the hunt for a whale, large portions of the book are pure non-fiction. The inspiring French naturalist, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was a great scientist. And even more wonderfully, he was a great writer. Fabre wrote brilliant science about insects, and his texts are often woven through with personal observations. He uses descriptive language that is so elegant, eloquent, evocative, and beautiful that whole pages can transport you into the realm of poetry. And so, when you pick up Emma’s challenge to engage your largest non-literary passion in your writing, I encourage you to think outside the box; think outside the literary categories that you know about. You can write a novel that is also a work on marine science, or describe an ant colony in a way that fully draws us into that world. If you are someone for whom algebra opens up a beautiful world, then Emma is asking you how you might incorporate that algebraic way of seeing into something more literary, and in doing so help the rest of us who cannot see it to understand it and discover something new. So, pick up a pen and start writing! For many of us, the act of writing itself gets ideas flowing. Until next week Contests, submissions, and more There are two weeks left to submit material for two of our current calls for submissions. Recipes for our food issue, and entries for our concrete poetry contest should both be with us by September 15th. As ever, use the Submit button to send your work to us. Next week we will be telling you more about a brand new competition that we have been working on with MacKenzie Press: the Secret Kids contest. For this contest, we are looking for book-length work, and the prizes in several age categories include publication of your own book! Entries are due in January 2019, so you have time to polish your longer form entries. Look out for our more detailed email all about this contest, coming soon. Highlights from the past week online Visit the Stone Soup blog for thought leadership, reviews and more from our young bloggers, all age 13 and younger. There is new material throughout the week, every week. If you have something to say that you think our readers would be interested in, then please submit a sample blog entry. Don’t miss our young blogger and leader in our refugee campaign Sabrina Guo’s latest blog post. This week, Sabrina shares a summary and her reflections on a talk by Tara Abraham, Executive Director of Glamor Magazine’s The Girl Project, “Reflections on the Syrian Refugee Crisis.” Our sports blogger Leo T. Smith makes his predictions for the new NBA season. What do you think

Ken carefully picked up the fledgling in his palms, taking care not to cause it any more pain Illustrator Keysun Mokhtarzadeh, 12, for ‘The Forgotten Fort’ by Andrew Lee, 13. Published January/February 2009. A note from William Rubel Whew! What a week! I flew to London on Monday, arrived on Tuesday, and with my Stone Soup colleague, Jane Levi, went the next morning went to see a friend of ours who is a book collector. He collects early books on gardening—books from the 1500s to the 1800s. His wife collects early British detective fiction. Do any of you have book collections? Have you ever thought about making a specialized library of your own focusing on books of one subject? If you have a book collection and would like to tell others about it, write something up and submit it to the blog section of our online submission form. If you still remember, tell us about the first book you bought, which of your books mean the most to you, and what plans you have for your collection. The first book I recall buying is a Bible from 1771. It is a big old book. Several of the people who owned it before me signed it on a blank page at the front of the book. When I read it I am always aware that I am just the current person in a long chain of owners going back over two hundred years who have sat down with it. From our our book collector friend’s house, Jane and I went to Oxford where I had been invited to give a talk about the history of bread and where Jane and I were asked to present something on our project in Kenya that I have mentioned in a previous newsletter. We stayed at Christchurch college. This means, we ate breakfast in the hall used to film the meals for the Harry Potter movies. Yes, it’s true! We ate breakfast at Hogwarts and walked up the stairway where Dumbledore greeted Harry and the other students when they first came to the school! Those of you who are fans of Philip Pullman’s books, as I am, will also one day want to come to Oxford to be in the place where Lyra begins her adventures. Jordan College is an invention but is closely modeled on walled colleges, like Christchurch. In the evening, in the early morning hours, and in the fields that still exist within the Oxford City limits you can get a real feel for how an author takes a busy modern place and finds within it inspiration for a fantasy story of unparalleled depth. December Food Issue! I wrote about this last week—the deadline for the December food issue is coming up in a couple of weeks. What I want to say to those of you who have not yet started on this, is that it is both a writing and a cooking project. Yes, we are interested in recipes for foods you love, but to get the recipes published in the Stone Soup December issue there has to be a well written introduction. In cookbook language, the introduction to recipes is called the “headnote.” Last year, when I first put out the call for recipes I mentioned how I used to make a gingerbread house with my mother every December. We did that from when I was in elementary school through high school and even into my first year of college, just before she died. I have published a gingerbread recipe along with this very personal story of why it meant so much to me in a book called Celebrations. You can also read other personal and creative stories about recipes—the headnotes—in last December’s issue of Stone Soup. Other foods I remember cooking… Bread. When I was eleven my mother gave me a beautiful two-volume cookbook. One volume was about the history of American food and the other volume was recipes. I was very interested in the headnote for the recipe for Anadama bread. I made that bread, loved it, and was hooked. I have been making bread since I was eleven and for the last fifteen years researching and writing about bread is what I’ve done virtually every day. I write articles about bread, I write books about bread. And this interest really started when I was your age. From that same American Heritage Cookbook there is a recipe for eggnog. It is a very rich eggnog—eggs, of course, cream, and lots of alcohol for the adults. I started making the eggnog for my family’s holiday party when I was eleven or twelve. The headnote is a story. It can be a story about the dish you are making: why you like it; when you make it; what it reminds you of. Sometimes, cookbook authors also use headnotes to help people with a tricky part of a recipe. For example, if it has an ingredient that may not be easy to find, you might suggest an alternative in the headnote. Recipes for Stone Soup must have three elements: the headnote, the list of ingredients, and the instructions. The list of ingredients and instructions fall into the genre of technical writing. Your work for Stone Soup is also judged on the clarity of that technical writing. The way I test recipes (and the quality of my technical writing) is to get someone else to make the recipe just from reading what I wrote. If you get moving on this project this week you ought to have time to get a friend to test your recipe (and of course we will test it that way, too!). To write the technical part—the part about mixing the ingredients together—I want you to take notes as you are cooking. Then, when you work up the notes into a more final text, please visualize your hands—what are they doing? What are the steps? “Take a bowl, break two eggs into it, mix with a whisk, then…” The more you explain the gestures of cooking—like, “when mixed, set