First Place “No Longer Blue” by Olivia Park, 12 Second Place “The Dreamer” by Claire Nagle, 12 Third Place “A Splash of Water” by Tara Prakash, 12 Honorable Mentions “Back in the Days” by Gemma Yin, 11 “Lilith’s Quest” by Sabrina Guo, 13 Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who participated; we and our partners at By Kids For Kids – Story Time Podcast loved working together, and we had fun reading your stories and thinking about how they would translate into an audio drama. In the process of judging this contest we realized that what works for the podcast and what works for Stone Soup Magazine are not quite the same thing. The guidelines we wrote focused on writing stories that would work for a dramatized telling on the podcast. We have learned that stories written that way do not fit with the work we publish in Stone Soup Magazine. For this reason, we have decided to publish the three stories we most admired on the website instead. AV Entertainment will be working over the coming weeks to make our winning story, “No Longer Blue,” into a Podcast episode, and we will prepare the top three placed stories for publication on our website. One of our Honorable Mentions, “Lilith’s Quest,” will also be recorded. We will add the relevant links as soon as the editing is done. Meanwhile, all our entrants will receive their other prizes, including year-long subscriptions for the top two, and copies of The Stone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories for all those placed. Congratulations everyone!
Contests
Spring 2019 Contest: Writing for a Podcast
Write a story, and have it recorded and broadcast as a podcast episode Stone Soup has partnered with AV Education, a South African nonprofit organization that produces By Kids For Kids – Story Time Podcast, a podcast series featuring children’s stories performed by kids as audio dramas. Until now, the stories they have recorded have been classic tales written by adults for children. Now, we are working together to give voice to new stories written by the young writers of today! We are looking for original short stories, between 500-1,000 words long, by kids aged 13 and under. Our theme is climate change. Your mission as writers is to deliver your message in an accessible, fun style: the material that works best for the Story Time podcast tends to be fantasy, magical, or fairytale. The winning stories will feature a strong narrative, and plenty of direct speech (but remember, we are looking for a story, not a drama script). The top prize is to have your story turned into a podcast episode, performed by the Story Time cast of 1 lead narrator and up to 4 character actors. It is a serious topic, but we are looking for stories that are fun, with a sense of drama, and some scope for silliness in the podcast performance. Contest Details Topic: Climate change or other environmental issue. Length: 500 – 1,000 words. Deadline: April 15, 2019 11:59 p.m. (Pacific time). Submission: via the Stone Soup Submittable portal, in the specific Contest category. Results: We will select three winners, plus runners up. Prizes: The winners will receive the following prizes: First place – your story made into an episode of Story Time podcast, and published in an issue of Stone Soup, plus a one-year digital subscription to Stone Soup and a copy of theStone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories. Second place – your story published in an issue of Stone Soup, plus a one-year digital subscription to Stone Soupand a copy of theStone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories. Third place – your story published in an issue of Stone Soupand a copy of theStone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories. Commendations – up to three runners up will receive a copy of the Stone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories. Publication: We will consider all stories submitted as part of the contest for potential publication, and as potential future stories for podcasting. Further information and advice Our best advice to all entrants is to listen to some past episodes of the podcast, to get a feel for the style that works for performance. Remember: Your story should have a narrator, with liberal use of direct speech, but it should not be an audio drama script! Podcast episodes are performed by 1 lead narrator with up to 4 character actors, so think about how many voices you are writing into your story. It’s always more fun to perform (and to listen) when there is a strong story, and perhaps some exaggeration. We value silliness! Even in the most serious of stories, just to lighten it up. Although message is important, the story must come first! There’s no point in having an important message if the story is weak. Your story will be adapted for dramatized performance, and the best dramas follow a structure. Ideally your story should have: Exposition: set the scene – who, what, where, etc. Protagonist vs Antagonist? Problem: an obstacle, problem or task that needs to be overcome. Climax: rising tension leads to tackling the problem. Denouement: tie up the loose ends, what happens in the end.
Congratulations to our 2018 Concrete Poetry Contest winners!
First Place ($50) “Steam” by Sabrina Guo, 12 Second Place ($25) “Moonlight” by Ashley Xu, 13 Third Place ($10) “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.
