Welcome to the Stone Soup Honor Roll! We receive hundreds of submissions every month by kids from around the world. Unfortunately, we can’t publish all the great work we receive. So we created the Stone Soup Honor Roll. We commend all of these talented writers and artists and encourage them to keep creating. – The Editors Scroll down to see all the names (alphabetical by section), including book reviewers and artists. ART Shiloh David, 4 Angelica C. Gary, 10 Eva Humphris, 12 Sela Milgrom-Dorfman, 11 Ainsley Rhoton, 13 PERSONAL NARRATIVES Edward Antwi, 12 Matthew Fic, 12 Eleanor Moy, 11 Tyler Oberdorf, 12 Deniz Ozsirkinti, 11 Ramona Weinstein, 11 POETRY Tarun Chava, 13 Priscilla Chow, 7 Hava Goldfinger, 8 Penn Kerhoulas, 7 Jaya Khurana, 10 Iris Kindseth, 10 Georgia Marshall, 12 Madeline Smith, 8 Kalyani Spieckerman, 12 STORIES Filzah Affan, 6 Sol Chung, 9 Aashi Gupta, 10 Carolina Henderson, 10 Sofia Huntley, 6 Olivia Hush, 12 Sophia Li, 10 Samuel Liang, 6 Alma Mendez, 12 Mia Shazeer, 8 Andrea Shi, 13 David Yu, 11
October 2021
Highlights from Stonesoup.com
From the Stone Soup Blog Book Review: How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees Brais Macknik-Conde, 11Brooklyn NY How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants by David Rees, is a gold mine for anyone wishing to sharpen a pencil. David Rees is a celebrated cartoonist, television host, writer, and artist. From listing the essential supplies for pencil sharpening (at a reasonable $1,000!) to describing the anatomy of a pencil, to explaining how to preserve a freshly sharpened tip, this manual has it all. This truly is the ultimate guide to pencil sharpening. Rees’s guide walks the reader through different sharpening styles and how they may apply to different styles of people and professions. One of my favorite sections describes how to sharpen a pencil with a pocketknife. For example, he recommends producing a steep-angled pencil tip for people with heavy hands, as this will make it harder to break the tip off. He also advises exposing a lot of the graphite in pencils for artists, as this will make for a light sketch that can be easily erased. Rees’s love of manual pencil sharpening is only surpassed by his hatred of electric pencil sharpening and mechanical pencils. Here is one hint: Rees’s feelings about electric pencil sharpeners involve the use of mallets. Without giving away all of this guide’s secrets, I must mention Rees’s most prized pencil-sharpening possession: an El Casco M430-CN. Created by a company that once made firearms, this double-burr hand-cranked machine, Rees declares, is the best pencil sharpener on Earth. I enjoyed reading Rees’s tongue-in-check manual not just for its jokes and wisecracks, but also for its factual information, and even its lifestyle recommendations. By reading this book, I have learned the proper hand-stretching exercises to do before long pencil-sharpening sessions, that a correctly sharpened pencil is an object of beauty, and that mechanical pencils make for good firewood. This book is where I will always look to for pencil-sharpening guidance and inspiration, and it is where you should too. About the Stone Soup Flash Contests On the Stone Soup Blog, we publish original work—writing, art, book reviews, multimedia projects, and more—by young people. You can read more posts by young bloggers, and find out more about submitting a blog post, here: https://stonesoup.com/stone-soup-blog/.
Nothing
Nothing, a void, a thing you can’t just put in an empty vase. Nothing, not a thing, you can’t lock it in a case. You can’t say it is, and once you embrace, it becomes something, and is just empty space. Nothing, not tangible, just a void without a face. Nothing, a place that isn’t here. Nothing, changing our lives, yet not ever there. A blank screen, outer space, even in the air. It seems to appear everywhere. It causes great despair. Nothing is the place you get to at nowhere. Maybe, just maybe, it can be we’re unaware, unaware of the greatness that ensnares the darkness of the fact that nothing’s there. It helps us when we need to think, or if we’re surrounded in a county fair. Appearing at its best, it can help us pass a test, or live through a war. Nothing, at its purest, is extremely rare. When we’re working, we are very aware of every single sound that is emitted through the air. Jake Sun, 9Winchester, MA Anna Weinberg, 11Washington, DC
