from Remember the Flowers Winner (Poetry) of the 2021 Stone Soup Book Contest Come play with me, Oppa. It rained yesterday, you know. The rain left fields of three-leaf clovers. We kneeled in the damp, weed-blanketed grass. In the forest of clovers there was a clearing. We built a house of twigs there, a stone path winding through the forest up to the empty well of sticks. Fleeting The day after that the gardeners came, their boots trodding on our masterpiece. They weeded and mowed, picked and pruned, crushing our town with rubber daggers. When we returned to the fields, it rained no more. The forest of clovers was gone. Remember the Flowers was released on September 1, 2022. You can order the book at Barnes & Noble or through our Amazon store: Amazon.com/stonesoup.
September 2022
Editor’s Note
“‘What’s the point of always wanting to do something more? It’s all going to disappear when we die, anyway. Why can’t I just be happy as I am?’” asks Simon, the main character in Phoebe Donovan’s story “Delay.” Simon is an adult, but he doesn’t (much to his mother’s chagrin) have a career or a family; he is single and makes sandwiches at a deli. But he has friends, he’s part of a community, and he feels fulfilled in his life—and for him, that’s enough. As someone who has always had trouble being “happy as I am,” I needed to read those words—and I’m sure I’m not the only one who does. And as a writer, I admire Simon as a character; he is three dimensional, fully developed—I feel like I could bump into him at the grocery store. For any of you attempting to write characters, I encourage you to read Phoebe’s story and to pay particular attention to the way she builds the characters of Simon and his mother. I have learned from her, and you will too! I hope you enjoy all the rich characters and sentences and stories in this issue!
The Pear
Acrylic
