PROLOGUE

The Stone Soup Philosophy — The Power of Peer-to-Peer Learning

It was 1973. I was a student. It was with this group of students—Gerry Mandel, Ziggy Render, and Richard Hoff—that I created the Stone Soup Literary Project. After more than fifty years, I am still here. And believing more than ever that the best way to encourage young people to use writing as a means of real self-expression is to treat them like adults.

I was nineteen when I began working on the idea of a children’s literary project that is entirely written and illustrated by children. I was not a child. I was, let’s say, a youth. I stopped being an artist in sixth grade when the teacher laughed at my painting of the full-bloom cherry trees circling the Jefferson Memorial, in Washington, DC. The painting meant a lot to me. My family had just returned to Los Angeles from Washington where my father had been in the government. I vowed never to make art again. A promise I kept until college, just about the time I thought of creating Stone Soup.

I don’t recall when I began writing. My father, a rare typing male executive, encouraged me to take typing in seventh grade. I’ve been a strong typist ever since. It was good advice. My bedroom and my parents’ bedroom were on opposite sides of a hallway. In high school, for sure, but I think in middle school also, my mother would tell me that she thought of my typing as the “typing ghost.” It was comforting to her.

Some days, now in my seventies, I write ten hours a day.

One of the critical ideas that helped me imagine a literary project based on young writers creating literature for each other was my realizing that as a college student the writing I was reading was the writing of my peers: adults. This was the early 1970s! Ideas were flowing. It has turned out that it is true. Young writers thrive on the writing of their peers.

Which brings us to standards. Not just any writing. Of course not. Literary writing by their peers.

This has turned out to be proven true. The students read work by their peers that has been selected for its strong literary quality—writing that is both accurate—it says what the author means and means what the author says—and expressive.

The Stone Soup Way is writing that tells us about the world through the author’s authentic vision. And that telling, mostly through fiction, is told beautifully. Expressively. Memorably.

William Rubel