Saturday Newsletter: April 30, 2022

A note from William

What a week! So much good news! Stone Soup received a $25,000 gift for curriculum development, our site license beta testing program launched, and our Amazon store is now up and running.

To begin. One million trillion gazillion thanks to Morgan Stanley, the Andreason Group at Morgan Stanley for a donation of $25,000 for developing curriculum that will be free to all users. This is a game changing donation. With this donation we intend to create the go-to portal for K-12 creative writing programs.

Central to our business plan, a solid curriculum platform supports the Stone Soup website for teachers and home schoolers.

We need your help! If you would like to help us develop curriculum for teachers and students, please write to me at education@stonesoup.com. I see developing Stone Soup curriculum as a community project.

Site License Beta Testing Program
Launched!  We are giving away 1 year school site license subscriptions ($250 value) to teachers who agree to look over what we have, test it out, and give us feedback through phone calls, emails, and at least one Zoom meeting. We will use our new curriculum development budget to make the Stone Soup website function as the ideal support for creative writing programs.

Amazon Store
The amazing Chrisy Lo of PVT Creative Solutions has created an Amazon Stone Soup store. You can now go to Amazon to buy single copies of Stone Soup, novels and poetry collections, our anthologies, and our journals and sketchbooks. Being straightforward about how things work in 2022, we were down to a choice. Stop selling books and single issues of Stone Soup or use Amazon. Using Amazon radically simplifies the process of publishing books and it means better service, as well. Please check out our store, and when appropriate, give Stone Soup books as presents!

Weekend Project
I am sitting in my garden writing this Newsletter on a lovely spring afternoon. As soon as I finish, I will garden. More specifically, I will be building simple trellises and other types of supports for vines. Why? Because I am writing an article about garden vines for the magazine, Mother Earth News. Thus, a real pleasure for me to thinking about this lovely photograph, Hanging Vines by Anna Weinberg.

Anna's photograph rewards study. Let your gaze relax into it. I want you to notice the way in which Anna framed the branches. Notice the horizontal branch near the top of the photograph and then the flowering branches that drop down from that. This photograph has a strong geometrical focus. On an important level, one can say that Anna's photograph is "about" lines, angles, and the shapes that they create.

Moving back from the photograph, I am drawn to the three vertical splashes of color -- splashes of white --AND the three window-like spaces framed by the branches. Part of the art of photography is framing your picture to create interesting visual patterns.

This weekend, I'd like you to work with framing. I'd like you to find something with a strong geometrical structure. This can be something you find in nature, as Anna found patterns in this plant, but it can also be something in your house -- furniture, a patterned floor.  I want you to think about how the geometry of what you are looking at -- squares, circles, arcs -- whatever it is -- creates interesting patterns when you look at them through your camera.

This project is about framing. I want you to to move around whatever it is that has attracted your eye taking pictures at different angles and different distances. Make it obvious to the viewer what geometric shapes you are focused on. As always, if you make something you really like, then please submit it to Stone Soup via the pink button, below.

Until next time,