Saturday Newsletter: January 12, 2019

It’s great!

I know. I am always saying that. But it is always true. You, our Stone Soup writers and artists, are consistently sending us fabulous material. Before saying something more about the issue, I’d like to let you read editor Emma Wood’s introduction.

In January, the days are already getting longer but it doesn’t feel that way! This issue has some short short fiction—the winners of our 2018 contest—to match the season’s short short days, as well as wintry, dark landscapes in both art and poetry.

It also has three longer stories that matched the seasonal mood in a different way; their “darkness” is more metaphorical, but each one still leaves you with a feeling of hope and the presentiment of longer, lighter days ahead.

Here’s to some fireside reading!

The drawing by Marco Lu that you see above, “Tick Tock,” combines the precision of scientific illustration with the imagination of a creative thinker. When I first looked at the drawing I saw a flea in a nautilus’s body. Next, it looked to me like a mechanical creature eating a bug. Now, I understand the image to be that of a single robotic creature. There is so much to look at in Marco’s masterful drawing, so many ideas in it, that I’d like to use it as the inspiration for today’s art project. What strikes me most about the drawing is the flea clock feels so present, so real—so weirdly, naturally alive. At least, that is how it strikes me. I think the real “how” of this drawing is not its accomplished technique. The “how” is in the ideas that Marco brings to life with his pencils. We all have different levels of drawing skill. What is is important to succeed at this project is not that your work is as precise as Marco’s but that your idea is equally well developed. It is the idea of this mechanical flea-like creature with a clock stuck to its side that that gives the work its power. We look forward too seeing what you come up with.

Until next week,

When she is calm, you see more of the gold, flickering. But when she is scared, her pupils are large and black, and you notice more of the green, which is the way she looks before the clock at night—her back arched, her fur raised like small tufts of grass. She stares at the oval shape of the clock as if it is the moon revolving around the earth and the earth around the sun. When the clock sounds on the hour, her ears twitch, but she doesn’t move. She simply resets her eyes, refastening them to the pendulum’s sway.
Unlike my cat, I think this time might have been better spent outside in the fresh air like my mother always wants me to do. But for my cat, no second is wasted; she merely sees and does: when she is hungry, she eats, when she is tired, she sleeps, and when she is frisky, she scratches the furniture, no matter how much we scold her.

When she is happy, she purrs, or she brushes her side against my leg, nudging her head and nose into my wrist when I reach down to pet her as if she is pleading, but for what I am never sure: more food, a toy, my lap? I never know exactly what she wants except that when I am with her, I am warm and calm, certain there is still enough time for everything.

Learn more about Stone Soup's past contests, read the winners' work, and find out about current contests you can enter.