A note from William

I’d like to thank Cathy Tu from Shanghai for this month’s striking cover image. It is a sweet world, but it is also melting! As publishers of creative work by thoughtful young people, I think it appropriate today to talk a little about the Swedish youth Greta Thunberg. I am sure that she has inspired many of you to participate in youth school walkouts. I would like to encourage all of you to listen to a few of her talks. She is in the news this week as she attended a big international gathering in Davos, Switzerland. What I want you all to pay attention to is the unusual clarity with which she expresses herself. The ultimate task of all writers is to say what you mean and mean what you say using words that are aligned with your vision. I think Greta’s statements are worth studying for the way she distills complex ideas to their most basic core concepts and then has the discipline to stop. Unlike someone like me, who always talks too much, Greta never wanders. She is always on point.

Your voices in Stone Soup are the voices of artists, poets, storytellers, and playwrights. As with Greta, your voices often speak with a maturity that surprises adults.

I would like to call out one poem and the two plays from the January issue. The poem is Huài shì hǎo shì (“Evil Things, Good Things”) by Sabrina Guo, featured in last week's newsletter. Sabrina is a long-term, repeat contributor to both the magazine and our blogs. This poem about friendship, and much more. Thank you, Sabrina.

Plays! Stone Soup has not published many plays, so we are super lucky that Emma Wood was able to select two fabulous ones for this issue.

Valentine Wulf’s parody of the often frustrating interactions we have over the phone with increasingly automated phone systems is a classic. The play, an excerpt of which is printed below, includes directions for music, so go to YouTube to find the appropriate soundtracks when Valentine tells you to. Parody is a literary genre that requires exaggeration.

Through exaggeration, parody writers arrive at the truth. The dialogue in Valentine’s play is ridiculous, but in its ridiculousness it brings the reader to that same state of utter frustration that occurs on real calls with automated phone systems! Valentine's play so thoroughly and creatively explores the most frustrating aspects of modern phone systems that it should be required reading for phone-system programmers. Funny, clever, insightful. You are all in for a treat!

The other play in the issue is The Illusory Life of Mr. Brite. We included Galen Halasz’s play in our recently published Stone Soup Book of Science Fiction Stories. Order now if you haven’t already. Galen’s play revolves around the idea that computers end up taking advantage of a basic flaw in human behavior: our laziness. “This allowed them to turn people’s laziness against them, trapping them in the exoskeleton and weakening them for life.” Like Valentine, Galen exaggerates to find a truth. In this case, a work of science fiction, Galen extrapolates from behaviors we are all familiar with to ask what would happen if we continue in the direction we seem to be going—relying on computers “for everything.”

Having read Galen’s play, the next time you look up from your tablet and realize that most of a day has passed with you watching a parade of self-loading shows, you will not have the excuse that you were not warned where this could lead.