Saturday Newsletter: January 6, 2024

A note from Emma Wood

Happy New Year, all!

Every year, I complain about New Year’s and yet every year, I enjoy the opportunity to reflect on the past year and resolve to be better, in some small ways, in the next.

Every year, I also think about what I can do to improve Stone Soup! As many of you know, like many magazines, Stone Soup has struggled to find its footing in the digital era. This year, the Stone Soup board and I are continuing to work hard, re-examining the budget and exploring partnership opportunities, to ensure that Stone Soup can live on and thrive. We are extremely grateful to all of you who donated in 2023; thank you so much for helping support our mission!

My high school had a weekly, student-run newspaper I was extremely involved in, as a writer and an editor. Over the break, a friend sent me an old article from that paper, reminding me just how incredible it was to feel like we were doing the work of actual journalists, just on a smaller scale. I learned so much from my time there, and it is where I first began to see myself as a writer. For some reason, I had never connected that experience with Stone Soup! But I see now how similar they are—and realizing this makes me feel even more connected to, and passionate about, what we do.

This year, we will continue to run our weekly writing workshops, starting January 27, and we encourage you to sign up for Conner Bassett’s Fiction Writing class, “Six Beginnings, Three Middles, and An End,” while there is still room—we currently have six spaces left! Conner was so blown away by the novels his students wrote in the fall, and is excited to write more fiction with many of you this winter.

Yours from our last day in Las Vegas, where we have been visiting family and friends the past couple of weeks,

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