Saturday Newsletter: May 29 2021

A note from Tayleigh

An Update on Stone Soup’s Refugee Project
We are so excited to announce that the Stone Soup Refugee Project Website is now up and running! The Stone Soup Refugee Project provides a space for children and young people displaced by war, social collapse, and climate change to publish their creative work to share amongst themselves and with the world.

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of the contributing programs and young people who have entrusted us with their writing and artwork and to the generous donors who have made this project possible. To explore our entire collection of creative work by young people living as refugees, please visit the Stone Soup Refugee Project website.

Quarterly Reading on June 6th

Are you registered for our second Quarterly Reading of the year? At this virtual event, we'll have contributors from the April, May, and June 2021 issues of Stone Soup read their work. And, if you're a contributor to one of these issues and you'd like to participate, you can submit your piece or an excerpt from your piece that you'd like to read to this Submittable category. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Sarah at sarah@stonesoup.com.

A Little Bit About Me
Since this is my first newsletter, allow me to introduce myself! My name is Tayleigh, and I handle the customer service side of Stone Soup. I also work as a personal assistant to Stone Soup Founder and Executive Director William Rubel. On my days off from the magazine, I work at a local garden store. I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in December 2020 with a BA in history, with a special focus on Italian history. La mia passione è la storia italiana!

Weekend Project
Returning to the subject of our Refugee Project, I wanted to highlight the striking piece Shoes, which was composed during the “Everyday Objects” Workshop (2017), run by Hands On Art at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. What a stark yet evocative work of art! Many ideas could be read into this image, but what I see is one crisp, white shoe, its form straight, juxtaposed against its own shadow—smaller, crooked, edges blurred. Two sides to the story. What appears on the surface as sharp and clear muddles itself through reproduction, as in a reflection or a shadow. The image asks whether we lose some of the sharpness of our forms, our luster, in our shadows and reflections.

Julia Marcus’s poem, “A Window in the Evening,” sheds some light on these questions. The melancholic speaker of the poem lingers on an image in the window blurred by their own breath, through which they “draw [their] name in the vapor” and “wipe it all away.” I’d like to focus on their breath, the vehicle that drives the blurry reproduction of “every sharp detail of [their] body” reproduced in shadow. Thus, the clarity lost in the speaker’s shadow is their own fault, their breath functioning as a metaphor for doubt brought on by self reflection. This poem, like Shoes, asks whether we lose some of ourselves in shadows and reflections, and answers back with another question, itself a reflection—is it our innermost self, our breath, that causes the loss?

This weekend, I want you to write about someone who functions as their own worst enemy by way of excessive self reflection. In essence, their own obsession with the question of “Who am I?” should be precisely what keeps them from finding out. As always, if you like what you’ve written, please send it to us at Stone Soup for consideration either in the magazine or on the blog.

Till next time,