Saturday Newsletter: October 16, 2021

A note from William

I hope all is well with our extended Stone Soup family. I took my first post-COVID vacation last week. I drove up from Santa Cruz, California to the Mendocino coast, north of San Francisco, to visit a friend I had not seen since October 2019 when we had traveled in Japan together researching the culinary use of that fabulously colorful mushroom, Amanita muscaria. That is the mushroom many of you will know from the mushroom emoji 🍄. I cooked meals on the fireplace, found about thirty pounds of the porcini mushroom in one fabulously lucky hunt, and came home refreshed!

It is my great pleasure today to announce that Stone Soup is collaborating with our summer school partner, Naomi Kinsman, and her staff at Society of Young Inklings to test the waters for selling Stone Soup site licenses to schools. I have not talked much about Stone Soup sales here in the newsletter, but for the last several years they have been dismal. Times changed, and print subscriptions to private homes have largely gone out of fashion. So, with the help of Naomi and her Young Inklings colleagues, we are doing a proper market study of how the online Stone Soup magazine, blog posts, workshop texts, and creativity prompts can be used to teach creative writing in schools. Thank you, Naomi, for your help with this.

There is other good news since I last wrote the newsletter. We have received a sizable COVID-19 relief grant from the state of California—$15,000!—and a truly substantive pledge towards our upcoming Annual Drive by one of our Stone Soup donors, a true angel (though more on that when we launch our 2021 Annual Drive). Taken together, we are now in the best financial position we have been in years, which is fabulous because it means we can start growing Stone Soup again.

Several of us on the Stone Soup staff joined in the virtual awards ceremony at the Green Earth Book Award (GEBA) ceremony on Thursday, October 7, for Abhi Sukhdial’s Three Days till EOC, the novel that won our Long Form fiction contest in 2019. The awards ceremony was the kickoff to a three-day-long EnviroKids Literacy Festival. Our Stone Soup store is down this week as we are reorganizing it, so for now please order Three Days till EOC at Amazon. Abhi’s book was the only winning title by a child.

Elodie Weinzier shows us “A Tangled World” in the complex patterns formed by twisted and arching branches. I really like her photograph. It is actually a kind of photograph that I have taken many times myself as I have personal interest in plants and the shapes they make. Like Elodie, I often see stories in plant shapes. To me, her photograph speaks of energy, of time, of an unfolding life, one that shifts in response to events becoming more interesting, varied, and complex over time.

For today’s project, I’d like you to use your phone's camera to find a pattern in nature that speaks to you. Once you find the pattern that interests you, begin experimenting with framing that image with your camera by moving it around and changing distance and angles as necessary to capture your vision. Take at least ten photographs of each pattern that interests you, and then choose which image of each pattern you like best. Complete the task by deleting the rest. This last step can be difficult, but in the end, as the artist, you need to choose the photograph that most speaks to you.

Until next week,