An update from our twenty-sixth Book Club meeting! On April 24, in the first meeting of our new session, the Stone Soup Book Club discussed Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin. In the book, a girl named Minli embarks on an adventure filled with mythical creatures and interwoven stories to find the Old Man in the Moon and change her family’s fortune. After coming up with a few “ground rules” for our new session to make sure…
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Writing Workshop #30: the Literary Vignette
An update from our thirtieth Writing Workshop! A summary of the workshop held on Saturday December 12, plus some of the output published below This week William presented on the idea of the vignette: a focused piece of writing, often in the midst of another longer, piece, but that is somewhat outside time or narrative. A vignette adds color or shape, but doesn’t necessarily move the story forward. After an introduction on the meaning of words (contrasting Humpty Dumpty declaring…
Saturday Newsletter: December 5, 2020
Cracks and Fissures by Sage Millen, 12 (Vancouver, Canada) Published in Stone Soup December 2020 A note from Jane It’s always a good week when a new issue of Stone Soup comes out, and there is so much great work in the December issue—all 48 pages of it! One of the things I love about the story we are featuring from the December issue this week is its title, “The Serenity of the Simple Inquiry.” It perfectly describes the perspective of the…
Balancing My Nerves and a Bike
My mom used to like telling people about how she was in labor with me for over 36 hours. She would laugh and say that I was so comfortably curled up inside that I didn’t feel like coming out, and when I was finally forced to come out (two weeks late), I stretched out my arms and legs like a starfish all the way down. Physical activity was just not my thing. It never was, not since I was born….
The Lost Girl, Reviewed by Pragnya, 12
The Lost Girl is the kind of book you’d want to write but thought you wouldn’t do well enough. Luckily, we have Anne Ursu who skilfully spins us a thoughtful, emotion-provoking yet engaging tale. The Lost Girl by Anne Ursu is a weirdly beautiful Magical Realism novel about Iris and Lark Maguire, twins who are identical but not alike, with completely different personalities, sort of like relatable alter egos. Lark is the dreamy, imaginable, shy character and Iris, the solid,…
Book Club Report: The War I Finally Won, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
An update from our twentieth Book Club meeting! Last Saturday, September 26, was the Stone Soup Book Club’s first Book Club meeting at its new meeting time: 9am PST on Saturdays. The Book Club ran for around an half-and-a-half and was attended by thirty participants from across the US, as well as in the UK. The book we discussed was The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, which is the sequel to our previous read, The War that…
Summon the Mammal
With the ability to summon any mammal, I was safe. So, my adventure started in the Mystic Woods. That was a warm, breezy day when the soil opened in a fold and I fell in. When I landed on some concrete, the unnatural purple color told me straightaway where I was—Professor Haunter’s course. He traps his victims and puts them, well, basically in a death course. Anyway, the room’s only light in this room was a ghostly mauve. Do I…
Gratitude
Third place in the Fall 2019 Personal Narrative Contest with the Society of Young Inklings. A summer in rural China teaches the narrator not to take her life for granted This summer, I was in the Liangshan mountains in rural Sichuan, China, for camp. At first, it seemed like an ordinary place, but those ten days taught me what gratitude is. Liangshan is a historically poor county. Isolated by mountains, it was the last place in China to banish slavery….
Book Club Report: Harbor Me, by Jacqueline Woodson
An update from our fourteenth and fifteenth Book Club meetings! Over the past two weeks, the Stone Soup Book Club has been reading Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson. The story is about six children in Brooklyn, NY, who end up talking to each other in the old art room without any adult supervision (they end up calling the room the “ARTT Room” (A Room to Talk)). The kids–Haley, Holly, Estaban, Amari, Tiago, and Ashton–become friends as the year goes on,…
Saturday Newsletter: July 18, 2020
A Wish for a Brighter Tomorrow (IbisPaint on IPad)By Chloe Mancini, 9 A note from Jane Book Contest countdown has commenced! We can’t wait to receive your manuscripts, and we’re sure many of you are taking this part of the summer to work hard on your books—maybe revising, adding some finishing touches, or even adding a whole new section or group of poems. The deadline is midnight PDT on Monday, August 10. Happy writing! One of the things that has brightened up…
