Bicycle, Elevated (Canon EOS Rebel T7) by Joey Vasaturo, 12; published in Stone Soup January 2023 A note from Emma Wood Hello all, I can still remember the first story my daughter, Margot, told: “Once upon a time, Sawyer [her brother] went to sleep.” That was back in June and now, at two years and nine months old, her stories have grown increasingly complex. Last night, she was telling me an incredible tale about a bunny-frog who couldn’t find its way home and ran into an abominable snowman. After a few exploits involving a mountain, a cave, Rudolph (the reindeer), and a chandelier, they went home together and had tea. Watching her learn how to use language has been thrilling and inspiring in the same way that reading submissions for Stone Soup is thrilling and inspiring: she, and all children in the Stone Soup age range, often use language in totally novel and original ways. Sometimes it’s unintentional—a kind of “happy accident”—but other times it is more than that: she is trying to make a metaphor or simile. “What does it smell like?” I asked her the other day about a cookie she held up to her nose: “It smells like chocolate pancakes!” She’s never eaten chocolate pancakes: she made them up. She reminds me every day that children don’t have to try to be creative and totally original—that creativity and originality are intrinsic to childhood. As I take the helm of Stone Soup, I have been reflecting on our mission. I see what we do at Stone Soup as valuable in so many ways: we affirm and cultivate that natural creativity of childhood. But we also do so much more: we give children a voice and a platform; we encourage them to read and to write, which in turn fosters critical thinking and deep feeling; through the magazine or our books, we offer an opportunity to slow down, to turn off the devices, and practice true focus. As I work on updating our mission statement, I would love to hear from you: What makes Stone Soup valuable to you and your family? Write to me at emma@stonesoup.com or join us at our Donor Meeting on January 14 at 10 a.m. PT. I can’t wait to hear from you. New year, new term! We are happy to announce the continuation of our virtual classes for the Winter 2023 term beginning January 21st, 2023! They will run weekly through March 25th. We are additionally thrilled to once again present Isidore Bethel’s filmmaking workshop and are incredibly grateful for his continued partnership with Stone Soup. Also on offer is Conner’s popular writing workshop! For the year of 2023, we plan to alternate Conner’s and William’s workshops to consolidate and boost enrollment. If you were looking forward to William’s class, check back in the spring and try out a course with Conner or Isidore in the meantime! Introduction to Short-Form Filmmaking with Isidore Bethel, meets at 9 a.m. Pacific Time every Saturday. Isidore is an award-winning filmmaker who will guide students through the process of making their own film. Discussing and writing about other filmmakers and their work will complement the students’ own filmmaking journeys. Sign up here for Short-Form Filmmaking. Conner’s Group: At 11 a.m. Pacific Time every week, Conner Basset will teach his writing workshop focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of writing. Conner teaches English at Albright College and has experience instructing younger writers. He is a poet and translator in addition to being a brilliant teacher. Sign up here for Conner’s workshop. From Stone Soup December 2022… The Story of the Puddle and the Frog By Ava Shorten, 12 There was once a river. For years, this river had flowed gently all the way from the top of a great mountain down into a forest, where it joined up with tributaries and eventually ran into the sea. Until, that is, it stopped. The river had been blocked up with sticks and stones at the place where it ran out of the forest and into the sea. No matter how much the poor river tried, it could not trickle in or around this blockage. The river began to dry up. The sun became high in the sky, until at last the river was nothing but a puddle in the shade of a large willow tree. The puddle was within sight of the ocean, and every day he yearned to reach it, and yet he couldn’t. One warm summer’s evening, a young frog hopped up to the puddle and began to splash around. The puddle spoke to him. “Have you ever been to the sea?” he asked the frog. The frog looked around in surprise, and then realized it was the puddle speaking. “Yes,” replied the frog. “Many times. Have you?” “Once I was there every day,” said the puddle mournfully. “Until my river was blocked, and I dried up to the size of a puddle. Tell me of it,” he begged. “I long every day to be able to flow into its wonderful coolness, and yet I can’t.” Read more… Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Illuminae, Reviewed by Nova, 11
Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is the first book of a young adult series titled The Illuminae Files. The story is set in the year 2575 and most of it takes place in space. The two main characters are Kady Grant and Ezra Mason. Kady, a seventeen-year-old girl with dyed pink hair, who is also a secret hacker, is aboard the spaceship Hypatia. Ezra, who is Kady’s ex-boyfriend, is also seventeen, enjoys playing a sport called geeball, and travels on the spaceship Alexander. The reason that Kady and Ezra are on two spaceships is that a corporation called BeiTech attacked their planet, Kerenza IV. Another important character is AIDAN, an AI (artificial intelligence) who runs the Alexander. The story takes off when refugees from a ship called Copernicus, who are infected with a manmade virus created by BeiTech, try to board the Alexander. This virus was designed to attack the part of the brain that controls fear, and to make the infected people very scared. But because the virus has mutated, people who get sick turn into psychopathic murderers. To make things even worse, AIDAN, the AI, has also gone insane. Releasing the infected refugees into the Alexander and watching the ensuing bloodshed, AIDAN thinks, “Am I not merciful?” Kady and Ezra switch places as first-person narrators for most of the story, in more-or-less alternating chapters called files. Occasionally, a file is inserted from a random character’s point of view. Later, AIDAN’s perspective comes to replace Ezra’s—for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling a major plot point. One thing that makes Illuminae different from most other books I have read is the formatting, which is both unique and beautiful. When AIDAN comes under attack and begins to glitch, this is shown in an ingenious fashion by random capital letters appearing in AIDAN’s sentences. Curse words are blacked out. Text is interpolated with diagrams, lists, hand-written annotations, and all sorts of schematics. Just by removing my hardcover’s dust jacket, I found so many easter eggs and hidden surprises underneath. Even though Illuminae is a horror sci-fi story, there is quite a bit of humor too, even in the serious parts. At one point, when Ezra sends a drunken text to Kady, it sounds like a drunken teen, complete with horrible punctuation, grammar, and capitalization. I also liked that when Ezra texts his friend James, it seems like a conversation between two immature teens. The characters’ personalities are rich and varied. Some people are silly, some are loving, and AIDAN specifically is sophisticated and poetic, even in its thoughts: “If I breathed, I would sigh. I would scream. I would cry.” This particular phrase appears twice in the book, two “chapters” apart. The second time I read it, it gave me chills. Reading Illuminae I had the strange sense of watching an AI gain human emotions when it used to have none, and develop empathy without being reprogrammed. I was glued to the story, but I felt I was a bit young for the gory parts and graphic descriptions of murder. I would recommend this book for readers thirteen and up. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Ember, 2017. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Weekly Creativity #236: Write an Alternative History Story
Write an alternative history story.
