Write a story where the character fails at everything and ultimately doesn’t succeed at the end.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: April 2, 2022
Music Lover (Acrylic) By Selene Wong, 11 (Champaign, IL), published in Stone Soup April 2022 A note from Caleb Hello and happy April! Here in California we are hoping for April showers, though the May flowers would just be a bonus! We are now a week removed from our last writing workshop of the winter session and officially looking ahead to our spring session of classes, beginning April 23rd. For more information on spring session sign-ups, scroll down to the classes and events section. In the meantime, please visit our Youtube channel and watch some of the terrific individual readings and playlists from the winter session, like Emma’s from the Stone Soup workshop on Automatic Writing, below. To kick off April, I want to provide a brief analysis of Music Lover by Selene Wong, the April issue’s delightful cover image. Simply speaking, this painting is fun. The colors are vibrant, the subject is whimsical, and the slanted perspective of the piece highlights its jazzy, musical feel. The painting sets the tone for all of the issue’s prose, poetry, and art, but perhaps for none better than Sevi Ann Stahl’s rip-roaring poem “Roo’s Song.” Reading the poem, and now sitting down to write about it, my mind is racing—like Roo, the poem’s subject—with excitement. The poem’s first line “The fur blurr enough slow to know it’s her”—indeed the poem itself—is resemblant of the ecstatic energy of Lewis Carroll. Sevi could have easily opted for the grammatically correct “blurry” and gone on to write a good, maybe even great poem, but instead she takes a risk and elevates her poem to a masterpiece. To begin, “blurr” is in and of itself playful—it is literally the effect of playing with language. “Blurr” also rhymes with its preceding word, “fur,” as well as the final word of the line, “her,” the effect of which is a whirlwind of rhyme that further connotes playfulness. Then, on top of creating an unusual rhyme structure, the chopped off syllable of “y” allows for a bounding rhythm to enter the poem. But what is truly brilliant is that all of of these complex formal choices work together to enact the simple content of the poem: a happy dog running through its neighborhood. I could go on about other delectable phrases in this poem, like “underbrush / or meadow of our yard,” or “wishing of being a car,” and attempt to contain their bursting energy long enough to analyze them, but to do so would take away from the poem’s brilliance. Noiseless pleasure? No, this poem is so good, so coursing with the youthful juice of life that I want to “sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” so that strangers may know the pleasure of “Roo’s Song” by Sevi Ann Stahl. For this weekend project I want you to do two things. First and foremost, I want you to enjoy yourselves. Be free! Run wild! Enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds you. But, whatever you do, if you can, try and do it with a near reckless abandon; that is, do whatever it is you’re doing for the sake of doing it, rather than as a means to an end. (In this case, try and forget that it’s a part of the weekend project!) Then, when the weekend and the fun is over, try and recapture what you did and the feelings that came with it through a painting, a poem, a work of prose—anything! Loudly from the rooftops of the world, Contest News Fourth Annual Book Contest Every year we recognize the top novel or poetry collection submitted to this contest. The first prize is for your book to be published by Stone Soup. Books by previous winners like Abhi Sukhdial, Tristan Hui, and Anya Geist, have garnered important national recognition. The deadline is Sunday, August 21, 2022 at midnight in your time zone. There is a $15 filing fee. The winning book will be published in September, 2023. To submit to this contest, please visit our Submittable page. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! In a work of ekphrasis, Ella, 14, wrote a hauntingly beautiful story based on Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Check out Anirudh Parthasarathy’s in-depth review/essay entitled “The Relevance of Fahrenheit 451!” Classes & Events Workshops Join us this spring as we are once again offering two writing classes—William Rubel’s, Saturdays at 9 AM Pacific, and Conner Bassett’s, Saturdays at 11 AM Pacific—as well as Book Club with Maya Mahony Saturday April 30 and Saturday May 28 at 9 AM Pacific. We’re sorry not to offer a short form filmmaking class with Isidore Bethel this go-round, but hope to once again offer it in the future. In the meantime, please watch some of the amazing short films our students made in the fall session of 2020. You will find details of all our classes at our website, and booking and further information via Eventbrite. Young Inklings Studio Summer Camps Please register for the Young Author’s Studio Summer Camps offered by the Society of Young Inklings! A few members of the Stone Soup team—Book Club Facilitator Maya Mahony, Refugee Project Coordinator Laura Moran, and Caleb Berg—are all offering classes. Maya’s class on Identity and Imagination takes place July 25-28 at 1-3 pm pacific time, Laura’s class on the Anthropology of the Everyday on June 13-16 at 9 am pacific, and Caleb’s class on Literature in Miniature on June 27-30 at 9 am pacific. More classes will go live as we get closer to summer, so make sure to look out for updates! From the Stone Soup Blog April 2022 Roo’s Song By Sevi Ann Stahl, 10 (Bend, OR) The fur blurr enough slow to know it’s her that a foot or maybe a wild ear she turns the corner ripping sod, leaving a heap to run through as she comes leaping through the underbrush or meadow of our yard making sounds of happiness and wishing of being a car to vroom down those highways of pavement, tail spinning, she turns the next corner leaping, becoming a bird for one fleeting moment before landing with a plop on the ground as she skids to a stop finally over with her own song,
The Relevance of Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 has never been more relevant than it is today. The parlor walls that Ray Bradbury envisioned in his iconic story are similar to the large wall-mounted TV screens with continuous streaming content available for binge-watching. Video games have become immersive with Oculus and Metaverse. Many people (especially children) are addicted to video games, and some play them for a living. City planning often bolsters car culture, with the assumption that everyone has a car, which, majoritively, they do. People either rush to shops in cars through freeways to make good time or order in through Amazon, Instacart, and/or Doordash. A pedestrian walking to a grocery store is a rare sight indeed! As more and more books are made into movies, people prefer to consume the movie version rather than read the same book, which requires a lot more work and time. Movies lack richness, detail, and the nuances of a book, and there’s less power of imagination involved when everything is shown exactly as it is. Beatty summarizes this well when he says “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume” (26). In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury demonstrates how mindless consumption of entertainment over the pure joy and fulfillment of reading and existing as one with nature leads to addiction to technology. Through the striking contrast between Clarisse and Mildred, Bradbury exemplifies the difference between a book-lover aware of the world around her and an addict whose life revolves around technology. Mildred is always in bed, looking at her parlor wall, believing actors—who neither know nor care about her—to be her family. Montag, Milred’s husband, walks home and despite the presence of his wife he finds the room empty. He expects to find “his wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty” (5). This excerpt shows there’s no true connection between them, romantic or otherwise. It also shows that Mildred seeks gratification in cheap, superficial, unhealthy ways, and does not seem to be truly happy. When Mildred overdoses on sleeping tablets, it’s such a common problem that they don’t even need a doctor for it. The handymen say, “We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built. With the optical lens, of course, that was new; the rest is ancient. You don’t need an M.D., case like this; all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour” (6). This indicates people are deeply unhappy in this society. Mildred also says, “Books aren’t people, my family is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh. And the colors!” (34). She seems to find television more tangible than books. It’s almost as if she believes that people on television have a personal connection to her and are her family. When Montag asks her, “Does your `family’ love you, love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?” (36), she’s unable to answer. She doesn’t want to acknowledge that the cast neither knows nor cares about her, and she’d rather remain in denial. Clarisse, on the other hand, has a deep personal connection with nature, books, and people. She admits she rarely watches the parlor walls. Instead, Clarisse likes to “smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise” (3). And for this, she is sent to a psychiatrist, because it’s not considered normal. She even admits that her uncle was once arrested “for being a pedestrian” (4), and once “jailed for two days” (3) for driving slowly on the highway to observe the scene around him. Clarisse loves being outside and being one with nature. She likes enjoying the small things that no one else pays attention to, like “walking in the center of the sidewalk with her head up and the few drops falling on her face” (9). “Rain even tastes good,” she says (9). In this book, Clarisse is a breath of fresh air compared to the jaded Mildred. Bradbury uses the universal concept of book burning, which has always been a constant across multiple authoritarian regimes, because books foster independent thought—the dictator’s bane, and the seed of a democratic system. Therefore, burning books is how dictators enforce conformity. There have been instances of book burnings in China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany, where the authoritarian regimes carried out large scale purges of authors, intellectuals, and teachers. Countless books and the ideas they contained have been destroyed. Closer to home, in the United States, book burnings were planned during the McCarthy era, when there was a red scare. Beatty explains the dictator’s perspective, and how this might have a populist basis when he says, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it” (28). He says books create inequality because it makes some people seem smarter than others. If everyone can’t be intellectuals, then no one should be, thereby forcibly removing diversity. Beatty also says, “You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred” (29). So, according to him, if people are upset with a book, then burn it, thereby removing all freedom of expression, forcing everyone to conform. Bradbury imagines how life would be
