An update from our fifty-sixth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, January 22nd, plus some of the output published below William introduced the workshop participants to the concept of vignettes—a short, descriptive piece of writing that typically describes a character or a scene. Beginning with the concept of vignette photographs, William then went on to give the class examples of poetic vignettes. The class went over poems by Basho, a description from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and a passage by Willa Cather from her novel My Antonia. The Challenge: Write a focused description of a place, person, or scene. The Participants: Ananya, Lena, Liam, Lauren, Yueling, Kate, Alexandra, Peri, Agatha, Anya, Elbert, Rachael, Iago, Shonali, Hani To watch the students’ readings from the class, click here. Peri Gordon, 11Sherman Oaks, CA The Nighttime City Peri Gordon, 12 The streets are nocturnal. The nighttime city stretches on through space and time. The skyscrapers don’t scrape the sky, they illuminate it with dancing lights that only come out when all else is dark. The streams of vehicles flow under the swirling haze of the atmosphere, both unending. The buildings are drenched in colorful blackness, as the car engines sing a lullaby and the world is locked into a dream. Window pane after window pane is encased in frost, street after street is decked with cars. Time is frozen like the windows, time is never-ending like the line of cars, time is completely irrelevant. A second goes by in an hour, an hour goes by in a second as slumber sweeps the clocks into a dreamlike state and time goes wild by doing nothing at all. It’s been midnight for hours.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
How to Live the Life You Dream of Living, a motivational piece by Sabrina, 13
Sabrina Lu, 13 (Ashburn, VA) How to Live the Life You Dream of Living Sabrina Lu, 13 If you would like to live the life you dream of living, please follow the steps below as a guide. However, there are no right or wrong steps in living the life you desire. It is all about you. This list is simply a reference. Be yourself. It’s that simple and that hard. No one knows who you aren’t. No one knows who you are. Only you do. You can be anyone in the world or be yourself. Remember that there is only one of you and nearly eight billion others. Look at the mirror with confidence. Believe you can, and you’ve done the most challenging part of believing that you can and you will. Your journey may not be exactly as you imagine it, but it will be a great accomplishment to take pride in. Look up to others and yourself. You are one of the most extraordinary people on Earth. You have so much potential and can soar so high. You can inspire future generations and change the world for the better. Take care of yourself. Much like a good book, you need to be cared for. It’s perfectly alright to rest still for days at a time. Don’t forget to dust yourself. Let go of past grudges and think ahead to all the great wonders the future has to offer. The longer you hold on to something, the more tiring it will be to hold on to it. Find the little things that bring you joy. Sometimes it is the smallest things that make all the difference. One genetic mutation can create an entirely new species. One microscopic particle can evolve into a life-changing remedy. There are no limits to this list. If you imagine it, the list is endless. The opportunities are endless. You are limitless. You are empowered. Repeat the following steps above as often as you wish, and if you want to see how far you can stretch your wings, try creating your own list and refer to it often. It will always be there for you. No matter how tough life may seem, if you stick with it, you can’t go wrong. Even in the emptiest and darkest of places, there is always light. You just have to find it.
Animal Farm and the Concept of Failed Socialist Utopia
Historians estimate that around twenty million perished under Stalin’s totalitarian socialist regime (Keller). Around 18-45 million died in China’s Great Leap Forward under Mao Zedong’s similarly structured dictatorship (SimpleHistory). Many more perished during his Cultural Revolution (Lowndes). Though similar to fascism in terms of death toll and suffering, communism is somehow interpreted as an egalitarian utopia, which is far from the truth. In Animal Farm, George Orwell presents a fascinating allegory of the rise of the Soviet Union and the dangers of communism. Through a simple fable, Orwell provides a detailed study of how absolute power corrupts and how dictatorships don’t ever work even if they have a populist basis. Any system that puts too much power into the hands of a few people is doomed to fail. Stalin leveraged Marx’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to seize absolute power (Daugherty). Animal Farm’s central idea is that of a failed socialist utopia like the Soviet Union, with egalitarian socialist ideals, corrupted and twisted into something unrecognizable by power-hungry elites. Both Old Major and Karl Marx saw a fundamentally unjust system with flagrant exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoise and challenged the status quo, inciting many revolutions. Karl Marx believed that all of society’s production is carried out by the proletariat, but the bourgeoise steals the fruit of their hard labor and reaps all the benefits, or “for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work” (Marx, 21). Old Major endorses the same beliefs in the relationship between animals and humans, when he says “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself” (Orwell, 4). Karl Marx was against any divisions amongst the proletariat, including classism, nations, or religion, because he believed these differences would be further exploited by the bourgeoise. Old Major’s commandments are similarly structured stating that animals should never have any of the habits of the humans and should always be equal and united. In his speech, Old Major says “No animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal” (Orwell, 5). Both imagined a classless society free of private property, in which everyone received equal shares of the products that labor creates. They saw this as the ultimate and inevitable end result of society. The similarities between Old Major and Karl Marx also spill over to Napoleon and Stalin. While Stalin rose to power through lies, manipulation, and elimination of everyone who stood in his way (starting with Trotsky (Stuart)), Napoleon blazes a similar trail in Animal Farm with Snowball paying the price. Squealer is Napoleon’s mouthpiece, just like how all of the media in the Soviet Union were Stalin’s. Both Napoleon and Stalin controlled the flow of information and relied on propaganda to push their rhetoric, as propaganda is a key component of any authoritarian regime (McGregor). When the pigs stole all the milk and apples on the farm, Squealer justified it to the gullible animals by saying that “Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig” (Orwell, 15). This is a partial truth, as it’s necessary for the well-being of any animal. Though all animals are considered equal, Squealer also says that “We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples” (Orwell, 15). So, Squealer is using propaganda and fear to convince the other animals. Napoleon’s army of dogs is based on the Soviet secret police, who relied on fear to suppress all dissent and to establish a totalitarian regime that controlled every aspect of life in their society (Stuart). Napoleon and Stalin share many similarities, but Animal Farm is not an exact replica of the Soviet Union. Though Stalin collaborated with the capitalists in World War II, similar to how Napoleon makes friends with the farmers in Animal Farm, he never reverted Russia back to a tsardom or abandoned the communist rhetoric, while Napoleon completely strays from everything the ideology of animalism once stood for. The animal farm ends as a total failure because they never manage to build the windmill to industrialize the farm and their living standards never improve, but the Soviet Union rose to being a superpower that challenged the United States for many decades during the Cold War before it finally fell (SimpleHistory2, Stuart). Stalin’s collaboration with the allies was a temporary measure, and he later betrayed them, establishing socialist dictatorships in the territories he seized from Germany (SimpleHistory2). On the other hand, Napoleon colludes with the humans and even invites them to the farm for a game of poker to show his solidarity, causing some friction when “Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously” (Orwell, 60). The animal farm is permanently renamed to its pre-revolutionary name, signaling the abandoning of all founding principles. Napoleon announces in his speech that “the name ‘Animal Farm’ has been abolished. Henceforward the farm is to be known as ‘The Manor Farm’—which is its correct and original name” (Orwell, 59). All commandments are erased except for that of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” George Orwell captures the giddy rise and inevitable corruption of utopian socialist ideals in a way that can be understood by everyone in a cute but gritty allegory. It’s horrifying to see the transformation of what starts out
