“A Tangled World” By Elodie Weinzierl, 11 (Waban, MA), published in Stone Soup October 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, Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our October Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #172 (provided by Molly Torinus, Stone Soup contributor), which asked participants to perform the meta task of writing about somebody writing a story. The result was a wave of submissions unlike we have ever seen, making the selection process this month even more difficult. We read stories that anthropomorphized bananas, that projected protagonists’ lives far into the future, that literally wrote out entire stories within stories, and much, much more. In the end, we wound up with five winners and five honorable mentions whose fantastic and distinct work gives shape to a bright and promising future! As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! Congratulations to our Winners and Honorable Mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this contest (and previous ones) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “With Great Power…” by Jack Liu, 13 (Livingston, NJ) “Words” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “Myrtle and Sage” by Pranjoli Sadhukha, 11 (Newark, OH) “Rejection Miracle” by Alexandra Steyn, 12 (Greenwich, CT) “Coffee Mates” by Emily Tang, 12 (Winterville, NC) Honorable Mentions “Crumpled Papers” by Anushka Dhar, 12 (Hillsborough, NJ) “Charlotte’s Unusual Story” by Hannah Francis, 11 (Stanford, CA) “Writer’s Block” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 10 (Brooklyn, NY) “It Should Bother You” by Violet Solana Perez, 13 (Scarsborough, ON, Canada) “Behind the Counter” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers on our blog! Vivaan, 12, wrote a riveting review of Lois Lowry’s classic, Newbery Award-winning novel The Giver. Sita, 12, wrote a comprehensive review of the renowned TV series Community, which ran from 2009 to 2015. Ismini, 12, reviewed Ginger Johnson’s brand new novel The Other Side of Luck. From Stone Soup October 2021 Oak By Graham Terbeek, 10 (Towson, MD) My name is Oak. And if you didn’t already guess, I am a tree. I’ve heard rumors of trees that grow delicious fruit, Of trees that bloom exotic flowers, Or even trees that are so tall that it seems they can see the whole world. It must be nice having a purpose. I don’t have anything special about me. Just your typical, everyday tree. I live in the backyard of a small house. People rarely go in and out. I keep to myself. I don’t mind, really. I’m used to being alone. Years ago, I wasn’t
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #17: The Body
An update from our seventeenth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday October 16, plus some of the output published below This week we pivoted to discussing more concrete individual themes—in this case “the body” in four distinct forms: the monstrous body, the transformed body, the body in pain, and the body in motion. We began with the monstrous body, looking at various depictions—Paul Rubens’ Medusa, Joos Van Crassbeack’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Prometheus—of its form in art. We found that depictions of the monstrous body were often exaggerated as in the main subject of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a giant’s head. Next, we discussed the transformed body, as depicted in artistic portrayals of the myths of Apollo and Daphne, as well as that of Narcissus and Echo. Then, we discussed the body in pain, as brilliantly shown in Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica, which in turn inspired Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. From additional examples ranging from Tumor a la Muerte by Goya to Frida Kahlo’s Without Hope, we discerned that the body in pain is often distorted, twisted. Finally, we discussed the body in motion, with Magritte’s The Blank Signature and Gertrude Stein’s prose poems—”A Long Dress” and “A Blue Coat”—serving as the primary examples. The Challenge: Write a story/poem about the body. Focus more on what happens to/inside the body than what happens around the body. The Participants: Simran, Alice, Sinan, Emma, Lina, Olivia, Audrey, Ellie, Ethan, Josh, Shilla, Svitra, Emma Hoff, 9(Bronx, NY) Stories Emma Hoff, 9 The dark, we are celebrating everything, we are stretching and writhing and becoming. People dot their i’s with hearts but we do not work this way. We are standing tall and speaking, saying, “we walk the Earth right with you, and if you do not appreciate colors, appreciate us.” We can make your life hell. We tell you hello, but what we really want to say is goodbye, we would like to fly away, we could own bat wings but we have no allowance. We scratch ourselves, and you scratch yourself, we have forgotten to reach out of your mouth, your ear, and sprayed mosquito repellent on us. This is how you began to believe that mosquito repellent doesn’t work. We tell you stories and we dance to our voices. We tell ourselves stories, we touched the world, and the world touched us back. The rest of the story goes onIt needs courage to build a school ! to explain how we will dominate, take over. I tell this story with such rich description. I am vivid in my movements, just like you. Svitra Rajkumar, 13(Fremont, CA) Window Cleaning Svitra Rajkumar, 13 Where is the building? It’s so tall, it shouldn’t be that hard to find I looked up to see a tall apartment looking down at me. They can’t be serious I wanted a job quickly, but they wouldn’t give a new cleaner something this tough, right? A grumpy looking man sat inside the building. He had an untended beard, and looked as if he hadn’t had his morning coffee. Or maybe he had too many. “Here, start immediately, you can have a break in an hour-thirty,” he commanded in a gruff voice. He turned his eyes back to the glowing screen, which was making strange sounds. I glanced out of the corner of my eye to see he was playing a video game. Ugh. He expects me to clean a fifty foot tall apartment while he plays games? “Well what are you waiting for?” He grumbled. Sheesh! I walked outside to find a tiny spray bottle and a cleaning rag. This is all they give me to clean all these windows? If I wasn’t getting paid I wouldn’t have come. The spray reeked of a lemony clean scent, and the rag wouldn’t last five minutes in the sweltering heat. I could die out here from dehydration. People working on the great wall of China died due to the heat. No one would come looking at the top of the building to find me. Much less the grumpy, video game guy. I started to climb the metal ladder, which felt slippery against my sweaty hands. I reached the first window. And started spraying the lemon cleaner. I wiped the rag furiously, trying to complete the job quicker. It didn’t matter anyways; there were around thirty more windows left. For such a big building, why didn’t they hire someone more experienced? They’re probably cheapskates.
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #15: Veering
An update from our fifteenth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday October 2, plus some of the output published below For today’s Writing Workshop, Conner decided to tweak an old lecture on veering and give it a new spin. To begin, Conner had us choose an object—any object—from the room we were in to write about later. The core concept with which we began the workshop was that “veering” should be seen as a break in the pattern, as any sort of change in direction, a thing we understood to be aesthetically pleasing. To enforce this concept of veering, we looked at a few examples, the first of which being the “I am your father” plot twist from Star Wars and the second being Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. We also looked at examples of narrative veering in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Harry Potter, and The Sword and the Stone. Then, for an example in visual art, we looked at Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. From there, we reinforced the idea that “veering” represents the moment in which a story or poem breaks its most characteristic habit through a reading of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets whose final line completely changed its trajectory. We also looked at the poem “I Know a Man” by Robert Creeley, two haikus by Basho, and examples from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The Challenge: Write a poem or story that veers off its intended path. Change direction. Change your mind. And use the object that you chose at the beginning of class. The Participants: Clara, Josh, Emma, Lina, Ellie, Simran, Ethan, Alice, Audrey, Shilla, Olivia, Nova, Svitra Emma Hoff, 9(Bronx, NY) Or Rather, the Shape Emma Hoff, 9 Or rather, it was the shape that interested me the most, spin like a top, no, trap it, the base is on the other side. You must understand, dear reader, that there was something that curved (that curved!) in unnatural ways. The black was only a shield, a protector of the young and old, the little. The big were never protected. They had feet. We look inside and we wonder, how do we eat out of this? How do we put food in this and stain it and put it in the dishwasher and torture it, when it was truly meant to be held, not breaking the shield, but held nonetheless, and the patterns and colors make you want to touch cool. I think it is rather beautiful. You touch, you are hot, and it makes a sound. Ring is the sound. But this does not interest me. There is something else that interests me. Or rather, the shape. Ethan Zhang, 9 (McLean, VA) Two Poems Ethan Zhang, 9 The Sound of the Wind I was holding it, An ocarina, An ancient Chinese Instrument. Suddenly It was gone Vanished Replaced magically With a French Horn. Unreal Unrealistic Yet I believed the magic Until The waking Sound of the wind. A Rosy Carpet Outside my window A rosy carpet hovered. It was unreal Absurd And even insane Was what I told Myself. Yet I was convinced It was anything But a fantasy. Carefully I stepped on it Into the misty clouds I rose. The wind brushed my face And I flew, high, high Up and over The steely house The buzzing town
