Forest Creature (collage) by Eva Stoitchkova, 11 (Ontario, Canada), featured on the cover of the March 2018 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Tayleigh Ciao for now! We are taking a vacation from our weekly newsletter for the month of August. Don’t worry—we’ll be back in September with a brand new (and better than ever) format. In the meantime, be sure to check out book reviews, writing, and art on the Stone Soup blog. And remember that the deadline for the annual Stone Soup book contest is August 16th. We will select two winning manuscripts—one in fiction and one in poetry—to be published and distributed by Stone Soup in both print and ebook forms, available for sale on Amazon, in the Stone Soup store, via our distributors, and advertised along with the rest of our books. This is a contest you don’t want to miss. So, good luck, and happy writing! Selfie Contest Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. For more information on how and what to submit, please visit our Submittable form. Weekend (August) Project Now, I’d like to draw your attention to Eva’s breathtaking collage, Forest Creature. As collages do, this piece creates an image, in this case a raptor, out of something else. But what distinguishes Eva’s piece from the standard collage, and what I admire most about it, is the fact that she has used clippings of a forest, the bird’s habitat, in order to create its form. Moreover, Eva has made the white space work for her, allowing the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps of the image. In this sense, Eva has managed to enhance the relationship between viewer and art, allowing the two to work together, not unlike the forest and the raptor. All in all, what we have is a work of genius whose primary concept works on multiple levels. Rainer’s poem, “Rainer’s Mind,” is similar to the collage in content and form. To start, both works feature a forest as the setting, and a bird as subject. And, in both works, a bird is born from the fecund combination of forest and mind. The key difference, however, is that in Rainer’s poem, the mind consumes its creation, a metaphor for its endless capacity to entertain itself. But the brutal action of the poem calls into question this cannibalistic ability. The poem’s speaker appears cognizant of this brutality (“I didn’t even say hello”), yet helpless to change it (“I just walked home”). In short, Rainer’s poem builds off of Eva’s collage, posing questions about the mind’s tendency to create beauty for its own consumption—questions well worth considering. Taking all of this into account, I would like you to spend the month of August meditating on why it is that you create art. Then, I want you to choose a magazine—maybe an issue of Stone Soup—and either make a collage that utilizes white space to fill in the gaps of its image, or write an erasure poem by blacking out selected chunks of text. Until next month, Book Contest 2021 For information on submitting to the Stone Soup Book Contest 2021, please click here. To submit your manuscript, please visit our submittable site. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Young Blogger Mason Li wrote about his experience running a triathlon! New blogger Anirudh Parthasarathy wrote about why he finds Bobby Kennedy inspiring. April, 13, reviewed Alexandra Bracken’s new novel Lore. Daniel, 12, reviewed S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders. From Stone Soup June 2021 Rainer’s Mind By Rainer Pasca, 14 (Bay Shore, NY) I was in a forest with nothing but my mind. It opened a little bit— lifted its mouth like a shark. Suddenly, a bird. Snap, said my mind. Delicious! I didn’t even say hello. I just walked home. …Read more from the June Issue of Stone Soup, including more of Rainer’s poems 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’s Advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Selfie Contest 2021: With and Without Masks
Winners will be featured on the blog! Open to kids age 14 and younger Free to enter Parental permission required Submit up to four selfies: two with a mask and two without Deadline: Monday, October 3, 2021 Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. Since the term “selfie” was first coined in 2002, and since its addition to the OED in 2013 as “word of the year,” seemingly all possible variations have been exhausted, leaving little room for selfie innovation—it’s up to you to prove this assumption wrong. As has always been the case, we want these selfies to tell us a story. Think about how masks can both aid and make more difficult the expression of thoughts and feelings. How can you show us who you are behind the mask, and how can you build off of that image once the mask disappears, or vice versa? Because the inclusion of two photos offers a unique opportunity to play with progression, we want to see you use this to your advantage. How might the second photo change or build upon the story told by the first? Get creative! Try something you’ve never thought to try before! Surprise us, and, most importantly, surprise yourself! You may submit up to four selfies: two with a mask and two without. Submit via our Submittable account here.
The Outsiders, Reviewed by Daniel, 12
S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders tells the story of a young teenager named Ponyboy, who is a member of the greasers gang, who is ensnared in a battle with the Socs, the richer people in the neighborhood. One day, a group of Socs try to drown Ponyboy, who is a greaser, in a fountain, but his friend Johnny kills one of the Socs, which causes them to run away. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Ponyboy and Johnny are also forced to flee, and they hide out in an abandoned church. It is during this time that a fire starts in the church, and Ponyboy and Johnny go in to rescue the children who are still stuck inside. From this moment in the book forward, things begin to change for Ponyboy. He questions the ideals he has believed for a long time, and it seems that his worldview has changed substantially by the end of the book. At the beginning of the book, Ponyboy believed that all Socs were bad, and that revenge against them was the only option; however, he meets some Socs who show him that’s not true. Many of his friends, including Johnny, had been jumped by Socs before, and they were often very brutal, sometimes even killing greasers. Ponyboy thinks the Socs “jump greasers and wreck houses and throw beer blasts for kicks.” However, one day when Ponyboy is at the theater, he meets a Soc named Sherri Valance (nicknamed Cherry), who tells him that not all Socs are bad. Ponyboy befriends her, and Ponyboy comes to the conclusion that while greasers are more sensitive, Socs are cold, aloof, and the exact opposite. As Cherry puts it, “we don’t feel.” While Ponyboy begins to realize Socs like Cherry exist, his viewpoint gets conflicted when Cherry’s boyfriend Bob nearly drowns him, driving Johnny, who is known to be kind and perhaps a bit shy, to stab Bob, which kills him. This incident lingers in Ponyboy’s head for a while, but it isn’t until the end of the book that he really changes. After Ponyboy encounters another Soc, he begins to reconsider who’s right and who’s not. After Ponyboy returns from the abandoned church with Johnny, Randy Anderson, who is a friend of Bob, pays a visit to him. He tells him that in truth, Bob was actually a nice guy, and that his parents spoiled him too much. This caused Bob to be very angry, annoyed, and perhaps even sad; all he wanted, Randy said, was for his parents to say “no” to him once. He went out of control and was constantly drinking, and that’s partially what caused him to attack Ponyboy. This was different from what Ponyboy had believed; he thought Bob was simply fueled by hatred for the greasers. Cherry tells him a similar story, which changes him even more, since Cherry was the only friend he had that wasn’t a greaser. Although he still shows up at the big fight between the greasers and the Socs, it is clear that he is a changed person by the end of the book. While many of his friends, such as Ponyboy’s own brothers, remain unchanged from the beginning to the end, a small but certain seed of change is planted in Ponyboy, and grows steadily throughout the book. His encounters with Cherry, Randy, and the other Socs changed him, and this is portrayed well by the last couple pages of the book. During this time, Ponyboy’s grades drop substantially, but he gets over this by writing out what’s nagging him the most: the event that started his of conflict morals, Bob’s death. The change in Ponyboy may have been small, but in the end it was enough to make him think things over again. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Puffin Books, 1988. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!