Wooden Sunset by Amelia Driver, 10 (Woodacre, CA), published in the July/August 2021 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Emma Today, I would like to talk about Nora Heiskell’s quietly beautiful and incredibly moving novella, Get Myself a Rocking Chair, which we published in full in our July/August issue. There is so much I love about her novella—from the way she draws inspiration from Norman Blake’s evocative song “Church Street Blues” to her transparent, careful sentences and perfectly paced plot. But what I would like to talk about today is the way Nora has built her characters and their world. Both are so rich and full that as I read, I became convinced that the characters continued to live their lives, and the sun continued to rise and set in their world, even “off stage” (or rather, off-page). It’s that feeling you get when you finish a great TV show or novel—that the characters are still out there and you are simply not getting the privilege of peeking in on their lives anymore. Whenever I have that feeling, I know a world and its people have been carefully, convincingly created. This week, I would like you to carefully read or reread Nora’s novella. As you do, think about this question of the characters and their world: what makes them so convincing? For me, it’s largely a combination of the small, specific details she includes, the unique language each character uses—they all talk in distinct ways—and the way we learn about them through their interactions, rather than through exposition or summary. What makes them real for you? You might also think about one of your favorite novels or shows. What brings the world to life? Finally, I would like you to invent a world and a set of at least three characters in it. Write up descriptions of the place and the people. Be as specific as possible. Then, write a short piece set in that world. Let all the details you invented surface, but don’t force them into the story! See how having this background knowledge (rather than inventing as you go) adds depth to your writing. If you read our submissions FAQ carefully, you will notice that we do not accept novella or book-length submissions during the year. Nora submitted Rocking Chair to our book contest, and we loved it so much, we asked her if we could publish it in the magazine. This could be you! Our book contest is ending soon, and we can’t wait to read your work. And remember, we consider all submissions for potential publication. Until next week, 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. Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our July Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #160—provided by Jane Levi, Stone Soup Director—which challenged participants to choose one proverb from a list of five ( “A stitch in time saves nine,” “The early bird catches the worm,” “A problem shared is a problem halved,” “A leopard cannot change its spots,” and “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”), and write a story in which the opposite was true. As we have come to expect from our brilliant participants, the individuality, creativity, and outright quality of the work was breathtaking. Stories ranged from humorous to serious to heartbreaking, taking us on journeys to the animal kingdom, the times of Greek myth, a college campus, and much, much more! In fact, the breadth of quality apparent in this month’s submissions was so great that we selected two stories—”The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo and “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong—to be published on the blog at a forthcoming date. As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! In particular, we congratulate 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 “Mortal Complex” by Arishka Jha, 12 (Redwood City, CA) “The Early Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 9 (Brooklyn, NY) “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Bitter” by Pranjoli Sadhukha, 11 (Newark, OH) “A Trifle Shared Is… Big Trouble” by Daniel Shorten, 10 (Mallow, ROI) “Weighing Threads” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) Honorable Mentions “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder—or Not!” by Sinan Li, 11 (Allendale, NJ) “All for a Root Beer Latte” by Yutia Li, 12 (Houston, TX) “In Which Later Is Better” by Serena Lin, 10 (Scarsdale, NY) “How the Leopard Changed His Spots (with Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) by Ava Shorten, 11 (Mallow, ROI) “7 Days” by Chloe Yang, 12 (Cranbury, NJ) Chosen for the Stone Soup Blog “The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo, 12 (Los Angeles, CA) “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong, 11 (Oakville, Ontario, CA) Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Margaret, 13, reviewed the 1973 memoir Farewell to Manzanar, written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston about Jeanne’s experiences in the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Aviva, 13, reviewed Blue Balliet’s 2004 mystery novel Chasing Vermeer. Ismini Vasiloglou, our newest regular blogger, wrote an inspirational personal narrative “Reflecting on a Fault.” Calling all 9-14-year-olds to Virtual Summer Camp! It’s not too late to join our summer classes with Young Inklings–we have a few spaces left in all our July classes. Each interactive writing camp runs for two hours per day, Monday through Thursday, with plenty of prompts and activities for you to take away and use outside class, too. Have fun writing and learning with us this month! July 19-22 (Starting this Monday!) – practice creative Food Writing with Jane July 26-29 – learn from two generations who have started journals before in Start Your Own Literary Journal
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Flash Contest #33, July 2021: Choose one proverb from a list of five and write a story in which the opposite is true—our winners and their work
Our July Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #160—provided by Jane Levi, Stone Soup Director—which challenged participants to choose one proverb from a list of five ( “A stitch in time saves nine,” “The early bird catches the worm,” “A problem shared is a problem halved,” “A leopard cannot change its spots,” or “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”), and write a story in which the opposite was true. As we have come to expect from our brilliant participants, the individuality, creativity, and outright quality of the work was breathtaking. Stories ranged from humorous to serious to heartbreaking, taking us on journeys to the animal kingdom, the times of Greek myth, a college campus, and much, much more! In fact, the breadth of quality apparent in this month’s submissions was so great that we selected two stories—”The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo and “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong—to be published on the blog at a forthcoming date. As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! In particular, we congratulate our Winners and our Honorable Mentions, whose work you can appreciate below. Winners “Mortal Complex” by Arishka Jha, 12 (Redwood City, CA) “The Early Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 9 (Brooklyn, NY) “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Bitter” by Pranjoli Sadhukha, 11 (Newark, OH) “A Trifle Shared Is… Big Trouble” by Daniel Shorten, 10 (Mallow, ROI) “Weighing Threads” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) Honorable Mentions “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder—or Not!” by Sinan Li, 11 (Allendale, NJ) “All for a Root Beer Latte” by Yutia Li, 12 (Houston, TX) “In Which Later Is Better” by Serena Lin, 10 (Scarsdale, NY) “How the Leopard Changed His Spots (with Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) by Ava Shorten, 11 (Mallow, ROI) “7 Days” by Chloe Yang, 12 (Cranbury, NJ) Chosen for the Stone Soup Blog “The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo, 12 (Los Angeles, CA) “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong, 11 (Oakville, Ontario, CA) Arishka Jha, 12 (Redwood City, CA) Mortal Complex Arishka Jha, 12 The oldest of us left the town, but we liked to pretend that she was exiled. That it was us, the pulsing insides of our city, who drove her away. She arrived a few winters ago when the air was silvery and translucent for weeks and we were ten. That afternoon, we knelt inside our thicket of branches and saw the black tires of her compact car eat at the road in front of us. No one had moved here in years, and we knew no better than to imagine that anyone who did would be deadly. We didn’t know who the visitor was until she held a match to the ivory fences the next night and we watched them metamorphose until the embers flitted through space, moths to a growing flame. She reminded us of a bird from afar, with fragile sand-coloured wrists, eyes that were more raven than brown, and dark hair that pinwheeled down to her fingertips. She wore a long charcoal coat and iridescent shoes that flooded with sunlight. Up close she was less of a hummingbird and more of a buzzard or hawk, a bird of prey. When we asked, she told us that her name was something strange, Blue or Cyan. We thought it wasn’t a real name at first. If she had lied and said that her name was something more like ours, less pure, maybe we would have feared her presence more. “What’s that blue person doing?” the smallest of us said, forehead pressed to the foggy window. It was unnatural. The fences kept us safe, and we knew that they surrounded us like the walls of a greenhouse so that we could grow poisonous and contagious. “Burning it down, what else?” “There’s a reason we have it. It makes no sense.” It made no sense to the rest of us either, so we asked her why. She said our town was too isolated. Being so removed from the outside world had made us feral and invasive and she would save us. And that no, her name was Indigo. Everyone in our neighborhood used to insist that we weren’t old enough to use matches, but we knew that they were scared, scared that these feral children were like lightning: too unpredictable and charged to last long. *** Two years of nuclear skies and twisted secrets had passed by until Indigo left, and by that time, she was an idol to us. She was silver and astral in a dark, short-lived way, and we had thought she saved us until the last moment. The day before she ran away, we convinced her to take us into the forest. It was a gray place, rife with woven roots, overgrown grass patches, and yew pines. She told us that the natural world was beautiful, a blessing, while we hid underneath a tree behind her and fashioned fish scales and hummingbird bones into necklaces. Hours passed like a battle—victory, violence, and defeat compressed into simple blows. We wondered how those lifeless parts could infuse into one and create a body capable of both destruction and construction, futility and power. She left the next morning, and we took enough solace in the fact that we were the only ones who truly knew who she was before they all worshipped her. After all, her leaving made everything less messy. We used to be second in command, then we became first. Even so, we still felt forsaken. Our town’s lifeblood was history and rewriting it was the ultimate coup de grâce, a checkmate of sorts. We took to it with a scalpel instead of a pen, blanketed our town in dusk and shadow, dreaming ourselves
Reflecting on a Fault, a personal narrative by Ismini Vasiloglou, 12
Ismini Vasiloglou, 12 (Atlanta, GA) Reflecting on a Fault Ismini Vasiloglou, 12 It is always so very effortless to start. Ideas jumble around my head in whirlwinds, forming a cacophony of inspiration and infectious excitement. They fill my mind with a buzzing need I cannot ignore. To pick up a pencil is to breathe, to eat. It is an instinctual, primitive impulse, an irresistible temptation which I dare not resist. To pick up a pencil is to live. Yet things are not quite so simple. I paint an image of perfection, harmonious cooperation between pen and mind that does not last. As sentences form in my head, they struggle to ink into existence. My fingers feel weighty as my mind races past my poor, struggling fingers that can only type so fast. It is the tortoise and the hare, but in this story, the hare never sleeps; he only moves faster and faster until he stops and swerves in another direction. Half-finished stories sigh in silence, abandoned for new ideas. They sit lazily in their Untitled documents, waiting for fragments of a lost dream to return to me. They wait to be shaped and molded and typed on a page into a story worthy of the name. Only I am too afraid to steal the reins from the procrastinating beast which has conquered my world. I watch my characters silently sleep in their half-filled pages, weeping at their unresolved conflicts. I watch my settings sink into despair as they are overrun with my neglectful weeds. This is my fault. I know. Despite my teachers’ and parents’ beliefs, I do understand; my mind is a realm entirely within my reach. I can, technically, finish a story, but I can’t seem to fight my own laziness. This beast, this nemesis, was spawned from my very soul, and it is almost impossible to defeat oneself. Procrastination is a far more powerful enemy than any superhuman storybook villain. I know, I know, there are no excuses; there are no rightful reasons for my actions. Words have given me a chance at wings, but I have taken them too quickly without helping them to fully form. Now all I have is an extra weight on my shoulders as I fall asleep each night. It is not right to say there is a beast or a tortoise and a hare. There is only me. We all have our own self-imposed struggles and this is mine: an inability to finish, to see through long-term projects. And my failures affect others, too: the princess who has yet to escape her ivory tower, the citizens whose dictator’s cruel regime still reigns unchallenged, the captain lost at sea, doomed to never again set foot on land, and all of the other tales I have deserted so quickly that not a word of them was written, not a paragraph or a single page. However, I have come to a simple, comforting conclusion; my progress will not be instantaneous, for I cannot change overnight. I can, however, start small. I can start by finishing this reflection, just one letter, one word, one sentence at a time. This is me. Imperfect, flawed me. But I can grow. I can change—I am still malleable. I can take these wings words have lent me, mend them from their broken, unfinished state, take flight and soar.
