An update from our ninth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday June 12, plus some of the output published below We began this week’s workshop with an excerpt from the first two paragraphs of Colm Tóibín’s novel, The Master, in order to highlight how dreams are an essential function in writing used to tell us, or, rather, to foreshadow elements of character and or plot. We went on to distinguish the logic of dreams from the logic of reality, noting, in particular, how within art and literature dreams can be used to introduce a sense of unreality, reveal a character’s fantasies or inner desires, show how characters are haunted by past events, foreshadow future events, create a mood, create symbols, represent a theme, or show how real life is influenced by dreams. We then looked at a few representations of dreams/visions in art (Moses at the burning bush, Moses looking at the top of Mount Sinai, Ezekiel’s vision of a strange winged being in the heavens, and Ezekiel’s vision of bones reconstructing themselves in the desert) in order to demonstrate the full spectrum of feelings dreams can convey. Next, we close read two paintings according to their representation of dream logic—Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy and Fuseli’s The Nightmare—noting how the former portrayed a more neutral, poetic vision, while the latter portrayed the potential for darkness and horror in dreams. Finally, after our discussion of these paintings, we moved into the realm of literature with a reading of two Mark Strand poems—”Clear in the September Light” and “Eating Poetry”—and James Tate’s poem “The Cowboy.” The Participants: Madeline, Svitra, Aditi, Liam, Harine, Sena, Sasha, Emi, Isolde, Audrey, Simran, Helen, Zhilin, Josh, Julia, Lucy The Challenge: Write the opening to a longer story that begins with a character dreaming. Isolde Knowles, 9New York, NY Dream Isolde Knowles, 9 I walk around the strange world. The people of it all have different reactions to my existence. Some notice me, some just continue on. The people here are blurred and foggy. They are graying and any color they barely have is muted. As if they are on the verge of disappearing. I keep on going. Until I find someone different. Their colors are bright. When they notice me their colors change. Their skin goes bright yellow, their hair is now a startling purple and their eyes are pink. Suddenly they pivot and run through a shortcut which I will swear on my life hadn’t been there before. I start to jog and then run towards the shortcut. I am a foot away when the shortcut closes up, turning into a solid wall. I groan in defeat until I notice an alleyway. I follow it, and suddenly I’m chasing the strange person again. The terrain seems to be evolving to help the runner by creating paths and ramps for them, but only hurdles and hills for me. I run and run until I fall down panting as the runner disappears. I wake up in a cold sweat. Sena Pollock, 14,Madison, WI The Worst Rehearsal Sena Pollock, 14 I am in the dark and the dark likes me. I have forgotten the song for the talent show, so I make up my own. It goes like this: “I am in love with a squid, I will live in the sky, I have flowery eyes.” I will sing this and they will love my act. I shove the dark away and sing: “I am in love with a shark, I will live underground, I have a candy bar in my pocket.” I don’t pay attention when the dark comes even closer. “I am a stiiingraaaay, I will drive a plane, I will kill the rain.” Wait, this is a happy song, no killing. “I am a fist- no, no fists either, I am a fish in the lake, I like to eat cake, a rabbit I will bake- no, none of that, think happy!!! I am eating pie, I will surely die- WHAT IN THE WORLD IS WRONG WITH MEEEEE!!!!!!! Why can’t I think of anything happy?!?” I look and the dark is hugging me like a long-lost friend. The dark says, “Come with me and I will give you everything.” I say, “NO! I will sing in the talent show and win and they will all love me.” “Your life is empty without me,” says the dark, “You need me.” “What’s in it for you?” “We will have fun together,” says the dark, “we will have the most fun and your life will be complete! I know that you do not believe what they say. And you are right, their praise is hollow. Come with me and have a real life.” “What do you mean!!! My life IS real!! I AM happy!” I say, trying to convince myself as much as the dark. “You are lying to yourself,” says the dark and I know that it can see my innermost thoughts. “All right,” I say, feeling at the moment that this is what I truly want. The dark shouts with glee as we fly off a cliff I hadn’t noticed before. “CRASH AND BURN!!!!” The dark screams as we fly into an unknown future. Svitra Rajkumar, 13,(Fremont, CA) In Another Dream Svitra Rajkumar, 13 Rose was running. Although she didn’t know what she was running from and where she was going, she just couldn’t stop running. Her heart pounded like it was going to burst out of her chest. She bent down gasping for breath and trying to make sense of her surroundings. Her brain was working slower than usual and her head felt dizzy from all the continuous running. She stared up at the bright blue sky. It was an unreal blue, like the color of the ocean except burnt. The ground beneath her began to crack and split apart, and soon she was falling. Rose felt as if she had been falling for hours but the scream couldn’t make it
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: June 19, 2021
“Untitled” (acrylic)By Halil (Syria), created with the support of the Inside-Outside Project and published in Stone Soup June 2021. Artist description of the piece (translated from Arabic): There is something hiding behind the painting. There is a ghost behind it. It is the ghost of someone. (Who?) (No answer to that.) It is not me (says the artist); it is another girl who is afraid. The ghost frightens people, but it does not hurt them. (What does the girl in the picture say?) The girl (in the picture) says the ghost came to her. (What does the girl say to you about the ghost?) She told me so we can help her. A note from Conner World Refugee Day and the Stone Soup Refugee Project June 20 is World Refugee Day, a day of observance to raise awareness about the plight of refugees and to demonstrate a commitment that the world’s forcibly displaced people are not left behind. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are approximately 70 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes, 25.9 million of whom have official refugee status. Over half of the world’s refugee population is under eighteen years of age. So often, media portrays refugee children as the subject of a narrative. We at Stone Soup are committed to providing a platform for refugee children to use their voice to tell their own stories. The Stone Soup Refugee Project, in collaboration with seven organizations and refugee camps, has collected close to 200 pieces of creative work, including paintings, photography, poetry, and plays, from children living in refugee camps and host countries around the world. These children have fled their homes in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi, Tanzania, and Thailand, among other places. They have been resettled in countries including Australia, the United States, Turkey, and Greece. Refugee camps represented in our submissions thus far include Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan; Umphiem Refugee Camp in Thailand; and Vasilika, Ristsona, and Moria Refugee Camps in Greece. We are excited to announce that these works are currently on display and will soon be free and publicly accessible in our newly created Refugee Project website, which you can explore here. A Little About Myself I received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have just finished up my PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and accepted a tenure-track professorship of creative writing at Albright College in Pennsylvania. I’ve been teaching some of the Stone Soup Writing Workshops since April, where I’ve had the pleasure to interact and write with some of you. This summer I will also be offering a class on playwriting via the Society of Young Inklings. Weekend Project This week, I want to showcase Rainer Pasca’s strange and beautiful poems—poems that call our attention to the processes and mechanisms of attention itself. Here I focus on Rainer’s poem “Rumi on the Table.” Like many great poems, “Rumi on the Table” tells the story of its own inception—the moment the poet aims to possess that which possesses the poet. It presents the act of poetic creation as its subject matter. The poem, therefore, teaches us how to see and think like poets. 1. I’m thinking of nothing. My head is empty like a garbage can. The poem reminds me of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man,” which tells us to have “a mind of winter”—a blank mind—to see the world anew. Rainer takes up this injunction: “My head is an empty garbage can.” Of course, the key word is “empty”—free of metaphorical trash: assumptions, preconceptions, and prejudices. A mind of winter, thinking of nothing, is a poet’s mind: ready to see the world as it is. 2. Hey, look. Rumi is on the table. Rumi, why don’t we make a poem? When the poet’s mind is empty, seeing becomes an act of collaboration. To perceive is to perceive with. In these lines, the poet sees Rumi (a cat and a famous mystical poet) and asks to see as Rumi sees. 3. He’s purring! Awww, he is purring the poem. I love you, Rumi. You’re the king of gold. Rainer and Rumi make a poem together. The poem is a collaboration. In the final couplet, the poem becomes a celebration, an ode, a song, a love poem. This week, I suggest that you write collaboratively. Try to write a poem or story with someone or something else. Go out into the world and write with a “mind of winter,” “thinking of nothing.” What will you hear? What will you see? Until next time, 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 June Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #156, provided by sagacious ’20—21 Intern Sage Millen, challenging participants to interview a grandparent/older friend about a memorable moment from their childhood and to write that memory as a first person story. This clever prompt afforded those who participated with the opportunity to get closer to the elderly than ever before, allowing them to literally inhabit the perspective of their interviewee. These submissions followed no similar narrative arc, though each and every one did provide a unique window into various cultures of the past. Submissions ranged from tales of a smoking car radiator stuffed with gum to a mishap with homemade firecrackers in Taiwan to a poetic vignette about a car crash, plus much, much more. Thank you to all who submitted this month; it was a pleasure to read your work. 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 “4 Blocks” by Katherine Bergsieker, 13, (Denver, CO) “Nature’s Lullaby” by Mariana Del Rio, 12, (Strongsville, OH) “Still Life in Which Everything is on Fire” by Arishka Jha, 12, (Redwood City, CA) “A Love that Lasts a Lifetime” by Pranjoli Sadhukha, 11, (Newark, OH) “Rocket Trouble”
Book Club Activity: Making Our Own Anthology
At our most recent Book Club meeting on May 29, the Stone Soup Book Club read Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, by Jason Reynolds (you can read about the meeting here). As a writing activity, we decided it would be fun to make our own Look Both Ways, an anthology by our participants about what happens to people on their walk home from school. Each of our participants wrote their own stories, and then several of them submitted their writing to be published in an “anthology” format, right here. Below you can read some of the writing from this Book Club. Some of the stories are based on real life, and others are fictional. Enjoy! Jared Ashman, 14San Diego, CA 1. Untitled – Jordan and Jared Ashman, 14 Jordan was your average 12 year old kid. He walked home from school alone each day, and got home to play video games and eat candy. One day, after a particularly tiring day at school, he decided he wanted to take a shortcut home from school. Before, his mother had warned him about taking this shortcut, for she said it could be dangerous. However, Jordan was particularly tired today, and ignored his mother’s warning. He started walking into the forest, and after only a few steps, he found himself lost in the forest. Was he supposed to turn left, or right? There was barely even any light here. After almost an hour, he discovered a thin path of pebbles that he decided to follow. At the very end of the path, he discovered a temple! After pausing for a moment to take it all in, he walked inside. When Jordan walked inside, he found a deep tunnel going down to what he could only imagine was a secret layer. Walking down, he heard weird sounds inside. Coming to the bottom of the tunnel, he paused to stare in awe at the massive gate that hadn’t been there before. Walking in, he saw a massive monitor with arrows pointing all over… was that the world? He barely had a chance to register what he saw, before he was hit on the head by something from behind. He woke up in his bed, and realised it must have all been a dream. Or so he thought… Anya Geist, 14Worcester, MA 2. Apricot Street – Anya Geist, 14 I walk quickly down Main Street, joining the crowd of kids rushing toward the buses. Main Street’s not an actual street; it’s a hallway in my school (and it smells like a subway station), but because it’s a pretty big hallway, everyone calls it Main Street. Outside, the roar of the buses, all lined up in a row, threatens to drown out the joyful laughter and yells of high schoolers out of school for the day. I find my way over to my friend Lily, standing with a boy on our bus, Owen. “Is the bus here yet?” Lily shakes her head. “Nope. I walked all up and down the line with Sara.” “Again? Really?” Lately bus 51 has been coming later and later. I think our driver is kind of senile. “At least we didn’t miss it,” Owen says, half-jokingly; a few weeks ago the bus left me and him at school and the assistant principal had to give us a ride home. “That’s true,” I laugh, “but still.” Eventually the bus does arrive, though, and we load onto it. There’s not a ton of kids, because of COVID, so it’s pretty quiet as it barrels down Apricot Street, where our school is located. In middle school my bus took a different route, one that went up Goddard Memorial and Airport Hill, then through the traffic jam that is Tatnuck Square. I liked that route. I liked when the bus drove past the airport; on clear days, you could see Boston from up there (or at least that’s what Liam Forester said; I never saw it myself). But now we go down Main Street (a real street this time), alongside the rest of the buses from school, until they each break off to drive their respective routes. I think it’s pretty funny how all of the buses drive together at first; it’s like a big, yellow army, slowly separating to carry out different missions. My bus’s mission has only a few stops. Owen’s is the first. “I wonder what happened with your neighbor,” I ask him when the bus is pretty close to his corner. This morning he came to school saying the police were looking for his neighbor; it was all he could talk about in first period. “Yeah . . .” he says, “I wonder if all the cop cars are still there. No kidding, it was scary when they showed up this morning, just knocking on the door, asking if we’d the guy a few doors down. I bet he did something pretty bad, though. It wouldn’t surprise me.” “Well,” I tell him, as the bus pulls to a stop, “let me know what happens.” “Yeah, I will. Bye!” The bus shakes as he and a few others get off. Coes Pond flies by as the bus navigates the city, and the rows of grey seats slowly empty, till it’s just me and Lily, talking about our classes. “Where’s your class in Romeo and Juliet?” I ask. Our English teacher is making us read it. “Act 3, I think.” “Okay. Okay. George and Jonathan” (they’re two best friends in my class) “read the balcony scene the other day—they insisted on it.” I’m laughing now. “But Jonathan couldn’t stop cracking up, so he totally ruined it. He also pronounced Capulet wrong, it was hilarious—everyone in our class was trying so hard not to laugh.” “No, really?” “Yeah, he said, like, Capultet, or something. It was so funny.” “That’s great.” Now the bus is wheeling through Newton Square, down Pleasant Street, where Berry Fusion is located—a frozen yogurt place all the kids in
