Write a story as if you can’t see. Describe the characters and their surroundings using every sense other than sight.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: May 8, 2021
“Perspective (Pencil) by Grace Williams, 12 (Katonah, NY), and published in the May 2021 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Sarah Feedback Survey Have you participated in a writing workshop? We’re asking former participants and those who may be interested in attending a workshop in the future to fill out a feedback form, available here, so we can see what has and hasn’t been working. We really appreciate you taking the time to let us know what you think. Weekend Project Did you know that Stone Soup has published a ton of food writing over the years? William and Jane are both experts on food writing, and Jane is even offering a summer camp later this year on the subject! Rubina Davila’s personal narrative from this month’s issue, “The Bakery,” (excerpted below) has elements of food writing woven in, with the descriptions of the pan dulce and soda she buys at an East LA bakery. I particularly like how Rubina includes so many sensory descriptions into her story. These details, like how “the pots and pans clanked loudly” and “the lights shone brightly on the sweet breads,” paint a picture for the reader that allows them to imagine that they too are inside this bakery with Rubina. But more than just describe a scene filled with delicious food, Rubina also ties it all back to her family. She wonders what it was like for her family members who lived in the same neighborhood decades before. So much can change in a neighborhood in a few generations, but how can food tie us all together? My challenge for you this weekend is to write a story about food and family. Rubina’s story “The Bakery” offers a great model to use as inspiration, but feel free to branch off and experiment. Maybe there’s a specific family recipe that you want to write about. Or maybe you want to take a more research-oriented approach, in the vein of Ezra Bernhardt’s blog posts from a year ago, when he dug into the history of foods like pasta and cured meats. There’s so many angles you could choose to approach food! Whichever way you choose to think about it, we encourage you to submit the work you produce to Stone Soup for consideration either in the magazine or on the blog. Until next week, Writing Classes and Book Club Are you looking for classes to inspire, improve, and practice your writing with great teachers and a group of like-minded young writers and readers? Join us! We do charge fees for our clubs and workshops, but we try to keep them as low as possible, and we offer discounts to subscribers and scholarships to students who need them. Contact us at education@stonesoup.com with any questions. Writing Workshop: we have two new writing groups for spring/summer, starting April 17, that will meet via Zoom every Saturday except for the last Saturday of the month. Come write with us and share your work with your peers. Find out more and register for a workshop at Eventbrite. To see some of the great work produced by current workshop members, read contributions published at Stonesoup.com, or join us at one of our free public readings! Book Club: a book club for writers that meets via Zoom on the last Saturday of every month, with a new season starting on April 24! Find out more and register for book club at Eventbrite. Check out which books we are reading on our website. Young Author’s Studio Summer Camps: we are offering a wide range of classes through the summer jointly with the Society of Young Inklings. Each camp runs for two hours per day, Monday through Thursday. All details and bookings via Society of Young Inklings. 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! As part of AAPI Heritage month, Young Blogger Priscilla Chow wrote a personal narrative surrounding her creation of a Chinese lantern for the Chinese Lantern Festival. Young Blogger Daniel Chu wrote a compelling essay on the prejudices faced by women in science. Blogger Sita Welt took the initiative to interview author Kate Milford about her newest book, The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. A transcript of their interview can be found here. From Stone Soup May 2021 The Bakery By Rubina Davila, 13 (Sierra Madre, CA) (Illustrated by Grace Williams, 12 (Katonah, NY)) When I walked into the bakery on Cesar Chavez Avenue in East Los Angeles, my lungs were instantly flooded with the sweet air of butter and sugar wafting from the kitchen while pots and pans clanked and banged loudly and voices called out in Spanish. My mouth watered as my eyes scanned the many kinds of pan dulce displayed in neat rows. The lights shone brightly on the sweet breads. I could feel the heat from the pot of homemade tamales, and I craved one of the Mexican sodas in the glass fridge. I clutched my $5 bill, knowing I could walk out with a large bag of pan dulce for my family and a soda for myself and still have change. I ordered three kinds of pan dulce: elote, concha, and a large cuerno, named for their corn, shell, and horn shapes. I reached into the white paper bag of treats, the bottom stained with warm grease. My papa always said, “If the bottom is greasy, you know it’s good.” I bit into the concha, and the familiar sweet smell and ridged texture flooded my senses. The top of the bread crumbled and filled my mouth with its sugary flavor. The center of the bread was especially warm and soft. The smell reminded me of my Aunt Lulu’s kitchen. I wondered what it was like for my father to walk to this bakery at four years old, clinging to the hand of my great-grandfather, Agustín, and to taste the delicious
Interview with Author Kate Milford
I have always been a big fan of Kate Milford’s books, and so when I heard she had a new book coming out I very quickly knew I would want to write about it. Since I had already written a blog post on her other books, I decided that instead of a review, I could interview her about the book and her writing in general. The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book was released February 23, and, unsurprisingly, it was very engaging and altogether wonderful. In it, strangers are trapped together at an inn, and as the blurb so eloquently puts it, “to pass the time, they begin to tell stories… that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended.” Each story told in the tavern stands on its own, but an overarching story emerges from all of the tales, making the book feel like a short story collection where each short story indirectly contributes to the overarching one. It takes place in the 1930s, in the fictional city of Nagspeake, the same city in which Milford’s novel Greenglass House is set. In fact, in Greenglass House, the story’s main character Milo’s peaceful winter vacation comes abruptly to an end when unexpected guests start arriving at his parents’ inn. One of these strange guests has with her an old book which Milo ends up reading and the book even ends up driving some of Greenglass House’s plot. This book within a book is The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which readers can finally read for themselves. Below is a lightly edited version of my Q&A with the author Kate Milford. Sita Welt: Why did you decide to write “The Hollow-Ware Man” [the tale told by Sangwin] in verse? Kate Milford: It was actually one of the first stories I wrote for the book–I think the first three were “The Yankee Peddlers,” “The Devil and the Scavenger,” and then “The Hollow-ware Man.” I wrote the first draft of it back in 2014, when I thought I would be self-publishing The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. I *think* my thinking at the time was that I wanted to write something that would be as haunting as the idea of this character was for me, and I love ominous old poems and ballads. Plus, since one of the things I wanted to do with Raconteur’s was represent a wide variety of different types of folklore, it would’ve been a bit of an omission not to have included something like a poem or a ballad. (In my head, I imagine there’s traditional music for it somewhere in Nagspeake.) But if I’m honest, I don’t think I was thinking about all that exactly, when I first sat down to write the poem. It was something I thought about later–that I wanted riddles and trickster tales and some form of fortune-telling, etcetera, and how nice that I already had something in verse. SW: Where did the idea of “old iron” come from? Why is old iron such a big part of your stories? [“Old iron” is a magical, self-aware iron in the books] KM: I began writing about Nagspeake’s self-aware ironmongery even before I had the first idea for a book set in the city. It was one of the earliest things I knew about Nagspeake. I actually don’t know why I started in with the self-aware iron in the first place, except I’ve always loved the way ironwork can take damage over the years that makes it look like plants growing at odd angles–like you’ve caught a fence or a railing mid-motion, and it’s frozen in place until you turn your back again. There really wasn’t a reason for it to make an appearance in Greenglass House, so it didn’t; however the iron is also why Nagspeake’s locally-made glass has the green tint that gives the house its name–iron oxide can give glass a greenish hue. But it turns up in the other books set in the city, building to what we see in The Thief Knot and The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. Over time, it sort of became a character, in a sense. SW: Where did names like Trigemine, Alphonsus, Pantin, etc., come from? KM: Oh, I collect names from all sorts of places! I keep a notebook of names I like and words that I think might make interesting names. Old-fashioned words, obsolete words… right now there’s a tab open on my browser with a list of like a hundred types of seaweeds that I’ve been using for names in a current project. Sometimes if I know something about a character, I’ll pick a word or phrase that has a connection to them, then I’ll look up synonyms, etymology, history, etc., until I find something that sounds like a possible moniker. And sometimes I invent patterns to help me find names, mostly as a game to amuse myself. When I wrote the first draft of the story about the Yankee Peddlers, I gave them all names that were to do with the body. Trigemine, also a peddler, got his name from a body part, the trigeminal nerve. Sangwin’s name fits that pattern too, if you say it out loud. I didn’t invent the ‘Alphonsus,’ but his last name (being a Yankee Peddler) is Lung. Pantin means puppet in French, though I had to look it up just now to remember. The Haypottens got their surname from the word hypotenuse. I love finding names. Coming up with all the names for the different types of fire in “The Reckoning” was some of the best fun I had while writing this book. SW: I noticed that some of your stories seem to have a very eerie feel to them which gives them a very unique tone for a children’s book. Why did you decide to incorporate this into your writing and how did you manage that? KM: It’s just what I like, I guess! I’m a little like Mrs. Haypotten, trying to tell a cheery story to Maisie and
