A note from William Thanksgiving best from everyone at Stone Soup! It is a calm Thanksgiving this year, but to be honest, I am enjoying the weekend with my daughter and my garden. Open House! You are all invited to our first-ever Stone Soup open house on Tuesday, December 1, at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern. For the first time, the whole Stone Soup community—adults and kids—comes together Tuesday for our open house. It’s a free event, but you do need to register through EventBrite. Please register. The whole Stone Soup team is looking forward to meeting you!This first open house is about you meeting us and also you meeting each other. It is the first of more community-wide events that we have planned into 2021. But more on that at the meeting. All of us at Stone Soup will be at the meeting, along with our board of directors. We will introduce ourselves, and those of us who work on Stone Soup will briefly talk about our accomplishments in 2020 and our plans for 2021. We will keep our remarks short as we want there to be plenty of time for the adults and kids attending get to know each other. Bring questions to ask. If Stone Soup has meant a lot to you, then you may want to be prepared to talk about you and Stone Soup. This open house is taking place in the context of Giving Tuesday. One parent has just joined us as a Stone Soup patron and given us a $10,000 50% match. So, one purpose of the meeting is to answer questions about giving to Stone Soup, to help us bring in new patrons to achieve this match—and our larger fundraising goal for the year. The best way to prepare for the open house is to watch the interview between Anya Geist and Lena Aloise that is posted at the top of this newsletter. Anya is a former Stone Soup author and artist, as well as a brilliant photographer—and now that she is in high school, a Stone Soup intern. Meanwhile, Lena is one of Stone Soup’s current stars. She is an Honor Roll winner, Flash Contest winner, and a creative force at the Saturday Writing Workshop. Anya and Lena are both good examples of what Stone Soup is about: introducing young people to the best of their peers, standing back, and watching them bloom. William’s Weekend Writing Project Take inspiration from Lena’s piece for a recent writing workshop on nature writing, “The Plum Tree,” for Thanksgiving weekend’s writing project. You can read it below. Lena’s prose is exquisite. The paragraph that starts with “There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye . . .” includes prose that is so beautiful it gives me goose bumps. Two of the most remarkable aspects of Lena’s story are how she so quickly establishes a caring relationship between the two characters, and between us and the tree. Note how effectively Lena uses personification—the literary device whereby you give nonhuman creatures, in this case a tree, some human ways of being. When Lena speaks of the tree’s “boughs reaching towards . . .” she animates the tree. She gives it life. Gives it a sense of purpose. Also, I think because we can imagine ourselves making the same gesture as the tree—reaching—Lena draws us into imagining we are one with this very alien being. Another example: Lena writes, “The tree sat there, calmly, waiting for the worst.” Effortlessly, we are drawn into the story’s imaginative space. We are standing there with this thinking, feeling tree, waiting “for the worst.” For your nature writing this weekend, I’d like you to spend some time quietly observing a piece of nature. Which, given the circumstances, can be observing a pet. Let your imagination do its work so that the characters in your story, whether a dog, or a tree, or wind, take on the warmth of life. And as always, if you are happy with your work, consider sending it to Emma, our editor, to consider. Until next week—on Tuesday, we hope, as well as next Saturday in the newsletter! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Jane, 12, wrote a poem about the way COVID has stolen the sense of normalcy. We published a travelogue documenting Mahati’s pre-pandemic trip to Whittier, Alaska. Learn more about the unique community by reading Mahati’s post. Nora, 12, reviewed The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer. Find out why Nora enjoys the fairy-tale-with-a-twist book series so much. “How cool would it be to live inside a book?” Pragnya asks at the start of her review for Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale. Read what Pragnya thinks of the book where the main character finds herself lost within the books she reads. Becca traces her experiences of Yom Kippur throughout her life, ending with this year’s very unusual celebration. Read Becca’s post to learn what her take-away is. Lena Aloise, 11Harvard, MA From the Stone Soup blog November 2020 The Plum Tree By Lena Aloise, 11 (Harvard, MA) He was happiest early in the daytime, when the sky was painted over crimson and violet, when the crisp breeze flushed his cheeks a rosy red, when the birds sang their soft melody, whimsically conversing. Nowadays, there was nothing that brought him more pleasure than such a beautiful silence and he was content to be alone, for the most part. Human company depressed him. There was a plum tree up on the hill, surveying her lower domain with a watchful, protective eye. She sat on her throne of grasses, boughs reaching towards an infinite expanse of sky, bearing leaves of olive green and sagging under the weight of her indigo fruits. She bore the look of not a queen, but a mother, like the ones he had only read about in story books. He could not help feeling a twinge of jealousy, looking upon the spherical children that she loved so dearly. Why could not someone hold him with such tenderness? It brought him
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Stone Soup Author Interview: Anya Interviews Lena Aloise
Stone Soup contributor and 20-21 intern Anya Geist (14) interviews Stone Soup contributor Lena Aloise (11). They talk about artistic freedom, writers as composers, the online community of the Stone Soup Writing Workshop, and so much more! Watch the video to hear what Lena has to say. Read some of Lena’s writing here and here. 0:18 – How were you introduced to Stone Soup? 1:20 – What were your favorite parts about the Writing Workshop and Book Club? 2:08 – What is your favorite thing about writing? 3:53 – How long have you been writing? 5:00 – Do you have any writing advice for your peers? 6:22 – Do you think the writing you do for fun is different from the writing you do for school? 7:41 – If you could tell somebody about Stone Soup, what would you say?
Yom Kippur through the ages
When I was little, I didn’t have to go to temple on Yom Kippur. I got to go to the basement and make cool crafts. Every year, I would watch my sister and my parents walk into the big room with the colorful windows and get jealous. I would always wonder why they got to go into the cool room but I had to stay downstairs. I might not have known what actually happened during a service, but I knew it was exciting. When I turned five, I finally got to come with my family into the cool room! It was even better than I thought it would be! The ceiling was one million feet tall with huge lamps all over! Rows and rows of benches filled up the huge room, and there were tons of huge flower pots with flowers to match. Finally, I got to put on a cool dress and sit on a bench next to all of the other fancy-dress people too! I was so excited! I didn’t understand exactly what was happening or what people were saying, but I knew it was cool. The next year, I started to miss the days when I could go to the basement. I quickly learned that you’re not supposed to fidget or whisper during services, you need to follow along in the books with the backwards pages, and you have to sit and stand a lot. I had to find silent ways to keep myself busy. Using my boredom busters, I figured out that there were 217 wooden boards on the ceiling with 32 lamps hanging from them, and there were 58 flowers in each flower pot. I guess that nobody cares if a six year old doesn’t pay attention during a Yom Kippur service. A few years later, I started to understand and follow along. I flipped the pages with everybody else, tried to figure out where we were in the book, and mumbled along to what everybody else was singing. I’m not sure if I was doing a good job of hiding my boredom, but I was glad to participate. Fast forward just a bit to 2020. Six years after my first Yom Kippur service, we’re going to temple in our living room in sweatpants. No fancy dresses. No room with a tall ceiling. No stained glass windows, no big lamps, no wooden boards, and no backwards book. Just a TV, some comfy chairs, and wondering how much longer you need to stare at the screen for. What was the point of this story? I guess it’s that you should make the most of what you have, because you never know what you’ll have later. Savor your metaphorical crafts and be grateful for your boredom. What if you aren’t Jewish and haven’t gone to temple in your life? This applies to everything, not just religious services! I think we’ve all been in school and thought, “Wow, I wish I could go home and watch TV all day.” Of course, the second that we couldn’t go to school anymore, all we wanted was to go back! Nothing will ever be perfect, so try to be happy with good enough.
