Write a poem inspired by a Miró painting. (Hint: it can be as silly as you want it to be, and probably won’t make sense.)
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: September 12, 2020
“McArthur Lights” by Oskar Cross, 10 (Oakland, CA). Published in the September 2020 issue. A note from Jane The first copies of Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella Three Days till EOC have been delivered to readers, and we are already getting some amazing feedback. The chief of United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) included a review of the book in his latest message on the UNAI website, and other readers are already posting positive reviews on Amazon. Congratulations, Abhi! Abhi has been interviewed by his local paper, the Stillwater News Press, for publication tomorrow (Sunday, September 13). Also this week, we were delighted to publish a review of his book by Anya Geist, 14, on our own website. Besides writing a thoughtful review, Anya also recorded an interview with Abhi over Zoom. They had a great conversation about Stone Soup, as well as about Abhi’s book. It’s a great chance to (virtually) meet the author and gives real insight into his ideas, his writing process, and the work that went into crafting Three Days till EOC. I urge all of you, students and adults, to watch the video. I learned a lot about writing from their conversation, and I think you will too. And get your copy of the book in our store or any other bookstore: it’s a really great read! There was a problem with our website last week, and a large number of people experienced problems, especially when try to subscribe. We are very sorry! Everything is fixed now, so do please try again if you suffered with this problem. We have decided to extend our Labor Day 15% off offer through the end of the weekend to thank you for bearing with us (discount code: LABORDAY20). Over the summer Anya Geist, the author of the review and Stone Soup contributor, has been interning with us. It has been such a pleasure for us to work with Anya, and we wanted to acknowledge her incredible contribution and say a public thank you to her in this newsletter. Anya has achieved so much over the last two-and-a-half months. She managed a project to conduct and record Zoom interviews with a dozen of our contributors and Workshop and Book Club participants. You are seeing the first of these—the interview with Abhi Sukhdial—this weekend, and there are more to come. We would not have these great videos, which are an important record of a moment in time as well as a really interesting insight into young writers’ processes and motivations, without her. In addition, she has worked hard behind the scenes on all sorts of production tasks (on the blog, on contests, on writing workshops, on new project ideas, and more). Everything we do at Stone Soup is about encouraging and celebrating the brilliant work and mature contributions that young students can make in terms of creative work. Having the opportunity to work with Anya added a new dimension to realizing our mission, and we hope that with the help of our supporters we will be able to set up a more formal internship program in future. Thank you, Anya, so much! We are excited to continue working with you for the rest of the year at the Writing Workshop and the Book Club, and we wish you every success at high school! Finally, now that our flash contest is happening once a month instead of every week, the closing date for entries has moved to Sundays at noon (Pacific time). This means you still have time to write and send in your entries, so please accept this week’s writing prompt as your weekend writing challenge. Full details are below, and at our website. We can’t wait to read what you write.Until next time, Monthly Flash Contest Deadline tomorrow, Sunday September 13 Every month we hold a flash contest based on one of our weekly creativity prompts. The deadline for entries is Sunday at noon Pacific time, so you still have time to create or polish your work and send it in to the September contest! This month’s challenge: Create a piece of flash fiction written from the perspective of the first object you saw when you woke up this morning. Your narrative should be no longer than 250 words. Five winners will have their winning writing published at Stonesoup.com, and all the winners and honorable mentions will be posted there and in this newsletter. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Chloe, 9, created a lovely piece of digital art called Fall of Silence. We posted another art piece, this time by Aya, 13. Aya titled her work COVID Isolation. Does this piece reflect how you feel about isolation? Leave a comment to let us know. April, 13, wrote a poem about a place that many of us have gotten familiar with these past few months: our bedrooms. Read “Perfect for Me” for eloquent descriptions of April’s room and how it makes her feel. As Jane mentioned above, Anya wrote a wonderful review of Abhi’s Three Days till EOC. Here’s the first paragraph of Anya’s well-written review: “When you are an avid reader, or anyone who reads books at all, there comes a point when all of the stories start to blend together. You pick up, say, a new dystopian book at the store, and sigh, because you know it’ll just be a new version of The Hunger Games or Divergent or a million other books, with the same plot, same characters, same villains. It’s inevitable. Abhimanyu Sukhdial’s novella, Three Days till EOC, is different.” Yesterday we published another travelogue from Vivaan, our prolific travel blogger. This time Vivaan visited Warsaw, Poland, and detailed his experience visiting two museums. Allen, 5, wrote a short and sweet piece about his classmate’s birthday and how it was celebrated over Zoom. From Stone Soup September 2020 Liv Baker, 11Seattle, WA Everything I Love By Liv Baker, 11 (Seattle, WA) The ride up the mountain The thousands of trees The pine and bark Smell Makes me feel Like I am Relaxed and calm The rain pattering Against
Warsaw Travelogue
WARSAW Country: Poland Capital: Warsaw Main Language Spoken: Polish Currency: Zloty Warsaw (Warzawa), is a lively, modern and bustling city lacking nothing. It is steeped in history and this only made me more eager to visit it. Warsaw survived every attempt to wipe it off the face of Earth and rose like a Phoenix from the ashes every time. It has a myriad of museums covering a wide range of topics. I chose two museums – Warsaw Rising Museum and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. I would love to thank these two museums for keeping leaflets which contained synopsis of the main events for handing out to tourists. These helped me in reading at leisure and understanding more. It was written in an easy to understand language as well. It helped me in writing this travel journal with accuracy. The Warsaw Rising Museum elucidates a particular event in the history of Warsaw – the Warsaw Rising of 1944. The Germans wanted lebensraum (living space) and Hitler wanted to completely deprive Poland of independence, so Germany attacked Poland in 1939 leading to the precipitation of World War 2. Executions, round-ups and mass transportation to concentration camps or forced labour became normal. The Poles were considered ‘subhuman’ and were to serve as labourers. The Germans killed all the Polish intelligentsia and destroyed their works of art. Underground state came into existence between 1939 and 1940. In 1944 it changed into the home army – AK army – which developed plans for armed defence against Germans. They were called the Insurgents. ‘The Rising’ began on August 1, 1944. Allied aircrafts dropped food, supplies, arms, ammunition and medicine but very little supplies reached the insurgents’ hands. Stalin’s airbases (Russia) remained closed for Allied aircrafts until September 11, 1944. Due to this there was shortage of food. Insurgents and civilians suffered from famine and depression and hopelessness grew. The Germans blocked the network of waterworks so therefore water to drink and put out fires started to run out. There was an order to build wells and they became the main source of water in the second stage of the Rising. Soviet air drops began on September 14 without parachutes so lots of weapons and ammunition was destroyed. Poland did everything they could but defeat was inevitable because of disproportion of forces. People lived in fear of death. The remaining forces fighting waited in vain for the Russian attack (the ‘ally’ acted like an audience). There was no longer any hope of help for fighting Warsaw as the civilians and wounded soldiers found themselves in tragic positions. The home army sent peace envoys for surrender of the city. On October 2, 1944 the agreement was signed to suspend warfare and insurgents and civilians were to leave Warsaw. Soldiers were persecuted on the way and the remaining ones were not given water for a long time. Civilians passed through a camp where they were sent to forced labour in various cities. The Germans broke the provisions of the treaty and blew up everything. Only 64 out of 987 buildings in Warsaw remain untouched. More than 18000 insurgents and 180000 civilians died in the Rising. The defeat of the Rising was also a defeat of Polish aspirations for independence. On February 1945 at the Yalta conference, USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union decided that Poland would go under communist rule. Warsaw insurgents had to decide whether to stay in exile or to go back to Poland, under the communist rule. Poland had been a key part for protecting the Soviet Union from a foreign attack so they wanted it totally under their control. Soviet control over Poland lessened after Stalin’s death and ceased completely after the fall of the communists in late 1989, although some Soviet forces did not leave Poland until 1993. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is also very engaging and traces the 1000 year old history of Polish Jews until the end of the Holocaust. It depicts their difficulties, life and their culture through many interactive multimedia exhibits. They unravel the story of Polish Jews in such a way you can grasp every word. Poland had the highest Jewish population in Europe. During the Holocaust, out of 6 million Jews exterminated, 3 million were Polish. The Nazis decimated 90% of Polish Jews. This museum has been built on the former site of the Jewish ghetto. The ghetto was a walled area in which Nazis confined Jews and then transported them to concentration camps where they were killed in ghastly and abhorrent ways. On 19th April 1943 the people in the ghetto tried to put up a brave fight against the Nazis though they knew they were doomed to failure. The rising was crushed within a month. It was an act of heroism, desperation, reprisal and a protest against the world’s indifference. There is a monument dedicated to the Ghetto rising on the museum campus. Warsaw Old Town was annihilated during the World War 2. After the WW2, it was rebuilt exactly how it was before the war. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the superior quality of reconstruction. It consists of 2 main squares – the Old Town market square and the Castle square. We started the walk from the Barbican gate, the last remaining part of a fortress that used to guard Warsaw. The Market square has a statue of a sword and shield wielding mermaid who is supposed to to protect Warsaw from enemies. All taxis in Warsaw have a picture of the sword wielding Mermaid. On either side of the statue there were heavy black old time water pumps
