Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists

Canon PowerShot G7X A note from William Juneteenth—Black Lives Matter. With every new police murder of an unarmed black man, and images of police attacking Americans who are exercising their constitutional right to protest government actions, it is clear that for many Americans, their city police can feel more like an occupying army than a civilian police force there to help. Every American who is in a position of power to do something can no longer hide. This includes Stone Soup. Of course, we have published work by African American students over the years. And in our internal discussions we are often saying how we would like more work from African American students, but like so many small organizations with their heart in the right place, just staying in business takes up all our focus. We are aware that a big problem is that African American students opening the pages of Stone Soup see this as another “white space.” It just won’t feel instantly welcoming. We have some ideas for how we can address this problem, but we need some outside advice. We would like to create a predominantly African American advisory board to work with us to develop long-term sustainable programs that will turn this around so that all Americans, and all students of African descent wherever they live—Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, Oceania—will see enough students who look like them in our pages to feel it is a welcoming place for their creative work. You may write to me directly if you are interested in helping us get this advisory panel off the ground. Thank you. New order form! The biggest news at Stone Soup this week is that we finally have an online order form we are proud of. This form is a long time in the making—and will give you a hint of what is in store for the entire website. The new form makes it much easier to see what you are ordering. It also tells something about Stone Soupfor people who are new to it. If you haven’t subscribed, please use our new form—and tell your friends. All of these new, free, COVID-19 programs: the daily prompts, the writing workshop, the book club, and the daily blog posts, are are funded through subscriptions. A couple of us still work without pay, so your subscription will make a difference to all of us, and what we can achieve. All subscribers get All Digital Access, and print subscribers also get a beautiful magazine delivered to their house 11 months of the year. Subscriptions start at only $4.99 per month. Thank you. Summer school: The joint Stone Soup and Society for Young Inklings summer program started two weeks ago and is going strong. New dates will be announced shortly, and right now there is space in the June class being taught by our own Stone Soup team member Laura Moran, called The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Anthropology at Home. This class is a late addition, and to be honest, it looks like people have been a little bit afraid of it. So. Here is what I can say. Laura Moran, who runs the Stone Soup Refugee Program and the Wednesday Book Club, is a PhD anthropologist. Her specialty is actually refugee children. She is teaching a one-week summer program starting in a little over a week. Students will be using their own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic as the basis for their writing. What students learn in this class will help them with developing characters in their stories. The class explores the sometimes ambiguous line between nonfiction and fiction.  Photograph and story by Anya Geist: The Newsletter is long, already. I am out of space to give justice to the photograph and story and to say all that I would like to say. I spent a lot of time and a couple of trips to New Jersey in the late 1990s working with Nelly Toll, a woman who survived the Holocaust hiding with her mother in a city that was then called Lvov and was then in Poland. Nelly’s father and brother went into hiding someplace else but were apparently found and murdered, as they were never reunited. During the period we were in close contact she hired a police artist to make a picture of him so she would have that memory. During hiding, Nelly’s mother had Nelly make paintings and stories as one way to deal with time and the stress. Within the next few months I will go back to that archive of material I worked on with Nelly to share with all of you. Please read Anya’s story below, and also spend time with her multi-layered photograph of a menorah-like candlestick with Christmas tree in the background. I find her photograph to be unusually calming. The candlelight so present. A window of light through which we see into another world. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, one of my parents’ closest friends was one of the Jewish children who was sent from Germany to England during the war (on the so-called kindertransport), so this situation from Anya’s story feels very alive to me. One of the biggest conflicts I had with my father (he died a few years ago when he was 93) was that he was always saying that “It could happen again. It could happen here.”  The “it” being another Holocaust. This annoyed me so! But what we are seeing today, and not just in America, is that, unfortunately, he was right. People forget where intolerance can lead. So, all of you reading this newsletter today, whether you are a student or an adult, please have empathy for those who are different from you. And remember that if you do not speak up when the police come for your neighbor, that it will be too late when they come for you. This could be something that you could talk about together as a family using Anya’s story, plus the daily news, as the catalyst. Weekend project: Let me change the mood! In the Friday Writing Workshop, one of the students (thank