Draw or paint a scene from a book you are reading, or have read. This is a Monday prompt, so if you are writing your response in the week it was first published, you can submit it to our Weekly Flash Contest, via Submittable! If you decide to submit your artwork to our Flash Contest, be sure to include the following information with your work: the title of the book its author, and the scene you have drawn. You can indicate which scene by saying which chapter the scene took place in, and/or giving a quote from the book that sums up what is happening in your artwork. Editor’s note: For this week’s Daily Creativity prompts, we’ve got a special takeover! Anya Geist, Stone Soup reader and contributor, has written the five prompts we’ll be posting throughout the week. For today’s, which is the week’s Flash Contest, she will also be co-judge!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
The Virus, a graphic art story by Annabelle Garner-Tamayo, 10
The Virus By Annabelle Garner-Tamayo, 10 All of the viruses in the world gather together in one big, white and light blue lab. The viruses are green and red and orange. There are a lot of viruses there: the Spanish flu, the swine flu, the coronavirus and more. The viruses are all sitting in the lab and deciding what to do next. Majority votes always wins, so they all decide that each one will attack the world at a different time. They want to destroy the world. The Coronavirus chose the end of 2019. It seemed like the perfect time. The coronavirus is a big one, too. Things are getting bad! This virus could kill people. Our world can’t fight this one alone, its too weak because it’s just a baby to the viruses. We have to save our world! We can save it by: 1- no littering; 2-saving toilet paper;… … and 3- the biggest of all, coming up with a cure! If we can do these things… …the world will be saved. So, we try, but some people don’t listen and take all of the toilet paper! Those people are known as the “corona crazies”. The government gave us a scare. They have us all meet up. They bring a microphone and they tell us: “If we don’t stop, we will all die and our world will die”. So everyone stopped and the virus stopped and we all lived happily ever after. THE END. Annabelle Garner-Tamayo, 10 Omaha, NE
Saturday Newsletter: May 2, 2020
JellyfishBy Heloise Matumoto, 13 (Quebec, Canada), iPhone SE photograph, the cover image from Stone Soup, May 2020 A note from William First, the news and some updates I would like to thank all of you who have recently subscribed. Sales are up for the month. Thank you! It is probably best to think of Stone Soup as a micro-business. We do not have a single full-time staff member. We have done our best to rise to the current occasion with Daily Creativity writing prompts, the Weekly Flash Contest, the Wednesday Book Club, and the Friday Writing Workshop—there is a special newsletter section reminding you of all our new COVID-19 resources below, as well as a daily email signup link. The best way you can support us is to subscribe, and share the news of Stone Soup’s resources with your friends around the world. Month-by-month digital subscriptions start at $4.99, and month-by-month print and digital subscriptions start at $7.99. Thank you again. The Book Club held its second meeting this last Wednesday and doubled in size to 20 students. Laura Moran, who runs the group, invited Nicole Helget, author of our first chosen book, The End of the Wild, to participate in the session. She was so inspiring! Thank you, Nicole! The Writing Workshop has 23 participants. Last Friday, they asked that the workshop last longer! So this week, it ran for an hour and 20 minutes. You can read about the workshops and some of the work produced during them via the web links below. I want to remind all of you that our second annual Book Contest is running (see below for details). We have had requests from students who have started and who are thinking of starting manuscripts for a special workshop, to help them make this leap to longer-form writing. I will run a preliminary workshop for people interested in this on Saturday, May 2, at 1 p.m. PDT. Email us here with the subject line “Long Form Book Contest Writing Workshop” if you would like to join, and we will then send you a Zoom link for the workshop. I will hold the workshop even if only one of you responds. What do you have planned for summer? My daughter’s school has five more weeks to run. Then, summer vacation starts. An odd idea, a vacation at home following what for many of you will already have been over two months at home. A double “vacation” this year. We are thinking of programs we can offer to help fill the summer with creativity, and we would like to know what you think about our ideas for Summer Camps and Summer Workshops. Please respond to our questionnaire and tell us! We have been able to offer our Book Club and Writing Workshop over the past month because, to be honest, we are doing it ourselves and we are not all being paid. We will have to hire writers and artists to run summer programs, so there will have to be a charge. Please fill out the questionnaire. It includes questions about what you wold be willing to pay. Please be honest. We will be using what you say in the questionnaire to develop the program. Thank you. William’s Weekend Activity The May issue is out! I received mine on Wednesday. The cover photograph by Heloise Matumoto (13) of jellyfish is striking, and any of you who have seen jellyfish in aquariums will appreciate its beauty. The central jellyfish is poised in the water. Going up? Going down? I personally have very traumatic memories of repeated jellyfish stings from the summer of 1960, in Annapolis, Maryland. I was eight years old. Jellyfish were everywhere at the beach! It was truly awful. Tentacles lay on the sand. My feet were in agony. And, in fact, even though I have never lived further than two kilometers from the Pacific Ocean since the age of 11, I have not been into the ocean since! I want you to look at the May cover image and think about a photograph you could make of something that, like the jellyfish, seems to float, perfectly balanced, between up and down. I know that you are probably not able to just leave your house with your parents and go exploring for this situation, this image to photograph. So. I am not saying it will be easy. But, around your house, or where you are permitted to go during this pandemic, find an image that has the kind of balance and grace we find in the cover image. I am writing this at night. Right outside the window, to my right, there is a jar hanging from a tree—like the kind we use for canning—that is filled with a string of small lights powered by a solar charger in the lid. The lights are twinkling about 12 feet (four meters) from me. I can’t see the tree’s branches. The light seems to float in the night, as the jellyfish floats in the cover photograph. Think about lights, reflections, mirrors, shadows, clouds, and . . . Also this month, I’d like to call your attention to our Honor Roll. Every issue includes the mention of authors working in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and artists who have sent us their work for consideration. It is often not an easy choice for our editor, Emma Wood, to decide which works to include in the magazine. The Honor Roll is a commendation by Emma for work well done, and we celebrate all of you who make your work and send it to us. We and all your readers appreciate you! Until next week, Weekly Flash Contest #4: Winners The week of April 20 (Daily Creativity prompt #21) was our fourth Flash Contest, and our food theme really got everyone’s creative juices flowing! You obviously had fun finding your food objects and thinking of creative ways to write about them. We enjoyed reading each and every one of the entries, and it was just as difficult as ever to choose our top five this week—so
