A note from William Rubel This week the newsletter coincides with the release of our new December issue: our second annual food issue! It is filled with evocations of food in all its possible guises, and some fully tested (delicious) recipes that you might want to try over the holidays. There is so much to like about this issue that it’s hard to know what to call out. I’ll focus on the photography and mention Ula Pomian’s photograph, “In the Land of Bananas”. As with all of Ula’s work, you can see that she has a very clear point of view. Brilliant! The wrap-around cover photograph, “Snow in Clouds”, by Hannah Parker, also the photographer of our much-loved June cover (“Red Fern”, the goat), is beautiful with a complexity that makes this an image you can come back to many times. I urge you to click the link to see the whole picture. The image is of snow falling through bare tree branches at night. But I could also see the clouds at the top of the photo as interstellar gas clouds, with the snowflakes being stars. Thank you, Hannah. I’m not going to try to improve on Editor Emma’s introduction to the complete issue: During the holidays, when cookies, cake, and hot chocolate seem to be everywhere, we tend to think of food as a comfort and as a delight. We don’t often talk publicly about the many anxieties surrounding food, about the allergies, intolerances, and religious or ethical dietary choices that can make it difficult to enjoy a meal with one’s friends and family. In this year’s food issue, some of our young writers explore this darker side of eating, alongside its joys. We also have six delicious recipes to share with you, and hope you will enjoy sharing your kitchen with each other and with Stone Soup this holiday! Print subscribers should be receiving their issues now (they were mailed in mid-November: ours arrived yesterday), and digital subscribers can log in now to read the full issue. And you can always order additional print copies in the Stone Soup online store. Don’t miss it. Joaquin Garcia-Magallanes mailing out the first copies of the Stone Soup Annual 2018. Shipping News! The 2018 Annual, along with the new fully revised, expanded, and redesigned Stone Soup Books of… are all shipping out to those who preordered them, as I write. All products are mailed out within two days of your order. One of the pleasures of a small business is that you develop personal relationships with suppliers. The Annual and other books and products in our online store are shipped by my now longtime friend Martha Macambridge. Martha and her team have been mailing Stone Soup on and off over the last 40 years! The photo shows one of her assistants, Joaquin Garcia-Magallanes, stuffing the 2018 Annual into envelopes earlier this week. Thank you, Joaquin! For holiday gifts: All print subscriptions and other book and product orders ship within two days of being received. Print and digital subscriptions, monthly or annual, via our website and fulfilment house Annuals, anthologies, notebooks, and sketchbooks in the Stone Soup online store Food For Thought This week, I’d like to focus on one of our regular bloggers and Stone Soup author Sabrina Guo, who just posted an extraordinary essay. Sabrina, as those of you who follow her blog posts know, often writes about Syrian war refugees. In this post she really outdid herself. She actually set up Skype calls with Laura Doggett, who runs a photography and filmmaking collective with Jordan refugee camps. Through Laura she spoke with a couple of young women caught up in the Syrian War. In her own introduction to her blog post Sabrina writes, “Through speaking with them, I began to see the importance of storytelling as a way of connecting and forming bonds with others.” In a profound way, this is what Stone Soup is about. Storytelling as a way of making sense of your own life and of making connections and bonds with others. I don’t want to summarize what Sabrina wrote—please read it yourselves here: “Amplifying Voices with Another Kind of Girl Collective”. It’s an important piece of work. Inspired by Sabrina’s work, we have decided to have a special Stone Soup issue in 2019 featuring the creative work of children caught up in war, wherever they are in the world. We will plan the issue in more detail in the early part of 2019, and we will reach out to those of you who may want to help with the issue. In addition to the special issue, we will create a dedicated space on our website where the voices of children caught up in wars can be heard. Donations made for our refugee project will be dedicated to this important work. Until next week, The first free subscriptions have already been awarded in our 45th birthday promotion! Congratulations and thank you to K. Newlands! Stone Soup was 45 years old this year. We are celebrating that birthday and celebrating being back in print with an offer to our loyal readers. Can you help us meet our target of 1,000 new print subscribers by the end of the year? We are offering free subscriptions and extra prizes at various points along the way, all tied into our age. Every 45th subscriber will receive a free subscription (and we are so close to the next threshold, it could be you this weekend!) The 450th and 900th subscribers will receive a free subscription, plus copies of all ten of the Stone Soup books in our collection (8 anthologies and 2 Annuals). And, the 1,000th will receive all of that, plus a free site license for the institution–school or public library–of their choice. It’s easy to subscribe: visit this page. This particular promotion will continue until we meet our target or get to the end of the year, whichever comes first. Please share this with everyone you think would benefit from joining the readership of Stone Soup. Partnership news Miacademy We have an exciting partnership in place with Miacademy,
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Amplifying Voices with Another Kind of Girl Collective
By Sabrina Guo, 13 As the world grows more connected – through displaced populations, the internet, and accessible travel – we need to find ways of adapting positively and supportively to these new circumstances. Laura Doggett and her organization, Another Kind of Girl Collective, which promotes the films and photography of Syrian refugee girls living in Jordan, are wonderful examples of this. While speaking to Laura on Skype and email over several months, I was struck by her devotion to helping these young women tell their unique stories to the rest of the world. I also spoke to two girls in the camps, Khaldiya Jibawi and Marah Al Hassan, over Skype with the help of Tasneem Toghoj, the co-facilitator of the collective, who also acted as our translator. I was struck by their bravery and determination to make something out of their circumstances and lives. Through speaking with them, I began to see the importance of storytelling as a way of connecting and forming bonds with others, something that is especially important and relevant in today’s world. I wanted to reflect this in my own work, so I decided to write this piece to show an example of people from different cultures coming together to talk, bond, and work together. ********************************************************************************* Amplifying Voices with Another Kind of Girl Collective The film shows a crowd of corrugated metal buildings. Between them, children play. Scrap metal and pieces of wood are scattered on the ground, along with hammers, saws, rope. When the sun sets, the sky turns a deep pink and orange, and the buildings are illuminated, flashing red and burnt sienna. At a distance, there is a young girl, maybe four or five years old, wearing a dress decorated with a fabric daisy. She has on one purple shoe and one black sandal. Next to her, older children are playing around; with linked hands, they have formed a circle. The little girl is upset because she isn’t being included. She throws her hands in the air, but when a boy gestures her to join, she runs away, angry. Next, the film shows a boy is using a long length of rope as a whip to thrash a puddle of muddy water. The camera transitions to another little boy who is hammering a metal stake into the hard ground with a saw next to him. There is no soundtrack or dialogue, just the sound of the children’s voices from afar. The sun hangs low in the sky. This film, Children, was made by Marah Al Hassan, a young Syrian refugee who lives in Za’atari, the largest refugee camp in Jordan, which is twelve miles over the Syrian border and home to 80,000 people. Marah came to film by way of the Another Kind of Girl Collective (AKOGC), an organization that holds photography and film workshops across Jordan for Syrian refugee girls. The aim of AKOGC and of its founder, Laura Doggett, is to give the girls the needed space, training, and equipment to develop this art form, along with providing a platform for them to share their own stories and experiences. Through their films and photographs, the girls prove themselves to not be passive and tragic beings, which is sometimes how the media portrays them, but hardworking, creative, smart, and motivated visionaries. According to a 2016 United Nations report, at least 5 million people have had to leave their homes in Syria and settle, at least temporarily, elsewhere in other countries, from Turkey to Sweden. Laura Doggett first started working with Syrian refugees and founded the Another Kind of Girl Collective in Za’atari in 2014. Although thousands of journalists have interviewed refugees in the camp, the stories have often given incomplete or inaccurate portrayals of life in the camps. Laura recognized the need to provide girls in the camps with the necessary equipment and encouragement to document the true stories of their lives, along with a way to connect with others, both in and out of their community. Laura states that her ultimate goal for the collective is to help get the girls started by giving them a direction so they can “use the medium and to learn how to use visual language to be able to express what’s inside of them. A lot of people in general, especially in more traumatic situations, don’t have the words to talk about what’s going on for them. Giving them a visual tool encourages them to learn how to use that tool to say different things about their lives and to reflect on their own stories in a way that they probably hadn’t before.” Laura credits her father, a master storyteller, with helping her find her love of stories. As she grew up, she also read and drew inspiration from authors like Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and novelist. She recognized the importance of observation and of storytelling and earned her BA in English and Creative Writing. After college, Laura directed a program called the Appalachian Media Institute in Kentucky, teaching young adults how to make documentaries about their communities. She taught photography and creative writing at High Rocks, an organization in West Virginia that promotes girls’ leadership, confidence, and artistic expression. She has also helped teenagers in the inner cities of NYC and DC to share their worlds through making their own documentaries about their lives. Later, she received her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University to better learn how to collaborate with young people and reflect their artistic voices and vision more accurately. These days, Laura spends much of her time in Jordan in Za’atari, holding workshops and providing guidance to the young women there. When I asked her how she first connected with the girls in the workshops, since they were from such seemingly different worlds, she said, “We must understand they’re like teenage girls from everywhere else, and so we talk about love, friends, or parents. That’s why they want to be recognized
Saturday Newsletter: November 24, 2018
“Teary Eyed Giraffe”, painting by Aevahaadya Arun, 6, Ontario, Canada. Published in Stone Soup, January 2018. A note from William Rubel Our best Thanksgiving greetings from all of us at Stone Soup. Whether or not you are American or Canadian (Canadian Thanksgiving was last month), the end of the year is a good time to remember others who may not be in as happy a situation as you are. Where I live, in Santa Cruz, California, smoke from the massive Camp Fire that destroyed a town of 27,000 and has killed many people has reminded all of us here how lucky we are. The Stone Soup spirit is that when each of us gives a little, something great can be accomplished. I encourage you all to give something, even $1.00, to help someone who is in need right now. I just gave money to the UNHCR, the United Nations agency that helps refugees, and to the American Red Cross to help people caught up in the Camp Fire. I don’t think you will ever regret giving to help others. When we were at the California Library Association Conference two weeks ago we were surprised by how many librarians were interested in Stone Soup as a place where their patrons could not only read great work, but also get published. That got us thinking. That got us thinking about Stone Soupas a bridge between being a consumer of literature–a reader–and being a writer. All writers are readers, but all readers are not writers. I love to write. I feel most alive when I am writing. In that sense, for me, writing is its own reward. That said, I have many things I want to say that I want to share with others. While I don’t “write for publication” in the sense that I the only reason I write is to get published, having my work read by others is at the center of all of my writing. I tend to think of everything I write as a letter to a friend. In fact, the first book I wrote, The Magic of Fire, was started as a letter to a friend. But, when the letter got to about sixty pages I realized that the letter form wasn’t going to work–five years later that letter, by then a large book, was published. I decided I would be writer after visiting a friend of mine who was already a writer. He showed me a fan letter that had recently arrived. I was blown away! The fan letter impressed me because I saw that my friend’s writing had touched this person’s heart. And I thought, there and then, nothing could be better than enriching the lives of total strangers. Writing is where you, the writer, find your inner self. I think that ideas are best developed through writing. When you put words on paper you are forced to confront deep truths–do these words mean what I want to say? What is it, exactly, that I do want to say? In my experience as a writer, the act of writing itself is where I discover my voice. The trick is that to actually be a writer you have to write! We all have busy schedules and most of us are also distracted by our digital recreations. I am struggling with this in my own house with my own daughter. When she writes she is fully engaged with the writing, but more often than not, the lure of another episode of something on Netflix has her transfixed. We are working towards one or more video game- and movie-free days simply because it is so hard to stop playing or watching once one has started. If you are also struggling with how to balance digital entertainment in your life, or have advice for me and my 7th grader daughter, let me know by replying to this Newsletter. I’ll put together some of your replies to share with you. Replies from parents are welcome! A very brief reference to holiday shopping… Holiday shopping craziness is upon us! The one way you can best help Stone Soup thrive is to subscribe to the magazine via the Stone Soup website, look for gifts in our online store, Stonesoupstore.com, and encourage your friends to do the same–you never know, you or they might get their subscription for free in our 45th birthday celebration! (see below). Thank you. This week’s art and story In this week’s newsletter we wanted to highlight a particularly beautiful painting made by one of our younger contributors that we published this year: Aevahaadya Arun’s “Teary Eyed Giraffe”. What an achievement! Do take a closer look, and read some of the comments that tell you more about her work at our website. Also, don’t miss out on reading (or re-reading) Natalie Warnke’s story below, also published in January. It’s always exciting when a genre is turned on its head, and Natalie does just that with her clever twist on a fairytale princess. Until next week, The past week on our blog It’s been a great week on our blog – three new posts from young bloggers were published. In ‘Big Family: A Memoir’, Daniel Wei tells us about his experience as an Asian-American boy visiting China for the second time in his life. Maya V talks about ‘Sad Books’, and her difficulties with reading them. I’m sure lots of us share her feelings! Have a read and leave her a comment to keep the conversation going. And last but not least, Keshav Ravi muses on the joys of a fort: for play, for contemplation, as an escape, and as a place to read. Help us reach 1,000 print subscribers by the end of the year! Stone Soup was 45 years old this year. We want to celebrate that birthday and celebrate being back in print with an offer to our loyal readers. Can you help us meet our target of 1,000 new print subscribers by the end of the year? We are offering free subscriptions and extra prizes at various
