“Then I started going down slowly to the ground and I stopped at Vietnam” Martin Taylor, 12 Published July/August 2002, illustrating Hungry, by Tran Nguyen, 10 A note from the team William has gone camping in the mountains with his daughter for a couple of weeks, so this week’s newsletter comes to you from Emma and Jane. Drawing dreams This week’s drawing was made to illustrate a story about a dream. Dreams can be such a strange mixture of reality and fantasy, and I love the way this picture combines those two things. The detail of the city buildings, its curving river and tall palm trees, the valley dark on one side and light on the other, all conjure up a realistic and beautiful picture of a town in Vietnam. The sky is bright, with high thunder clouds–but then whatever is that in the top right-hand corner? Why is there a fork sticking out of a pink cloud? It’s unexpected, and that makes me want to look again. It also makes me more curious about the story it goes with. Like lots of great illustrations, this one is true to the words without literally putting all of them into the picture, and that mixture of truth and fiction feels very dreamlike. Dreams can be hard to remember or put into words. A drawing like this that hints at something a little bit strange is a great way to put the viewer in the right frame of mind to think about the dream that inspired it–and their own dreams. What do your dream drawings look like? Until next week Jane Submit to our Cover Contest and a Note About Art in Stone Soup A long time ago, when Stone Soup was first founded, we didn’t commission illustrations. Instead, we published pieces of art that excited us—regardless of their connection to a specific story! We have recently decided to return to this practice. This means, we are no longer commissioning illustrations for the magazine. From now on, we will be accepting standalone art—drawing, paintings, photographs, collages as well as images of sculpture, diorama, ceramics—that we simply love and want to share with all of our readers. Your art will be featured in a special “art” section of our new digital magazine. In addition, we might also choose to pair it with a story or a poem, in which case it would be featured in two places in the issue. Please consider submitting your best pieces of art to the magazine. This is also a good time to remind you that we are running our first-ever cover contest this summer and hope you will consider submitting! Given our new focus on standalone art—art that can stand on its own without a piece of fiction—I encourage you to take the story excerpts and run with them, to bring in your imagination, and maybe even your dreams, to play in your pieces. Think of the excerpts as springboards: where can they launch you? Until next week Emma Sign up to our mailing list to receive the Saturday Newsletter straight to your mailbox! From Stone Soup November/December 2000 Memories of Sunset Lake By Mandana Nakhai, age 11 Illustrated by Zoe Paschkis, age 12 It was getting dark. Zoe lay on the hammock on the front porch eating an ice-cream sundae. She looked out at the golden lake thoughtfully. The porch door slammed. Zoe scooted over for her twin brother, Hunter. “Thinkin’?” Zoe nodded. She slurped a chocolate drip off the side of the tall glass. Hunter carefully watched Zoe’s gaze drop toward the other white-picket-fence houses ringing the lake. “I just can’t believe the summer’s over.” Hunter got up and dangled his feet over the porch, brushing some blond hair out of his intense green eyes. “Well, we can come back next summer. We have to go back to school, you know.” Zoe nodded, wishing that the summer would never end. Cool air blew the trees as the twins walked down to the dock. “I just wish we could have done something interesting. All we did is sit around on the dock the whole time.” Hunter rolled up his khakis and dipped his feet in the water, thinking about what his sister had said. “We did lots of stuff. Remember the beginning of the summer? When we first got to the house?” …more
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: July 22, 2017
Planet with Five Suns Vika Sycheva, 8 A note from the team William has gone camping in the mountains with his daughter for a couple of weeks, so this week’s newsletter comes to you from Emma and Jane. What I did on my holidays… When I was at school in Scotland, the first thing we had to do when we got back after the summer vacation was write a short essay all about “what I did on my summer holidays” (we had holidays, not vacations there). It always seemed like a chore, and turned everything we’d done into a dreary, long list of “and thens.” But I realize now it doesn’t have to be like that! Maybe we could have treated the assignment as an invitation to write a short screenplay, or a journal entry about a single fabulous day, or a postcard or letter to a friend. What if we’d decided to write poem about just one thing that had happened: how it was on a rainy day in a sunny place, or a hot day in a cold place? We could have focused on a special trip; or someone new we’d seen or met; or even just on what it was like to do not much at all in a new place, or even be at home all day. I’m sure all our Stone Soup readers already have lots of creative ideas about how to celebrate and commemorate things they’re doing this summer. We’d love to hear some of them, and see your artwork too. Send us the short pieces you’ve written, drawn, or photographed telling us who you are and where you’ve been, and we’ll make a Stone Soup Summer Album on our website with a selection of them. We can’t wait to hear what you all did on your summer holidays at newsletter@stonesoup.com! Until next week, Jane Do you want to blog for Stone Soup? We are excited to announce that we are actively looking for writers to contribute regularly to our blog! Do you have a lot to say about a single topic—sports, fashion, art, writing, books, music, animals, science, theater, travel, crafting, movies, tv shows, video games, something else? Would you be able to commit to writing for us once a month? If so, we want to hear from you! Please write a sample post, between 350-600 words, and submit it here. A blog post can be many different things. It can be a review, a reflection, a story, a how-to, an opinion piece, or an account. It can include pictures, diagrams, videos, maps, comics—you name it! Until next week Emma From Stone Soup May/June 2017 As Seen From Above By Jem Burch, 13 Hundreds of feet in the air, the world is In miniature, a scale model made of tinfoil, cardboard, and glue The green water ocean is so smooth you could walk on it Haloed by a ring of white foam, tiny islands poke out of the sea They’re so small none of them have a name You could be the first to conquer them, call them your own more
Where are they now? We hear from Rachel Stanley, Stone Soup contributor in the early 2000s
We are often asked–and we often wonder–what careers our young authors and illustrators went on to as they grew up, so we were thrilled to hear from Rachel Stanley, one of our published illustrators and authors from the early 2000s. She gave us permission to share her letter to us with you. If you’d like to see what work she is doing now, you can visit her website. And, to hear about what publication in Stone Soup meant to hear, read on… She rose on her tiptoes and let herself fall forward Fourteen years ago, my childhood dream of being an artist officially came true when my illustrations were published in Stone Soup magazine. To this day, I owe so much to the magazine for the way it helped launch my artistic career. Submitting to Stone Soup was one of the best decisions I made as a young person. At the time I was just excited about getting my name and work in print, but I never could have foreseen the long-term benefits it would bring me. The magazine made me a better artist and a better writer, because each rejection forced me to work harder towards being published. It was one of the many factors that drove me to be an illustration major in college, and to this day remains a source of inspiration for me. I’ve kept every printed copy of Stone Soup I ever received, and to this day I love perusing the wide variety of styles and skills that are showcased in the magazine. He was running for me, and no one could ever stop us The first check I ever received was for my illustrations of “The Flying Angel” in 2003, and to my 11-year-old self, it was really a big deal. I was even more thrilled to have my story “Diver” and its accompanying illustrations published in the magazine in 2004. But to my surprise, Stone Soup has continued to net me benefits long after I passed the submission age limit. I’ve been able to maintain connections to the art community through following the magazine online. In the world of art-and especially illustration-connections and networking are everything, and I’ve been excited to reconnect with Stone Soup online and through social media in more recent years. Making a living as an artist isn’t easy, as I’ve found out, but Stone Soup is one of the things that encourages me not to give up on my dreams. I have even found some of my fellow Stone Soup illustrators enjoying exciting and successful art careers as a result of what was begun years ago with their publication in the magazine. So thank you, Stone Soup, for what you have done for me and for so many others. I hope that many more generations of aspiring authors and artists will be launched to success through their connections with you! ~Rachel www.rachelalana.com
