Every once in a while a story comes along that is unlike any other. Dancing Birds, the featured story from our September/October 2015 issue, is such a story. What makes it so special? Yes, the characters and setting are exotic. A Welsh girl named Glas lives with her family in a French-speaking village in Quebec. Glas makes mechanical animals in her attic. She misses her father, who is in Denmark, helping his sick brother. She misses her grandmother, who has gone home to Wales. Then her cousin Maskine arrives, sad and silent. But beyond the unusual characters and setting, the story, by 11-year-old Ayla Schultz, is special for the mood it creates. When we finish reading it, our mood has changed too. We feel the sadness, the loneliness, and the final glimmer of happiness. We are in the world of the story. How does Ayla do it? Read the story carefully, and you will see that it is full of descriptions that engage our senses. We see Glas’s dark blue eyes and her grandmother’s red coat. We smell and taste the cinnamon hot chocolate. The bare trees, icy water, and freezing rain tell us how cold it is. But above all, sounds—and especially silence—set the mood of this story. In the first scene, Glas sits silently atop a sand dune, staring at the chilly scene below, thinking about happier times. When cousin Maskine arrives, she doesn’t say a word for weeks. Finally, she speaks a few words to Glas, then grows silent again. Maskine is deeply worried about her family back in Denmark. Sometimes the silence is broken by a doorbell, a knock, or a slammed door. The postman is chatty when he brings a letter. Then all is quiet. In the story’s final scene, Glas has invited Maskine up to her attic workshop. Glas silently hands her the key to a beautiful mechanical bird. From their one conversation, we know that the girls have a bond. They share a love of birds and the way they appear to dance on the sand. Maskine turns the key and the mechanical bird lifts it legs one by one, just like the birds on the beach. For the first time since she arrived, Maskine smiles. No words are spoken, and the story ends with this perfect moment of understanding. The next time you write a story, think about sounds. Which sounds will you include, and which will you leave out? Will your characters reveal themselves through dialogue or through their thoughts? Sometimes a connection can be made between two people from a shared experience, without any words being exchanged. See if you can create a mood that stays with your reader long after the story has ended.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Free Verse and Kids’ Poetry
Most of the poetry we publish in Stone Soup is free verse. Free verse is the most prose-like form of poetry. It is very popular amongst adult poets and it is also very common in American schools. Free verse may by rhymed or unrhymed. What defines it is that it is unmetered. Walt Whitman was the American poet who popularized the form. Here is an example by Whitman. This poem is called The Noisless Patient Spider. “A noiseless, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. “And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. As free verse, Whitman is not constrained by meter or by rhyme. The poem consists of two grammatical sentences, one for each stanza. I’m not going to parse the poem here. If you are interested, look up the poem in Google Books. There are many commentaries. I’ll offer you this commentary on The Noiseless Patient Spider for those of you who want to delve further in the poem. For my purposes here, I will just say that by choosing free verse Whitman is able to focus on other things — to say things he couldn’t say if otherwise constrained by form. The language is poetic — .. “till the ductile anchor hold;/Till the gossamer thread you fling…” This is not prose. The great 20th-century American poet, Robert Frost, rejected this style of poetry for himself. Famously, in an 1935 speech at the Milton Academy he said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” We at Stone Soup believe that this is a style that more easily lets children get someplace deep with their poems. If you want to think of it as Robert Frost did — then its a style of poetry that gives the young poet a handicap. It lets young poets focus on content and language but doesn’t impose an overly consisting of structured meter. Anyone with a free verse poem to share by a child is encouraged to do so in the comments.
Join the Stone Soup Social Media Team
Contact William Rubel: william@stonesoup.com Stone Soup was founded in 1973. Through our magazine, Stone Soup, and through anthologies of children’s writing, we are the leading publishers of children’s creative work for homes and schools. We are now tying to increase our social media presence in order to reach a broader audience for the children we publish. Stone Soup is looking for people interested in children’s creativity to join its social media team. Whether your interest is writing by children, children’s art, child composers, child photographers or filmmakers, or your interest is more in the pedagogical side of things, we invite you to share your passion under the Stone Soup banner. Blogging: We offer bloggers an opportunity to write and be heard. Whether you might blog once a month, once week, or every day, we can fit you in to our new blogging program. If you like to write and want to communicate with a larger audience, then consider blogging for Stone Soup. We are looking for teachers, homeschoolers, anyone who has something to say about child art education in the largest sense of the term. Your blog can provide a venue for publishing creative work by students and talking about it, YouTube videos, and more. You will also be free to promote your own work including other blogs you write for, books you’ve written, workshops you lead, etc. Twitter: What we are looking for a few people, each with focused interests, who will Tweet for Stone Soup at least a few times per week. As examples, if you are interested in child composers, we’d like you to Tweet child composers at the Stone Soup Twitter feed. If child filmmakers interest you, please search out information and Tweet it for Stone Soup. Teaching methods, great writing programs, writing by children that you find online and like, this and more is what we would like to be offering within the Stone Soup Twitter feed. Facebook: Facebook sits somewhere between Tweeting and Blogging. If the Facebook format is one that appeals to you, let us know when you get in touch. We are looking for people who will write Facebook posts that engage with our audience. If you you’d like to talk, please write to me, William Rubel, at william@stonesoup.com. Thank you.
