Write a short story that begins and ends in this place: Fisherman’s Cottage (1906) by Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935).
ekphrasis
Saturday Newsletter: November 13, 2021
Trace | Ashley Jun, 13 (Short Hills, NJ), published in Stone Soup November 2021 A note from Sarah Happy weekend, all! I have been fortunate to work with a few Stone Soup interns over the past few months on an alt-text project to help make our website a little more accessible. Are you familiar with alt-text, also known as alternative text? In short, alt-text is a description of an image on a website that can be helpful for those who use screen readers or for users who might have trouble getting online images to load. If you would like to delve into the concept of alternative text further, I recommend this site, one of many great resources on the internet on this subject. While writing alt-text is mostly a practice in factual description, it has me thinking about how to describe complex artwork or art that could be interpreted in many different ways. If you know anything about the kind of art we publish in Stone Soup, both in the magazine and on the blog, you may know that a lot of it can be left up to interpretation! For example, the art piece “Trace” by Ashley Jun, 13 (pictured above) from the November issue might be understood in a variety of ways. At first glance, there are two figures walking in the opposite direction from the photographer, seemingly on a beach. But when you take a closer look, you notice all the extra shapes around the figures. What do all of the edits in the photograph mean? While you don’t necessarily have to be concerned with meaning when writing alt-text, I suggest that for this exercise, you think about description more generally and feel free to incorporate deeper meaning if you’d like. How would you describe this photograph? Once you have a description down in words, I challenge you to think of two different ways that it could be described—in effect, two other ways to interpret it. Now that you have three different descriptions of this photograph, try to incorporate all three into one story. Perhaps the photograph is hanging on the wall at an art museum, and your three descriptions are the way three visitors to the museum understand the piece. Or maybe one person’s opinion evolves throughout the years on what the piece signifies. There are so many ways to make a story out of these three separate descriptions. This writing challenge is not unlike the concept of Ekphrasis, which both William and Conner have covered in their writing workshops. For extra inspiration, take a look at the summaries from their workshops plus the writing created by students during those classes! Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at on our blog! Pragnya, 13, wrote a review of Anne Ursu’s stellar new novel The Troubled Girls Of Dragomir Academy. Mason Li wrote a tender poem, “Peace,” in honor of Veteran’s Day. Congratulations to the Book Contest 2021 winners & honorable mentions! We’re thrilled to announce the results of our 2021 Book Contest. It was a pleasure and an honor to read and consider all the manuscripts, and incredibly difficult to select our two winners. We are excited to share more about the books and the authors with you in the coming months! Winners Fiction Foxtale by Sarah Hunt, 14 Poetry Remember the Flowers by Enni Harlan, 14 Honorable Mention Days of Freedom, a novel by Sophene Avedissian, 13 Twenty Moons, poems by Maggie Berkson, 10 Adventures with the Robot of 1920, a novel by Srija Biswas, 13 A Lonely Lullaby, poems by Analise Braddock, 10 The Hotel Bellboy and Other Tales, stories by Steven Cavros, 10 The Legends of Atruviia, a novel by Ayesha Faruki, 13 Heart of Stars, a novel by Lillia Hamilton, 12 The Immortal Jellyfish, poems by Emma Hoff, 9 A Tale from Inside the Book, a novel by Jaslene Kwack, 14 Reunited, a novel by Olivia Lee, 10 Answering the Moon, a novel by Serena Lin, 10 This is the Song the World Needs Now And Other Poems, poems by Nova Macknik-Conde, 9, and Iago Macknik-Conde, 14 Book Zero, a novel by Leo Michelman, 11 Rainbow, a novel by Aanya Pandeya, 11 Serpent Throat and Other Stories, stories by Tayen Withrow, 11 The Poisonous Gift, a novel by Alice Xie, 13 Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our November Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #176 (provided by Sage Millen, former Stone Soup intern), which asked participants to create a character that had everything they’d always wanted, yet still wasn’t happy. Again, we received a massive influx of submissions, all of them worthy of recognition. Interestingly, this prompt also gave rise to more poetry submissions—a welcome sight. The work we read ranged from complex dystopian narratives involving time travel to an existential search for ice cream to inspiring poetry surrounding the nature of perfection. In the end, we decided there was too much good work to limit our Honorable Mentions to just five writers, and so highlighted a sixth! As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! Congratulations to our Winners and Honorable Mentions, listed below. You can read the winning entries for this contest (and previous ones) at the Stone Soup website. Winners “Natalie’s Wish” by Josephine Alpert, 13 (Cambridge, MA) “Allison!” by Quinn Brenner, 11 (New York, NY) “Perfection by Sierra E., 11 (Mountain View, CA) “Gone” by Scarlet He, 10 (Scarsdale, NY) “Hole of Debt” by Emily Tang, 12 (Winterville, NC) Honorable Mentions “Realization” by Kimberly Hu, 9 (Lake Oswego, OR) “The Bird and a Boy” by Jeremy Lim, 9 (Portland, OR) “Dare to Dream” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “Pride” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 10 (Brooklyn, NY) “Boredom” by Liyue Sally Wang, 10 (Newton, MA) “A Month of Awakening” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) From Stone Soup November 2021 How to Share an Apricot By Emma Catherine Hoff, 8 (Bronx, NY) I shared My apricot With a bird. It said, “Thank you.” I don’t know when the bird
How Stories Work-Writing Workshop #13: Ekphrasis
An update from our thirteenth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday September 18, plus some of the output published below For today’s workshop, Conner chose to focus on “ekphrasis,” meaning a creative interpretation, response, or translation of another work of art. Because ekphrasis has historically referred specifically to the transformation of visual art into poetry, we began class with this concept. First, we looked at Peter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus followed by William Carlos Williams’ poem written in response, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Next, we turned to Keats’ classic poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in order to see clearer the benefits of ekphrasis. Then, having seen two examples of visual art being transformed into poetry, we looked at an example of the opposite in Charles Demuth’s painting of William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Great Figure,” and William Holman Hunt’s painted rendition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s lyrical ballad “The Lady of Shalott.” To further illustrate ekphrasis’ power to transform and translate, we looked at painted examples of famous creation myths, one of biblical origin and the other of Japanese. Our final example was Michelangelo’s rendition of God giving life to Adam on the Sistene Chapel. By workshop’s end, we came to the conclusion that, in the words of student Olivia Rhee, ekphrasis “paints words into something new that lets the eyes see instead of imagine.” The Participants: Nova, Audrey, Simran, Emma, Josh, Clara, Penelope, Lina, Alice, Ethan, Ellie, Svitra, Sinan, Shilla, and Olivia The Challenge: Write a story or a poem based on Peter Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Emma Hoff, 9(Bronx, NY) The Price of Free Will Emma Hoff, 9 People are foolish. While fighting, those great grey things climbed onto our heads and begged for air. Eyed from above, clouds were meaningless, wings that had sprouted from spines of swords. A magical thing went limp and floated. Eyed from above, claustrophobic screams and gasps and chokings, wide open mouths, slit open mouths, eyes appearing inside. Little soldiers, clockwork hearts that wish for nothing but blood, blood for new stained wood uniforms. Mussels find hiding in their own kind, they are the moth wings of fishtails. All the instrument plays is a march by Shostakovich or any kind of Tchaikovsky. I hope these composers did not mean to be programmed to the minds of battle, they only dreamed of battles like this one, a woman of candy, climbing up a tower of others. The court jester thought this would be a good place to try out his jokes, but all that is left of him is his hat, his precious hat. Baskets of fish and rice and things, and baby chicks are squishing people (and the baby chicks). The clouds released penguins or puffins, nobody’s sure, the sun has burned them too quickly. People that die look up, they see their last visions of a sunny day, and even that is clouded by fog and red and people blocking other people, and when you are lying on your back while people are stepping on your chest and ignoring you, it is hard to see anything but twisted feet, jumping women in dresses, aprons, you think you saw an apron, but it could have just been your warped point of view showing you the sky that lifts itself higher. You thought you also saw the sky puff its chest, but it was just a shape, like an egg, with eyes where the eyes of a hammer-head shark would be, with teeth and a grin, snatching wings, fairies were here, too. Audrey Tzeng, 12 (Rocklin, CA) The Box Opened Audrey Tzeng, 12 The Box Opened The box must have opened. What else could produce such things? Yes, there’s no better word for them, Some man and some animal. Some half-and-half And some neither at all. They cannot be ordered, cannot be named. Angels stabbing and hacking As man, that fiendish beast, serenely plays on. Who fights for who? They eat each other And yet they are each other. Now my head spins. For we may not even be sure of the supposed “moon” in the background. This painting turns day to night And night to day.
