Colors (Panasonic Lumix ZS200) By Sage Millen, 13 (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), published in Stone Soup April 2022 A note from Caleb Good morning and happy Saturday! The last time I wrote the newsletter I led off by mentioning California’s need for April showers—well, the rain has started to fall, albeit in short bursts, and with it has come an abundance of flowers. (It’s not yet May, but the old adage can’t always be spot on.) In Santa Cruz, it is even scheduled to be raining right now, as this newsletter is being sent off, at 9 AM! And, scheduled for exactly a week from right now, at 9 AM Pacific, is our first Writing Workshop of the spring session—William Rubel’s—to be followed by Conner Bassett’s at 11 AM Pacific. You can sign up for both of these classes, as well as Book Club with Maya Mahony, using the blue button, below. I also spent my last newsletter giving rapturous praise to a poem from the April issue: “Roo’s Song” by Sevi Ann Stahl. This week, I turn my attention to another poem from the April issue—”Chocolate” by Autumn E. Weinreich—which, while substantially shorter, is no less brilliant than the former. The truth is that little can be said about “Chocolate” without detracting from the art itself—one simply has to read its four lines and let the absurdity wash over them like a mid-April rain. But I will say that in writing “Chocolate,” Autumn, just six years old, has perfectly encapsulated the creative and poetic potential of the youthful mind. Her poem reminds me of something my colleague, Conner Bassett, once said in a workshop on writing nonsense: “The purpose of art is not to make sense, but to excite the senses.” Conner’s words also ring true for Sage Millen’s photograph Colors. When viewing Colors, a logical mind might ask such questions as Why is the subject lying on newspapers? or Why are they upside-down? or Why is their hand on their face? or, perhaps most importantly, Why is their hand painted in colorful splotches? Of course, none of the questions surrounding these seemingly nonsensical elements matter for the simple reason that Sage has combined them to create art that, as Conner said, “excites the senses.” For this weekend project, I’d like you to try and eliminate all urges to make sense and instead wield the primeval, preternatural power of nonsense in the creation of art. Forget purpose. Forget logic. Create for the mere sake of creation! Bask in your freedom from the restraints of reason! Excite the senses! As always, if you like what you have made and would like to share it, please submit it to us via the pink button, below. Flying green ostriches, Congratulations to our most recent Flash Contest winners! Our April Flash Contest was based on Prompt #198 (provided by intern Sim Ling Thee), which challenged participants to write a story in which the protagonist failed at everything and ultimately didn’t succeed in the end. Unsurprisingly, this subverting prompt led to some the most inspired writing we’ve seen yet! Submissions ranged from a violin recital from the perspective of a snooty child to an unreliable narrator’s laundry list of past failures to an old woman’s battle with growing tomatoes. In one story, the unlikeable protagonist even smeared butter on their nemesis’ lawn! 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), here. Winners “Curses!” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “Beatrice” by Olivia Owens, 13 (Jacksonville, FL) “A Failing Success” by Emily Tang, 13 (Winterville, NC) “Cypress Woman” by Ellis Yang, 12 (Los Altos, CA) “You Win Some, You Lose Some” by Savarna Yang, 13 (Outram, New Zealand) Honorable Mentions “Dangly Necklaces” by Victoria Gong, 10 (Scarsdale, NY) “Learning to Fly” by Marin Hamory, 10 (Wellesley, MA) “The Last Leaf” by Kimberly Hu, 9 (Lake Oswego, OR) “The Performance” by Elizabeth Sabaev, 11 (Forest Hills, NY) “Gray” by Alex Zigoneanu, 11 (Portland, OR) From Stone Soup April 2022 Chocolate By Autumn E. Weinreich, 6 (Wilmette, IL) Oh, I got a new snail. Wait! Wait! He is dead. To read more from the April issue, including another one of Autumn’s poems, click here! Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
Newsletter
Saturday Newsletter: April 9, 2022
A note from William Friends! It is happening! The featured image is one of half a dozen educator pages that our web developers are promising will go live on Monday, April 24. The beautiful photograph is by the fabulous Stone Soup contributor and photographer, Sage Millen. Now that the educator pages we have been developing since October are actually going to go live, we need teachers who will beta test this new material. I had hoped to have had more time before school ends, but, we are where we are. Two or three weeks of testing will itself be a huge help. We currently have twelve beta testers. I’d like to have another twelve. What we need is feedback. If you are a teacher grades 4-8, please write to us at education@stonesoup.com and ask to be a beta tester. If you are a child in school and are reading this, and if you think your teacher might be interested, then please talk to one of your parents about asking your teacher to become a beta tester. For everyone else, please reach out to the teachers in your life. This beta testing program is hugely important to us. Long term, Stone Soup needs site licenses in schools in order to thrive Writing Workshops EventBrite registration is still open for the spring session of writing workshops by Conner Bassett and by me, William Rubel. The dates are April 23 to June 4. My class is 9 AM Pacific. Conner’s class is 11 AM Pacific. Yes, you can try a class for free. Write to Tayleigh@stonesoup.com. We want any and all students who want to take the classes, so please get in touch if you need a scholarship. We used to publish book reviews in Stone Soup Magazine. Then, we realized that there was much more demand for writing reviews than we had space, and that many reviewers had a lot of insightful things to say about the books they read. This review by Anirudh Parthasarathy of the classic science fiction book, Fahrenheit 451, is an example of the best of the best of Stone Soup reviews. Thank you, Anirudh. This is a brilliant insightful analysis of the book. You show why Fahrenheit 451—published when I was one-year-old (1953)—remains an important book. Please, all of you, read this review. If you like reading and if you would like to review a book (or books) for Stone Soup, please follow in Anirudh’s footsteps and submit a review to our Book Review & Blog editor, Caleb Berg. You do that by clicking on the link, below, “Submit to the Stone Soup Blog.” Until next week, From the Stone Soup Blog April 2022 The Relevance of Fahrenheit 451 By Anirudh Parthasarathy, 13 (San Jose, CA) Fahrenheit 451 has never been more relevant than it is today. The parlor walls that Ray Bradbury envisioned in his iconic story are similar to the large wall-mounted TV screens with continuous streaming content available for binge-watching. Video games have become immersive with Oculus and Metaverse. Many people (especially children) are addicted to video games, and some play them for a living. City planning often bolsters car culture, with the assumption that everyone has a car, which, majoritively, they do. People either rush to shops in cars through freeways to make good time or order in through Amazon, Instacart, and/or Doordash. A pedestrian walking to a grocery store is a rare sight indeed! As more and more books are made into movies, people prefer to consume the movie version rather than read the same book, which requires a lot more work and time. Movies lack richness, detail, and the nuances of a book, and there’s less power of imagination involved when everything is shown exactly as it is. Beatty summarizes this well when he says “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume” (26). In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury demonstrates how mindless consumption of entertainment over the pure joy and fulfillment of reading and existing as one with nature leads to addiction to technology. …/MORE Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.
Saturday Newsletter: April 2, 2022
Music Lover (Acrylic) By Selene Wong, 11 (Champaign, IL), published in Stone Soup April 2022 A note from Caleb Hello and happy April! Here in California we are hoping for April showers, though the May flowers would just be a bonus! We are now a week removed from our last writing workshop of the winter session and officially looking ahead to our spring session of classes, beginning April 23rd. For more information on spring session sign-ups, scroll down to the classes and events section. In the meantime, please visit our Youtube channel and watch some of the terrific individual readings and playlists from the winter session, like Emma’s from the Stone Soup workshop on Automatic Writing, below. To kick off April, I want to provide a brief analysis of Music Lover by Selene Wong, the April issue’s delightful cover image. Simply speaking, this painting is fun. The colors are vibrant, the subject is whimsical, and the slanted perspective of the piece highlights its jazzy, musical feel. The painting sets the tone for all of the issue’s prose, poetry, and art, but perhaps for none better than Sevi Ann Stahl’s rip-roaring poem “Roo’s Song.” Reading the poem, and now sitting down to write about it, my mind is racing—like Roo, the poem’s subject—with excitement. The poem’s first line “The fur blurr enough slow to know it’s her”—indeed the poem itself—is resemblant of the ecstatic energy of Lewis Carroll. Sevi could have easily opted for the grammatically correct “blurry” and gone on to write a good, maybe even great poem, but instead she takes a risk and elevates her poem to a masterpiece. To begin, “blurr” is in and of itself playful—it is literally the effect of playing with language. “Blurr” also rhymes with its preceding word, “fur,” as well as the final word of the line, “her,” the effect of which is a whirlwind of rhyme that further connotes playfulness. Then, on top of creating an unusual rhyme structure, the chopped off syllable of “y” allows for a bounding rhythm to enter the poem. But what is truly brilliant is that all of of these complex formal choices work together to enact the simple content of the poem: a happy dog running through its neighborhood. I could go on about other delectable phrases in this poem, like “underbrush / or meadow of our yard,” or “wishing of being a car,” and attempt to contain their bursting energy long enough to analyze them, but to do so would take away from the poem’s brilliance. Noiseless pleasure? No, this poem is so good, so coursing with the youthful juice of life that I want to “sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” so that strangers may know the pleasure of “Roo’s Song” by Sevi Ann Stahl. For this weekend project I want you to do two things. First and foremost, I want you to enjoy yourselves. Be free! Run wild! Enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds you. But, whatever you do, if you can, try and do it with a near reckless abandon; that is, do whatever it is you’re doing for the sake of doing it, rather than as a means to an end. (In this case, try and forget that it’s a part of the weekend project!) Then, when the weekend and the fun is over, try and recapture what you did and the feelings that came with it through a painting, a poem, a work of prose—anything! Loudly from the rooftops of the world, Contest News Fourth Annual Book Contest Every year we recognize the top novel or poetry collection submitted to this contest. The first prize is for your book to be published by Stone Soup. Books by previous winners like Abhi Sukhdial, Tristan Hui, and Anya Geist, have garnered important national recognition. The deadline is Sunday, August 21, 2022 at midnight in your time zone. There is a $15 filing fee. The winning book will be published in September, 2023. To submit to this contest, please visit our Submittable page. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! In a work of ekphrasis, Ella, 14, wrote a hauntingly beautiful story based on Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Check out Anirudh Parthasarathy’s in-depth review/essay entitled “The Relevance of Fahrenheit 451!” Classes & Events Workshops Join us this spring as we are once again offering two writing classes—William Rubel’s, Saturdays at 9 AM Pacific, and Conner Bassett’s, Saturdays at 11 AM Pacific—as well as Book Club with Maya Mahony Saturday April 30 and Saturday May 28 at 9 AM Pacific. We’re sorry not to offer a short form filmmaking class with Isidore Bethel this go-round, but hope to once again offer it in the future. In the meantime, please watch some of the amazing short films our students made in the fall session of 2020. You will find details of all our classes at our website, and booking and further information via Eventbrite. Young Inklings Studio Summer Camps Please register for the Young Author’s Studio Summer Camps offered by the Society of Young Inklings! A few members of the Stone Soup team—Book Club Facilitator Maya Mahony, Refugee Project Coordinator Laura Moran, and Caleb Berg—are all offering classes. Maya’s class on Identity and Imagination takes place July 25-28 at 1-3 pm pacific time, Laura’s class on the Anthropology of the Everyday on June 13-16 at 9 am pacific, and Caleb’s class on Literature in Miniature on June 27-30 at 9 am pacific. More classes will go live as we get closer to summer, so make sure to look out for updates! From the Stone Soup Blog April 2022 Roo’s Song By Sevi Ann Stahl, 10 (Bend, OR) The fur blurr enough slow to know it’s her that a foot or maybe a wild ear she turns the corner ripping sod, leaving a heap to run through as she comes leaping through the underbrush or meadow of our yard making sounds of happiness and wishing of being a car to vroom down those highways of pavement, tail spinning, she turns the next corner leaping, becoming a bird for one fleeting moment before landing with a plop on the ground as she skids to a stop finally over with her own song,
