Baleful Strix (Colored pencil, pastel, acrylic, & watercolor), by Zoe Campbell, 11 (San Francisco, CA), published in the October 2021 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Jane Now it’s October, it definitely feels like fall—the perfect time of year to curl up in a cozy chair on one of those ever-lengthening evenings with the new issue of Stone Soup and a pile of books to read. There are so many delights in this month’s issue, but I wanted to draw your attention to a book review, included in our new feature highlighting material from Stonesoup.com. I am a huge fan of the absurd, especially when it appears in the form of an incredibly serious approach to something not obviously worthy of that kind of attention, so I loved reading Brais Macknick-Conde’s review of David Rees’s How to Sharpen Pencils. Besides the fact that I am naturally drawn to the book Brais reviewed, I also really enjoyed the style in which they reviewed it. While sharing all of the proper insights of a great reviewer, they brilliantly deadpan their way through their review, mirroring the style of the book itself, and closing with a gloriously tongue-in-cheek summary of the important things learned from this manual. This weekend, I challenge you to produce a review of a piece of creative work in the style of the original. Focus in on two or three paragraphs of the writing you are reviewing and take note of the author’s word choices, sentence structures, turns of phrase, and adherence to the rules of genre. Do they have particular stylistic tics you can mimic? Maybe something like long, rambling sentences broken up with clauses or dashes—as if they are having lots of thoughts at once, in a haze—or, perhaps, equally long, meandering ones, somehow controlled with commas; or semi-colons. Or perhaps it’s all short and to the point. Or choosing every word or phrase carefully, like a cat waiting to pounce? They might use deliberately technical language, or period speech. Whatever it is, work with your observations to have fun working in the mode of someone else’s style or genre. Understanding our greatest inspirations can be a great way to help us find our own voices, and have some fun in the process. If visual art is more your bag, take inspiration from the tremendous October issue cover art by Zoe Campbell. Her Baleful Strix is so vividly alive, its legs powerful, its wings outstretched, leaning into our space and fixing us with its eyes. Its power is emphasized by her bold color palette, an extraordinary mixture of strong, fiery warmth and cooling blue-grays and purples. It makes me think of fall, and Halloween, and mythology—and at the same time, the creature’s expression, and even the striking title, make me question its identity. Is it really the baleful loner it seems? I feel there are many possible tales to tell embedded in this image . . . Whatever you choose as your creative inspiration this weekend, if you are happy with it, send us what you make! Before I go, I wanted to say that this week we are saying a fond farewell to one of our longest-serving interns, Anya Geist. We already knew Anya as a contributor pre-2020, but when COVID-19 struck she stepped forward to participate in and help us deliver all the new projects we started at that time—classes, Book Club, prompts, contests, and related web posts, just for starters—and she became a really important part of our team. We couldn’t possibly have got it all done without you, Anya! I was lucky to be the team member working most closely with Anya. It was a pleasure from start to finish, and great to have someone keeping me (mostly) on track! We especially had fun teaching our summer camp on starting your own literary magazine. (And what a great group joined the class, performing the miracle of making an actual online magazine in four days flat. Phew!). I want to say on behalf of the whole Stone Soup team that we are so proud of everything you have achieved with us, Anya. “Thank you” is two rather small words, but they mean so much in this instance. We look forward to hearing more from you as you continue to carry your brilliance out into the world. You can read a message from Anya herself below. Until next time, A note from Anya Dear Stone Soup Community, For the past sixteen-plus months, I have been working as an intern for Stone Soup. Now, my time here is coming to an end—I’m ready to take all that I’ve learned into my own community in Massachusetts, and to launch into all of the excitement that is sophomore year of high school. I have learned and grown so much through Stone Soup, and not only via my internship. Stone Soup has let me share my writing and art with the world: photography, short stories, poetry, my novel . . . all of it. I have met other young writers through the writing workshops, and through the summer camps; and of course, I gained invaluable leadership experience through my internship—co-running Book Club, creating an interview series with Stone Soup contributors, and far more. If you had told me five years ago that the magazine I loved to read would become so much more important in my life, I might not have believed it. But that’s what has happened. I am so grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to explore my confidence and independence, and to engage with the community—with all of you—through creative prompts, flash contests, Book Club, and so much more. Stone Soup will always be very special to me, and I hope that other young writers and artists will feel that way, too. Sincerely, Last call for the Selfie Contest! Our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks will come to a close tomorrow night at 11:59 am Pacific Time, so make sure to get your submissions in! To submit to this contest, please visit our Submittable page. Highlights from the past week online
Selfie Contest
Saturday Newsletter: September 4, 2021
Woodpecker (watercolor)By Aspen Clayton, 11 (Lisle, IL), published in the September 2021 Issue of Stone Soup A note from William Hello to all of you during these crazy, crazy times! We hope that all of you are safe from the natural disasters that are affecting so many of us. And, of course, that you are doing what needs to be done to stay safe from the pandemic. I have added a newsletter innovation today—a video! I hope you like it. I think that this is a mode of communication that works for me. Today’s video is about the publication of The Other Realm by Tristan Hui, the winner of this year’s Stone Soup Book Contest. Congratulations to Tristan for a job super well done! I’d also like to mention today—but there will be more in another newsletter—about our editor’s choice winner, who is Anya Geist. I am a working writer. I’d like to say to those of you who didn’t win that, unfortunately, not winning contests and having works rejected is part of the life of the writer. We look forward to reading what you come up with for next year, and you are also free to keep working on the novel you submitted this year. Refugee Project Fundraiser We have just sent out our first solicitation for our Refugee Project fundraiser. I don’t want to focus on that today, as for today Tristan’s book is the most important thing. So, more on this project next week. I will not explain that, in fact, in the words of the song from Cabaret, “money makes the world go round.” Classes As you all know, enrollment is open—we have two writing classes, the monthly book club, and now a filmmaking class starting next Saturday, September 11. There is flexibility in shifting between my writing class and Conner Bassett’s. The new filmmaking class does require that you know how to do basic video editing. However, if you don’t know how to edit, but this is something you really, really want to do, then please get in touch and we will discuss options. You will be able to enroll in classes after they start, but, obviously, starting at the beginning is ideal. Weekend Project Please read Summer Loh’s elegant poem about the woodpecker. And also, look at the paired illustration by Aspen Clayton. I was surprised a few months ago by a woodpecker just outside my kitchen window pecking away at the bark of a quince tree. Like Summer, I wondered what it was going for. And, like Summer, I found the sound comforting. I always enjoy the sound of woodpeckers. There is a trail I go on that starts at the Pacific Ocean and goes into the Santa Cruz Mountains. For an early stretch of the trail, before it gets into the redwoods, it goes through some old farmland. There are several huge old walnut trees along this part of the trail. I always stop to look at them—so many woodpecker holes! For this weekend’s project, I want you to observe something from nature. If you are where there has been extreme weather or fires, then use as a subject something from these momentous days. Otherwise, watch a bird, watch a cloud, watch your cat stalking a butterfly, watch the shadow being cast by a mountain as the sun sinks behind it. It doesn’t matter. Look for the center of your feelings, look for the center of how you are reacting to what you are watching. Note that Summer both gives you a sense of the bird with its “peck, peck, peck,” but also reaches into her imagination to describe what she is seeing in an original way—I am thinking there of the idea of the bird gliding like a paper airplane. As school has started and you may be busy this weekend still adjusting to being back in school—and for some of you, as it was for my daughter, back in school for the first time in a year and a half—I suggest that if time and focus is an issue, interpret what you see and feel either with art or with words. Prose or poetry are both OK. As always, if you are happy with what you make and think that our editor, Emma Wood, might like it for Stone Soup, then please submit it to us! Until next time, Refugee Project Dear friends and supporters of Stone Soup, Since the launch of the Refugee Project, we have partnered with seven organizations providing on-the-ground support to children living in refugee camps, as well as those resettled in host countries. Through these partnerships, we have collected over 300 pieces of artwork and writing by refugee youth. These creative works are currently on display in our newly created web portal for the project, which you can explore here. As we have said many times before, the media so often portrays refugee youth as the subject of a narrative. The Stone Soup Refugee Project provides a platform for these young people to tell their own stories, in their own voices. To make this vision a reality, we need your help. We have set ourselves a target goal of $10,000 to pilot the program. These funds will go toward the development of workshops delivered to young people in refugee camps, the facilitation of creative exchanges between young people, and the work of collecting and publishing more material on the Refugee Project website. In addition, funds will be used to support our Refugee Project contributing organizations and the young people they serve in the ways in which they deem valuable, such as the purchase of supplies and possible scholarship funds. —Laura Moran, Refugee Project Director Selfie Contest Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. As has always been the case, we want these selfies to tell us a story. Think about how masks can both aid and make more difficult the expression of thoughts and feelings. How can you
Saturday Newsletter: July 31, 2021
Forest Creature (collage) by Eva Stoitchkova, 11 (Ontario, Canada), featured on the cover of the March 2018 Issue of Stone Soup A note from Tayleigh Ciao for now! We are taking a vacation from our weekly newsletter for the month of August. Don’t worry—we’ll be back in September with a brand new (and better than ever) format. In the meantime, be sure to check out book reviews, writing, and art on the Stone Soup blog. And remember that the deadline for the annual Stone Soup book contest is August 16th. We will select two winning manuscripts—one in fiction and one in poetry—to be published and distributed by Stone Soup in both print and ebook forms, available for sale on Amazon, in the Stone Soup store, via our distributors, and advertised along with the rest of our books. This is a contest you don’t want to miss. So, good luck, and happy writing! Selfie Contest Since Stone Soup’s last selfie contest in 2017, the selfie has taken on a new form: the masked selfie. That’s why we’re enlisting you to participate in our 2021 Selfie Contest: With and Without Masks. For more information on how and what to submit, please visit our Submittable form. Weekend (August) Project Now, I’d like to draw your attention to Eva’s breathtaking collage, Forest Creature. As collages do, this piece creates an image, in this case a raptor, out of something else. But what distinguishes Eva’s piece from the standard collage, and what I admire most about it, is the fact that she has used clippings of a forest, the bird’s habitat, in order to create its form. Moreover, Eva has made the white space work for her, allowing the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps of the image. In this sense, Eva has managed to enhance the relationship between viewer and art, allowing the two to work together, not unlike the forest and the raptor. All in all, what we have is a work of genius whose primary concept works on multiple levels. Rainer’s poem, “Rainer’s Mind,” is similar to the collage in content and form. To start, both works feature a forest as the setting, and a bird as subject. And, in both works, a bird is born from the fecund combination of forest and mind. The key difference, however, is that in Rainer’s poem, the mind consumes its creation, a metaphor for its endless capacity to entertain itself. But the brutal action of the poem calls into question this cannibalistic ability. The poem’s speaker appears cognizant of this brutality (“I didn’t even say hello”), yet helpless to change it (“I just walked home”). In short, Rainer’s poem builds off of Eva’s collage, posing questions about the mind’s tendency to create beauty for its own consumption—questions well worth considering. Taking all of this into account, I would like you to spend the month of August meditating on why it is that you create art. Then, I want you to choose a magazine—maybe an issue of Stone Soup—and either make a collage that utilizes white space to fill in the gaps of its image, or write an erasure poem by blacking out selected chunks of text. Until next month, Book Contest 2021 For information on submitting to the Stone Soup Book Contest 2021, please click here. To submit your manuscript, please visit our submittable site. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Young Blogger Mason Li wrote about his experience running a triathlon! New blogger Anirudh Parthasarathy wrote about why he finds Bobby Kennedy inspiring. April, 13, reviewed Alexandra Bracken’s new novel Lore. Daniel, 12, reviewed S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders. From Stone Soup June 2021 Rainer’s Mind By Rainer Pasca, 14 (Bay Shore, NY) I was in a forest with nothing but my mind. It opened a little bit— lifted its mouth like a shark. Suddenly, a bird. Snap, said my mind. Delicious! I didn’t even say hello. I just walked home. …Read more from the June Issue of Stone Soup, including more of Rainer’s poems 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.
