“Disco” (iPhone SE), photographed by Heloise Matumoto, 13 (Quebec, Canada) and published in the February 2021 issue of Stone Soup A note from Anya First, a little bit about me. My name is Anya Geist, and I’ve been interning with Stone Soup for most of a year (basically since I turned 14), and reading and submitting to Stone Soup for much, much longer. This is the first newsletter I’ve written! My internship has impacted the way I think about writing, and has inspired me to encourage writing in my own community. A little over two weeks ago, on February 11, my high school’s literary magazine, The Apricot Journal, published its first issue. To many of you, this most likely does not seem like a big deal. Magazines are published all the time! However, it is a different experience when you are on the inside of that magazine; for example, I am one of the founders of The Apricot Journal. Being on the inside of The Journal, I have a very different perspective on it than any of my classmates who only see it in its final version. I remember, very clearly, every step of the process that brought us to the published edition. I can recall, for example, when the project of creating a literary magazine suddenly became real a few months ago, I paced excitedly around my kitchen for about ten minutes. I’m sure that most of my peers would be surprised to hear about the amount of work that went on before they were even aware of The Journal’s existence. Behind seemingly simple things such as submission forms, there were long meetings. Behind every writing workshop we held, or every announcement we made, were elaborate text conversations. And, all of this was before we even published our first issue. So, as you can see, appearances can be deceptive. The presence of a PDF with a pleasant cover, full of poetry and stories, that appears in an email inbox under the subject title of The Apricot Journal, might not be as spontaneous or sudden as you’d think; in fact, on the inside, it was something being led up to for months. Now, on the topic of appearances that can be deceiving, I want you to look at Heloise Matumoto’s photo Disco, in Stone Soup’s February issue. In this photo, I really like the way the light is reflected from the disco ball and onto the ceiling. When I first looked at it, I thought the ceiling was domed, because of the way the light warped the shape of the ceiling. So, this weekend, think about how appearances can be deceiving! Then, write about an instance, whether in real life or not, where what appears on the surface is distorting what’s actually there. As always, if you like what you have written, please go to our website and submit it to Emma to read for possible consideration. My best to you all, More on the Apricot Journal, and Stone Soup Author Interviews Congratulations, Anya, on The Apricot Journal. All of your friends and colleagues at Stone Soup are so impressed with what you and your team at school have achieved! As well as taking over this week’s Newsletter, we asked Anya to write a blog post about her experiences setting up The Apricot Journal. To find out more about it, and to see some more images of the beautifully designed magazine, click here. Check it out, and if you are inspired to create your own publication, let us know about it! Also, have you been keeping up with the short video interviews with Stone Soup Authors? We have continued to post more in the series Anya recorded last summer to our website over the past weeks, and there are more to come. Visit Stonesoup.com to eavesdrop on conversations between Anya and our authors. You’ll hear advice, writing tips, and experiences from some of our contributors and Writing Workshop participants! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! As we mentioned above, so many thought-provoking author interviews were posted to the blog this week! Check out the Stone Soup Author Interviews page to watch Anya’s chats with Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer, Lucy Rados, Georgia Marshall, Analise Braddock, Sasha Miller, Tilly Marlow, and more! In Eden’s poem, “2020,” each stanza represents a month from last year. She successfully captures the roller coaster of emotions that so many of us felt in 2020. Nora, 12, wrote a glowing review of the Betsy-Tacy series of books by Maud Hart Lovelace. Read Nora’s review to find out why she enjoys the historical series so much. At last week’s writing workshop, participants wrote about larger-than-life characters. Read some of the work created during the workshop here. We published an excerpt from Dytui’s journal, detailing her experience during Diwali last year. Read her post to find out how she and her family celebrated in 2020. From Stone Soup February 2021 When You Fall Asleep at Night By Yutia Li, 10 (Houston, TX) (Illustrated by Heloise Matumoto, 13 (Quebec, Canada)) The pitter-patter of feet heading up the stairs reaches their porcelain ears. The room is holding its breath, waiting silently for that sound, the sound that everyone yearns to hear. Soon, the faint melody of snoring drifts downstairs. The cabinets begin to stir. The drawers rustle. The cupboards ease open with a muffled creeeeak. They come pouring out, jostling for position, the tiny objects creating a huge traffic jam. Some throw on makeshift washcloth dresses and suits and find a spot on the countertop dance floor to twist and twirl like graceful ballerinas. Others sit down to chat about the ups and downs of their day. Yet more toss ping-pong balls and skitter around like squirrels, uttering subtle squeals. But most sneak into the pantry and nibble a morsel of well-deserved cookie crumbles and leftover Cheerios after a long, weary day of serving their masters—a meal large enough to fill their
The Apricot Journal
The Apricot Journal: Creating A Literary Magazine
Preface Stone Soup has been an inspiration to me for a long time, from when I first starting reading it as a ten-year-old, never even considering that I could submit and have the chance to be published, to now, when I have been published in the magazine several times, have attended countless Writing Workshops and Book Clubs, and have been interning with Stone Soup for the better part of a year. Therefore, it is no surprise to me that Stone Soup’s presence in my life certainly played a role in my decision to try and found a literary journal at my high school this past winter. I have learned a lot from Stone Soup—how to write agendas, how to plan meetings, how to organize a website, how to analyze creative writing, among other things—all of which helped in the formation of South High Community School’s literary magazine, The Apricot Journal (named The Apricot Journal because South High is on Apricot Street). This is the story of The Apricot Journal. The Coverby Melissa Truong The Idea The idea of creating a literary magazine at my high school in Worcester, MA was something I’d been thinking about since the beginning of the school year. As previously mentioned, I was inspired by my internship with Stone Soup; and I knew that this, a literary journal, was something I was interested in creating in my own community. I didn’t get around to actually putting forth the idea, though, until late November. That was when I reached out to my English teacher, Mrs. Eressy, (who would become one of our teacher advisors) and told her what I was thinking. She was very supportive, and immediately suggested another teacher who would also be helpful in creating our literary journal: Ms. Bishop. Ms. Bishop became our second teacher advisor. Mrs. Eressy also suggested that I ask a peer to help run the magazine. Following her advice, I reached out to Emma Robeau, a tenth grader who I’d gone to school with since elementary school. Emma was excited to work on the project, and so she and I became the founders and Editors-in-Chief of what would soon be called The Apricot Journal. The Editors’ Noteby Anya Geist and Emma Robeau The Beginning That No One Ever Knows About What does it mean to build something from the ground up? With the exception of community service projects in middle school, where I had to come up with an idea and then implement it, I don’t think I’d ever actually created something out of nothing until The Apricot Journal. There is a lot of work involved in making something exist, especially when, as in our case, school was (and still is) entirely remote. Nevertheless, Emma and I launched into it. Every detail that might be taken for granted, in fact requires a lot of work. Forming a shared Google Folder that now has subfolders within subfolders within subfolders, we spent time working on a submission form, making sure we were asking our submitters all of the questions we needed to—and actually, just the other week we realized we’d forgotten something. We came up with a name, which was a surprisingly harder process than we’d anticipated. We thought long and hard about exactly what we were publishing; do we accept essays as well as stories and poetry? What are the word limits? There were also a lot of questions about: what is our website going to be used for? How will we send The Journal to everyone at school? What jobs need to be filled (this one was particularly important), and what responsibilities will be entrusted to our staff members? Additionally, there were certainly a few hours spent writing the standard acceptance and rejection letters that would be sent out to our submitters. Furthermore, there were random, random things that we wouldn’t have thought of until we were actually confronted with them. For example, Emma and I quickly learned we couldn’t activate the Google Meet link in our Google Classroom by ourselves; a teacher needed to do it for us. There was also a brief moment of confusion when we couldn’t access the mock submission we’d submitted to make sure the submission form worked, though thankfully, it sorted itself out. At any rate, you get the idea. Building the inner infrastructure of a club, an organization, whatever you want to call it, is a lot of work. However, once we had the majority of that in place (for the work never really is finished), we could begin to spread the word around our school community that The Apricot Journal was something to be excited about. Making Ourselves Known There were two things we needed to do to be considered an “actual club.” First, we needed to get the approval of the Principal. Second, we needed proof that at least twenty people were interested in our idea (this would be determined by the number of people who joined our Google Classroom). Our principal, Mr. Creamer, gave his official approval, and with that in hand, we set about informing the rest of the school of our existence. Since South High is remote this year, it has a “morning announcement slideshow” in place of actual morning announcements. The slideshow is a forty-something-slide Google Slides presentation, filled with information about schedule changes, sports, and clubs. So, we designed an advertisement slide, and had it placed in the morning announcements to draw attention to ourselves. It basically said, “Do you like writing? The Apricot Journal is South High’s new literary magazine! We publish stories, poems, and essays by the students of South High! We also plan to host a virtual writing workshop every two weeks!” (This was something we’d decided would encourage people to write, and would foster a community of writers.) We have edited that advertisement slide several times now, to add deadlines and new information (“We accept submissions in multiple languages!”), but it remains largely the same. Additionally, we created a Google Classroom