Girl with Daisies By Jane Wheeler, 13 (Boxford, MA), published in the Stone Soup Blog March, 2022 A note from Caleb Happy Saturday! I’d like to begin by congratulating Abhi Sukhdial—Stone Soup contributor and winner of our 2019 Book Contest—whose novella Three Days Till EOC was recognized by the 2021-2022 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in the novel writing category. As per the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, “This year the Scholastic Awards received nearly 260,000 entries nationally; 20,000 entries were from the Remote Programs alone! In the Remote Programs, only 9 percent of all works received a Silver Key. And only 12 percent of all works submitted to our Remote Programs received an Honorable Mention. Receiving a Silver Key or Honorable Mention is an incredible achievement.” Weekly Writing Workshops There are two of (William Rubel’s) and three of (Conner Bassett’s) classes left in the Winter session. The Spring program begins after Easter. If you would like a free trial in one of the remaining classes this session, please send an email to tayleigh@stonesoup.com. Below, you can find a video of one our students—Zar, 11—delivering an incredible reading during the February 12th Workshop on Parables & Paradoxes. Summer School Registration On top of the inimitable Naomi Kinsman’s Design a Novel weekend workshop, which takes place Saturday March 26 and Sunday March 27 from 1-4 pm eastern time, you can now begin registering 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 myself—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 my 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! This week, I’d once again like to direct your attention to the Stone Soup blog, though this time my focus is on our fabulous COVID blog that we began way back in 2020. The purpose of this blog is twofold; it’s primary purpose is to allow children to filter their complex feelings about the pandemic through art, but it also acts as a sort of ongoing time capsule with which to capture the cultural zeitgeist of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jane Wheeler, 13, writes of her beautiful piece Girl with Daisies, “We have all used different styles of face masks throughout covid to keep ourselves and others safe. This art represents the way we can find beauty even when covering up part of ourselves.” And Graham, 12, writes of his stunning poem “Life in the Time of COVID-19,” “Because of my mom’s job, I was living in Peru when COVID-19 started. The country locked down because of COVID. I couldn’t leave my apartment for forty-eight days. It was really hard. Things deteriorated in Peru and we had to be evacuated back to the United States. I returned home to Montana where there was no lockdown and I could finally go for a walk and be outside. My poem tells this story in half acrostic form and half free verse to help show the isolation and then freedom.” Both Jane and Graham turned to art in order to represent their unique perspectives, and in completely different forms. This weekend, I’d like you to think deeply about the pandemic and how it is affecting you most in its current form. Then, think about how you might capture this unique moment in time through your art. Like Graham altered the form of his poem in order to express the nature of its content, try and come up with an art form that mirrors your feelings about COVID. For example, if your experience with the pandemic is too difficult to express in the second dimension, create a sculpture or some other form of three-dimensional art. Be creative, think outside the box, and if you like what you write, please submit it to the COVID blog for consideration. Until next time, 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. From the Stone Soup Blog March 2022 Life in the Time of COVID-19 By Graham Kosnar, 12 (Billings, MT) I t started—the disease that just kept coming S taying in Peruvian lockdown O ften complaining about Zoom meetings L osing our minds A t home day and night T rees and parks are bare I t drove everyone into despair O bjects became our closest friends N obody outside walking, walking, walking, Walking in Montana Trekking through Yellowstone The sky is blue Trees sway. I smell wild sage and mint. I can follow Whatever trail I want Passing birch trees Traversing hills Hiking D o w n Into valleys Entering a stream, The water, cold on my feet Feels good. I am home. I am finally free. Click here to read more from the COVID blog 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
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Saturday Newsletter: March 5, 2022
Wounded Soul, by Arina, 14 (Iraq). Arina is in Athens with her mother, sister and brother. She loves to paint, read, swim, learn languages and go to the beach. Her art is currently up in an exhibition in Athens. She’s painted dozens of paintings and her story has brought awareness to hundreds of people around the world on 4 continents. This piece was created as part of Love Without Borders, a non-profit organization for refugees living in camps and shelters in Greece, and published through the Stone Soup Refugee Project. A note from Stone Soup Founder William Rubel Dear Friends — Well, it is again that millions of people are streaming out of cities where bombs and artillery pound people’s homes. The costumes change. The language of pain, tears, and flight does not. Here is a link to the group, Save the Children. Annual Book Contest – August 21 Deadline. It is early March, and so it is that time again—the time to announce the opening of our Fourth Annual Stone Soup 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. Writing a book is not an easy task. I know that some of you are already working towards this contest goal, including a few of you continuing work on a text you submitted to the contest in 2022. With school and life in full swing, we know that it is going to take an extra degree of organization and discipline to get a manuscript ready to submit by the deadline roughly six months from now. As a writer myself, I can tell you that I am all too aware of the key problem with being a writer: writing does not write itself! We, the writers, can only get our work completed by sitting down at a desk and typing. Stone Soup has your back. The fabulous Naomi Kinsman, founding director of the Society of Young Inklings, a brilliant writing program for young authors, is leading a weekend workshop—Saturday and Sunday March 26 & 27, 10-1 Pacific/ 1-4 Eastern—on how to set yourself up for success as a novel writer. The workshop costs $200. However, if you cannot afford the class, then please write to Tayleigh@stonesoup.com. We want any student interested in starting a novel to be able to attend this workshop. In addition to this one-time weekend workshop, I will be holding a monthly meeting on the last Saturday of every month from March through July via Zoom at 9am Pacific for anyone who wants to meet to discuss their project with me, and to share with other writers. (For the record, I am not involved with judging the contest and do not speak with the judges about authors or manuscripts.) I am not a novelist. But, I am a working writer. I am on my third book. So I can help you with focus issues and the meeting lets you share directly with your writing colleagues. Here are the books of the past winners: Three Days Till EOC, Searching for Bows and Arrows, The Golden Elephant, The Other Realm, and Born on the First of Two. Last year’s winners—Remember the Flowers and Foxtale—are forthcoming and will be published later this year. I’d like to close this contest announcement with a general statement about contests. The primary reason to enter this contest is to provide a deadline to aim for with a project that will stretch your abilities as writers. Every novel stretches the author. First novels are especially challenging. Challenges are good. Challenging yourself is key to becoming a great writer. Every contest has an element of chance about it. Don’t write for the judge. Write to make yourself happy. That way, whether you win the contest or not, you will have created a winning manuscript. Weekend writing project. Today, I am sharing with you one project that I will be teaching as part of my writing class this Saturday morning. The writing project today is something that any of you can do whatever your age—12, 21, or, like me, approaching 70. This project is about the sound of words, and how sounds can carry feelings, even when the words aren’t real words. The trick for all writers is to say what you mean and mean what you say. But literary writers, like Stone Soup writers, have an extra task. That is to use language in expressive ways—even sometimes to use language that has some of the qualities of music. Even I will sometimes think of the past as being, well, simpler, less complex, and less daring than we are today. This is not how to think of the past! One hundred years ago there were many artists doing totally crazy things. Truly crazy things. Like, writing poems with words that don’t mean anything! Words invented for their sounds—for how the sounds make us feel—kind of like how composers choose sounds. The 1916 poem by Hugo Ball that is read in the video, below, is made up of “pseudowords.” Pretend words. The only real limit to creating pseudo words is that you create words that are easily pronounceable, slamdoodle vs. gholtzhtzlp. Please watch the poem in the video, and then, sometime this weekend, find a place and time when you can sit quietly and go into yourself to find the word sounds that will express your feelings, or the feelings of a character you may be writing about. If you are a writer, then think of this as an exercise to help you become more alert to the connection between how the sound of your story (or poem) might affect your readers. I also think that you might find that there will be a place in a story that
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #28: Automatic Writing
An update from the twenty-eighth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday February 19th, plus some of the output published below “We are still living under the reign of logic… but dreaming is not inferior to reality as real human experience.” -André Breton For this week’s workshop, Conner had us “let go of our logical brains” and imitate surrealists of the 20th century by writing “automatically.” According to the rules of automatic writing, one should write for a period of time without a plan, purpose, or end point in mind, one should write as rapidly as possible without intervening consciously to guide the writing, and one should avoid conscious thought. In order to get in the proper frame of mind to write in this manner, we looked at various paintings by surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí and action artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, and read the automatic writing of pioneers like André Breton, Benjamin Peret, and Phillipe Soupault, including some excerpts of Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques. Before we began our prompt, we were also supplied with the following word bank, for optional use: Island Frog Milk Mountain Leftovers Grandfather Sweater Feather Rooster Crystal Holy Fork The Challenge: Write automatically for 20 minutes, then spend ten minutes arranging your piece. The Participants: Emma, Sophia, Nova, Amelia, Ananya, Alice, Josh, Zar, Samantha, Ellie, Chelsea, Quinn, Penelope To watch the rest of the readings from this workshop, like Emma’s below, click here. Emma Hoff, 9(Bronx, NY) I Tell Bad Jokes Emma Hoff, 9 Watermelon, cantaloupe, manatee, old shawl, disappearing objects, gone now. Jokes on the water at school, screen on fire, full fire, keep going and run or ride yourself forward make it bad but good and everything looks like the letter F. Everything’s crooked but perfect just kidding it’s all sad and makes people collapse but who cares anyway? Fruit in a bowl, toss the cookies out of the “cookie jar.” I don’t use a cookie jar, fruit in a jar. Everybody, come and join the feast! The table is wide and spread for you, but you do not come. I will eat your favorite watermelon by myself I guess, and the meat will rot, because all the company I have are ghosts that plucked their feathers out on Ebay. I guess I had too many stressed birds for pets. Daisies unfold but was I talking about tulips? Why looks like a letter, feels like something else new, can it be new? Nose, head, I can’t draw. Is this all good, am I bad, am I ranting? I take piano lessons and everything eventually breaks and I will eventually grow up and be scared and responsible and do things, and then I will eventually die, so what’s the point of learning? This moment? Okay, I’ll keep this moment but I know they won’t inscribe it on my grave because it’s too long to explain and too much beauty is too beautiful for eyes to see, my own eyes are on fire. My finger is in a pencil sharpener because I couldn’t find a pencil and I didn’t want to write with a marker. Maybe I should write with a crayon or mow lawns with a glue stick? I should plan a vacation so I can become tiny, because then the light switch will be easier to use and I’ll be able to climb everything and actually be a mountaineer and I’ll get squished and know what it feels like to be an accordion, but I can’t play an accordion, so my hypothesis is that it won’t be like in the cartoons and I won’t make music. Hypothesis is a long word and an accordion is also long but I like the word hypothesis and I like accordions, sort of, though I don’t play them. If you jump on an accordion I bet you would spring right back up because that’s what an accordion is like, and if you don’t clean out the basement right now, I will get super mad and possibly kill you, but the correct thing to say would be angry, because mad would mean you’re crazy, but I’m mad with anger at grammar, but I like grammar anyway, but I also like the word mad. Mad, mad, mad, say it louder! Turtles crawl slowly but the one my cousin made out of a paper plate is completely still. I think my cousin made it. Maybe I crafted it in my sleep? Ha ha, good one, good joke, why is no one else laughing? I don’t think I should go onstage and be a comedian because all my jokes suck and I’ll be the only one dying of laughter and everyone will storm out because they think I’m annoying. Pinwheels and flowers are similar, except one is plastic and one is paper, because I see a flower right now, and it’s paper. Why are you smiling? Why aren’t you smiling? Why is your mouth so tight and grim? It’s all wrong and so is the writing, so why do I keep painting? I draw people wearing crowns, but then I put Xs through the crowns and I laugh and I give them red hair because I like red hair. I like carrots, too, but the bunnies will eat all my carrots before I can and I don’t really like carrots. Are you sure you don’t want to eat with me? It’s nighttime, I should go to bed. I don’t want to sleep and I need to get this olive out of the jar and unstick my cat from the cannon and get the stain from the juice of the orange off the couch, the table, my clothes, and my chin. Okay, but really, there’s nothing to see, except orange and red! I see pink, blue, and so many different shades of green, too, but don’t tell. It all makes me roll my eyes and I see
