Glimmer (Panasonic ZS200) by Sage Millen, 13; published in Stone Soup November 2022 A special announcement from William Dear Friends! Firstly, on a personal note, I hope you all have a truly fabulous Christmas Day. My daughter and I will cook our Christmas meal on our fireplace. Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Magic of Fire. So, you can imagine us eating by candlelight in a room dancing with shadows, standing outside of time and place. Our table is from 1800, and our silverware from the same period. I have piano sconces on the walls in all of our rooms so at night we move within this lovely soft light. I have tried to make a home in which poetry is life. However, we are not in the eighteenth century, so the day after Christmas you may imagine my daughter and I strapped into an airplane seat heading for New York. As my daughter is now sixteen, this will be our first visit to New York City when we can do more adult things—magic shows, cabaret, off-Broadway plays. We are both very excited! I wish each of you the best for this holiday, and may next year be a healthy and rewarding year for all of you. And now, for the Stone Soup news! I have the best Stone Soup news imaginable! News that is so good I cannot even believe it myself: After fifty years, I have just stepped down as President and CEO of Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., turning over that role to our brilliant and beyond competent editor, Emma Wood. This is a generational shift. Emma is roughly forty years younger than I am. This will make Stone Soup young again. I find it totally amazing that it has all worked out. There is no better outcome for Stone Soup than to have Emma as its leader. You all know Emma’s work as editor of Stone Soup. Under her direction the magazine has thrived as the preeminent showcase and support community for young writers and artists. Her work with the Stone Soup Annual Book Contest broke new ground in the history of publishing creative work by young authors. What you will not know is that in addition to being a gifted editor, she is also massively competent in ways that I am not. She brings to Stone Soup the management skills Stone Soup needs to thrive. Under Emma’s leadership, the future of Stone Soup is assured. The first issue of the magazine was published in May 1973. I can’t imagine a better 50th-anniversary present for Stone Soup than Emma Wood—poet, translator, editor, and now our new leader. If Stone Soup could talk, it would also say, “Thank you, Emma, for giving me new life!” I am seventy. I am a writer with, what can I say, too many irons in the fire! There are so many it is an embarrassment. Most pressing, I have a big book on the history of bread that is “out of contract,” a polite name for a book that is not just late, but super, super late! I should now be able to complete my Book of Bread by this time next year. I have a big project concerning Amanita muscaria, the mushroom you will all know from the mushroom emoji and cartoons—the mushroom with a red cap and white dots. A lab that a colleague and I have been working with for a couple years is just completing the lab work to support my previously published assertion that the mushroom is edible after parboiling. The lab will be publishing the discovery in a food science journal, and then I have a lot of writing to do for the popular press. Plus, many, many more other writing projects in various states of completion. So, for me, I am looking to sprint in the next ten years to complete what I can. So, don’t imagine me with my feet up taking in the sun on a tropical beach. I will be writing. Everyday. And because I love teaching my students, I will continue teaching my Saturday creative writing class, next on offer in the spring. To offer continuity, I am also staying on the Board of Children’s Art Foundation. As I step down after fifty years, the favor you can do for me, the thank you you can offer me for my work here, is to please give Emma your support in any way you can. In the next newsletter, the last of this year, Emma will be writing to you as Stone Soup’s President with full authority over the company. As she develops her plans, I am sure she will be reaching out to you collectively, and in some cases, individually. She will, for sure, be asking for financial support to enable her to realize her dreams for the organization. I suspect she may also be asking some of you to help with skills that will help her implement her programs. I strongly encourage you to attend the Donor Meeting on January 14th to hear more about her vision for Stone Soup. I’d like to thank all of you for your support for Stone Soup while I was its leader and I’d like to thank all of you for the support you will give to Emma as she moves the magazine into its 50th year, and beyond. And, to you, Emma, words cannot express the depth of my thanks to you, and my admiration for your work at Stone Soup. Thank you, as I enter the last decades of my life, for breathing new life into this dream of nineteen-year-old me. Thank you for keeping this candle for creative young writers and artists alight. All my best for the new year, From Stone Soup December 2022… The Little Christmas Tree By Celia Chen, 10 Once upon a peaceful time, there was a little Christmas tree. He wasn’t that much different from the other fir trees on the little mountainside. Day by
William Rubel
Writing Workshop #75: Core Temperaments
An update from our seventy-fifth writing workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, November 19 In this workshop, the participants learned how to base characters on core temperaments. William explained the ancient Greek concept of four personality types: phlegmatic (calm and anchored; associated with earth), choleric (hot-headed and leaderlike; associated with fire), sanguine (happy and sociable; associated with air), and melancholic (thoughtful and deep; associated with water). Today, this idea has been expanded on by psychologists, and it can also be used to create characters. William used examples such as Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist by Dickens (choleric temperament), the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (melancholic temperament), and an orchestral work called The Four Temperaments by Paul Hindemith, which contains one movement to express each temperament. As a mini-writing challenge, the participants had five minutes to create a character based on one core concept—“earth,” “fire,” “air,” or “water.” The Challenge: Create one or multiple characters around the idea of a core temperament. The Participants: Anya, Ava, Celia, Crystal, Greta, Pearl, Rachael, Yueling
Writing Workshop #74: Mixing Genres (Revisited)
An update from our seventy-fourth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, November 12, plus some of the output published below This week, workshop assistant Liam Hancock challenged the students to step outside of their comfort zones and incorporate two or more separate genres into a single work of fiction. The young writers were shown a collection of mixed genre works, from Beethoven’s famed Ode to Joy to Lewis Carrol’s “The Jabberwocky,” and then asked to extract the genres present within these masterpieces using even the most minuscule of clues. After a brief five minute warm-up inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s “Self Portrait” and “The Procession” by Henry Miller, in which Rachael and Nami read their incredible work, we moved into our 30-minute writing period. The young writers were asked during this time to write a coherent work of fiction including one genre they conventionally write in and one that they generally avoid. Yueling, Greta, Pearl, Ava, and Peri shared. The Challenge: Select a genre that you would like to write in. Then, think of a genre you generally avoid. Try to include both genres within one cohesive piece. The Participants: Anya, Ava, Celia, Crystal, Greta, Katelyn, Nami, Nova, Pearl, Peri, Rachael, Reethi, Yueling The Claustrophobic Genie Peri Gordon, 13 My hand caresses the smooth surface of an ancient lamp, chilling my wispy indigo fingers and inviting me to come inside. Distracted, I just barely manage to pull my hand back before I’m transported into the lamp’s cramped little world—maybe for centuries. I’m not ready to get in my lamp yet. I haven’t even chosen a lamp. There are so many of them, stretching as far as the eye can see through this miles-long cavern, each one gilded and bejeweled, and I’m supposed to find my “perfect match.” I’d be happy with any of these lamps—if one can actually be happy to be stuck in one place for so long, even if it’s a miniature palace in there. At least time speeds up inside the lamp, so the centuries won’t really feel like centuries. Still, I’m dreading it—I’m already tired of this metal, metal, and more metal, and it’s only been two hours of searching. Genies are supposed to be wiser than humans, and yet humans are the ones who say, “All that glitters is not gold” while genies seem to think gold and glitter make life worth living. I move on to the next lamp. It’s pretty, beset with amethyst, sapphires, and silver flowers, but it’s so tiny I don’t even want to think about shrinking to fit in there. Let’s face it: I am a claustrophobic genie. I start to simply search for large lamps. It takes a half hour, but I finally stumble across one that’s the size of a pumpkin. It kind of looks like a pumpkin, too: round with a handle that sticks straight up—and yes, the handle would work for a human trying to set me free. Contrary to popular belief, not every lamp has to be rubbed to be opened. I like this lamp: It’s roomy, it’s easy to open, and it still manages to be pretty. The top and bottom are covered in rubies, the middle in topaz. Knowing I won’t find anything better than this and that I’ll never be more ready than I am right now, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and touch the lamp. Five seconds go by, then I’m sucked in, screaming, shrieking, and, worst of all, shrinking. When I open my eyes again, I doubt that I have opened them. I’ve always been told that the inside of my lamp would be beautiful, but all I see is darkness. “Don’t tell me you chose wrong,” says a rich, malice-filled voice. I blink. Suddenly, a spotlight appears on what looks like a cross between a genie and a human skeleton. He grins as I step back, shutting my eyes and hoping that I’ll wake up back in the gold-filled cavern. “Chose wrong? You mean, the wrong—the wrong lamp?” I manage to say. The skeleton nods. “You’re a wayward genie. You chose based on the wrong factors—size, or beauty, or convenience. The lamp didn’t call to you. You’ll have to pay the price for that.” “Where—where am I?” “Welcome to the Lamp of Darkness. Unlike in an ordinary genie lamp, time doesn’t speed up here. You’ll be trapped here for eternity—and suffer through every second of it. No human will ever find you here.”
