Get your book published by Stone Soup! Stone Soup is thrilled to announce that we are accepting submissions for a book contest. The winning manuscript will be published by Stone Soup as a standalone book (see the other awards below!). For prose submissions, the minimum length is 20,000 words. For poetry submissions, the minimum length is 40 pages. There is no maximum word or page limit. As always, we have no preference in terms of genre, topic, or form: you can submit a manuscript of poems or short stories, a novel or a memoir. We are simply looking for excellent, innovative, unusual, powerful writing. You have the rest of spring and all of summer to work on your book. We can’t wait to read it! Contest Details Genre: We are reading in all genres. You can submit a collection of poems, a memoir, a short story collection, a collection of personal narratives, a novel, a graphic novel… you name it! Length: For prose (fiction or memoir) submissions, the minimum length is 20,000 words. For poetry submissions, the minimum length is 40 pages. There is no maximum word or page limit. Age Limit: For this contest, we will accept manuscripts written by those age 14 or under. Deadline: Monday August 10, 2020 11:59 p.m. (Pacific Time). Entry fee: $15.00 Multiple Submissions are accepted but you must submit each as an individual entry and pay the fee each time. Results and Prizes: We will select one winning manuscript to be published in 2021 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 to libraries and other vendors. We will also name a handful of finalists. Publication: We will consider all work submitted as part of the contest for potential publication in the Magazine or as standalone volumes, if our budget allows. Submissions: All entries must be sent to us before the closing date via our Submittable portal, here.
writing activity
Writing Activity: Using Framing to Add Depth and Power
Emma McKinny’s story “Windsong,” is about going to a performance of Dr. Atomic, an opera by John Adams with libretto by Peter Sellers. Her father is the lead singer. You can use your research skills to get information on the actual performance and its reviews online, but here we want to focus on one element of the story–the way in which Emma frames her narrative. Framing is the subject of this writing project. The basic history you need to know is that the United States invented and tested the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II. The bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed in Los Alamos. These bombs ended the war with Japan, which surrendered after they were dropped. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of civilizations were killed by these weapons, whole sections of the two cities that were the victims of these bombs were obliterated. These bombs gave humans god-like powers which J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the lab, and the Doctor in the opera’s title, Dr. Atomic, understood. He quickly became concerned about the consequences of his invention. You also need to know that Los Alamos is visible from Santa Fe and this is especially true at night when its lights glow from the mountain ridge where it is located. “Windsong” takes place in the Santa Fe Opera House, a fabulous outdoor theater that sits under the distant gaze of Los Alamos, the place where the bomb-making that is the center of the opera’s story took place. The author goes through a huge emotional experience during the Opera performance. Those of you who attend operas, ballet, and traditional theater may have experienced these deep emotional moments. And then there is the clapping. And the lights go back up. And then you have to get up from your seat and make your way home, behaving normally, with this deeply emotional experience still inside you: “turmoil boiling in the pit of” ones stomach, as Emma puts it. To help the reader understand her experience, and express it herself, she gives her feeling and emotion to the wind which blows through the Santa Fe Opera house. She whispers to the wind the same good-luck phrase she had called out to her father in the beginning, thus transferring the art of the opera and the performers to nature. Let the wind howl, like a wolf, adding its voice to the power of theater. The Activity Write a story where an element at the beginning–a framing device–introduces a powerful idea into the story, that you can use to develop your story, and then return to at the end to convey even greater depth of meaning to it. To help you see how this can work, read “Windsong”. In “Windsong,” the phrase “in bocca al lupo,” introduces a series of related ideas about sound and the elements: it relates to the wind, a wolf’s howl, the power of art and performance, all of which carry through the whole story in various ways. When the author of the story comes back to that same phrase at the end, we all have a greater depth of understanding that allows us to read even more into it. When you plan your story, think about your key message and image, and think of a way you can introduce it as a framing device early on. Try to carry your framing device through your story, and then, as in “Windsong”, come back to it explicitly towards the end. By this stage, if you have woven the ideas into your story, your frame–and your story–will have great depth.
Saturday Newsletter: August 31, 2019
“Bird in the Clouds” Photograph by Hannah Parker, 13 (Burlington, VT), published in Stone Soup Magazine, May 2019. A note from Emma Wood As a teacher of literature, I am constantly thinking of new ways to categorize ways of writing, so that I can say to my students, “Poetry is this,” and “Fiction is that.” Since I love to organize and arrange, these kinds of neat categories are very satisfying to me. However, reading—and especially reading submissions for Stone Soup—serves as a constant reminder that these categories can be both limiting and unproductive. There are short stories that read like poems, poems that read like stories and look like art, and art that tells stories. Often, art that crosses these generic boundaries (meaning, the boundaries of genres) is the most powerful and the most creative. This weekend, I encourage you to create outside of the usual boxes. For writers: Instead of sitting down with the intent to write a story or a poem or a personal narrative, sit down to simply . . . write. Since some structure is always helpful, maybe set a timer for 10 minutes and look at Hannah Parker’s stunning image “Bird in the Clouds” (above) for inspiration. Try to write without stopping for the whole 10 minutes, letting the words and your mood lead. For visual artists: instead of taking photos of a picturesque scene or an interesting object, think of creating your own scene. How might you tell a story with an image? How much can you convey without any words at all? Similarly, if you paint or draw, challenge yourself to draw a story, rather than a thing. I encourage you to look at the paintings of Pieter Bruegel for inspiration. Alternatively, think of ways to incorporate text into your visual art. Maybe that means using watercolors over a newspaper story or adding text to a photograph. Whatever you do, do it in the spirit of experimentation and play! Until next week, Customer service and online accounts This week we launched a new Customer Service FAQ to answer some of the questions we have been receiving most often in the last few weeks since launching our new website and order-processing functions. The FAQ starts off with advice on how to log in to the new “My Account” facility and moves through more detailed questions about checking your subscription details, updating your payment information, and more. If you have been wondering about how something works on the new site, take a look! Plus, you can always write to us at subscriptions@stonesoup.com with any questions about your account or our services in general. We love hearing from you and we want to help. Do you have an outstanding query with Stone Soup? In the past couple weeks, we have become aware that our former fulfillment house has for some time been taking messages and answering customer queries even though they no longer work for us. Some of the information given out to subscribers was incorrect, other issues were not followed up on as promised, and they had not been passing any details of the messages or calls on to us. If you have an open query with Stone Soup, especially one left by phone or sent to an email address with the letters “icn” included in it, would you please resubmit it by writing to us direct at subscriptions@stonesoup.com? We will deal with it for you right away. Thank you. Please note that any old customer service email address(es) and telephone numbers that you may have noted are no longer functional. Please delete them from your records. We do not currently have a facility to take telephone queries. We intend to reintroduce that facility within the coming months, and for now we ask you please to email us with all of your requests and questions at subscriptions@stonesoup.com. We will keep you informed about improvements to the site and to our customer service as we work on it over the coming weeks and months. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! We’ve published another short interview with a former contributor to the blog. Siena DeBenedittis wrote the story “Illuminated,” which was published in our March/April 2015 issue. Now she’s a college student studying environmental studies and English. Her interview is full of great advice, including, “Rejection is an opportunity to improve.” Read it here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson Reviewed by Kate Choi, 14 (Seoul, South Korea) What is hope? Why do we feel hope? And why is hope so important to us? In a story from Greek mythology, hope was famously the only item to remain in Pandora’s box after it released the evils of the world, demonstrating just how valuable hope is to us: had hope escaped from our possession, humanity would have been unable to survive the evils of the world. Emily Dickinson believed in the power and value of hope just as strongly. Famously reclusive, this 19th-century American poet remained largely unpublished during her lifetime, by her own choice. After her death in 1886, however, her poems were discovered and published by her close friends and family. Since then, Dickinson has grown to become one of the most mysterious, emblematic, and loved poets of all time with her short but powerful poems. Much of her poetry is devoted to exploring the nature of life, death, and what she called the “Circumference,” the boundary where the reality that we know meets that of the sublime—God, for example, or for the less religiously inclined, Truth with a capital T. Dickinson was the first poet to really capture my attention when I was younger, and she is now one of my all-time favorite writers. In her beautiful poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Dickinson explores the power of hope and what it means to us as humans. …/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,
