Become a Blogger at StoneSoup.com
We are looking for teachers and homeschoolers who would like to blog about their work teaching children 8 to 13. We are particularly interested in those of you who use material by children in your curriculum. You will have your own place on our site so your friends, colleagues, and the general public will be able to follow your work.
Please contact me, William Rubel. Tell me a little about yourself. We would expect you to post at least once a week during your school year. You will be able to post directly into the blog or by email.
First Person Narrative
This story, told from the point of view of the first person, is short but wound tight, like a spring. The story flows from beginning to end, concluding in a climax, Piper has succeeded in doing something that is very difficult – getting the reader of a short story to so identify with the character that we, too, feel the relief of the ending, we, too, feel overwhelmed by what is happening and a sense of exhilaration as we read the last words!
Write about an obsession
Lots of girls dream of horses. And there are lots of stories about horse-loving girls. What makes this story special, The Horse’s Reins, by Nicholas La Cortiglia, is how Nicholas, through attention to detail, makes Julie into a full-as-life character, a girl with an obsession, but a girl who is also a normal child within a family.
The Young Visiters
Daisy Ashford’s 1919 Best Seller, The Young Visiters
[where to put links to Amazon? There are new editions, used first editions of $24, and a TV movie.]
The Google Books PDF of the 1919 edition: The Young Visiters
The Young Visiters sold 300,000 copies in 1919! And that was just in Britain.
The introduction to The Young Visiters was written by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. In Britain, The Young Visiters was published by the prestigious house of Chatto and Windus; in the U.S. by George H. Doran. The book was published without corrections for spelling or punctuation.
The first third of the twentieth century was a period of great ferment in the arts. This is the time when the arts became more abstract, this including painting, sculpture, music and the literary arts as well. Many of the period’s finest writers, particularly in Europe, began complex literary experiments, including jettisoning standard grammatical forms and typographic conventions: The Death of Vergil by the German author Hermann Broch, Finnegan’s Wake by the Irish author James Joyce, and The Sound and the Fury by the American writer William Faulkner are classic examples of authors stretching the limits of standard grammatical form. Publishing children’s writing without corrections in 1919 spoke, not to indulgence or a lapse in standards, but to a courageous look at the achievements of naïve artists, of artists working without a full complement of technical skills, but with something to say and the will to say it.
When we published Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman in 1978, it was no longer possible, if one wanted the work to be taken seriously, to publish a child’s manuscript virtually as is. Or at least so it seemed to us then, and still does today. We standardize spelling and punctuation in Stone Soup (and did so in Crippled Detectives), although we do leave grammatical innovations, as we did in the work of the Vietnamese boy Huong Nguyen.
As you read The Young Visiters (you may want to download the book, as it is “rarther long,” as Daisy Ashford would have put it, for computer reading), you will find yourself immersed in the world of popular romantic fiction of the first decades of this century. Re-reading The Young Visiters makes me feel much more tolerant of student writing that is heavily influenced by mass culture. It reminds me that we learn by copying; that the desire, and then the will to carry through with the desire to tell a story is the true underpinning that makes all great artists great. The rest of us are those who have made a list of great titles for our books, but haven’t been able to make the books to go along with them!
Submitting Creative Writing for Publication
Stone Soup provides the opportunity for students to learn about the publication process. Our contributors’ guidelines include information about format, response time, and payment. It’s nice when submissions are accompanied by a cover letter; students can learn the proper way to write and format a professional letter. Because of the high volume of submissions received at Stone Soup, it’s a good idea to discuss expectations with your students. Even though a story is very good, it might not be accepted for publication. Editors are just people, like yourself, with personal tastes and opinions. It’s an adventure to send your work off to a magazine—you never know if you don’t try!
Creative Writing Models
The creative writing that appears in the pages of Stone Soup is the cream of the crop. From the hundreds of submissions we receive every month, only a handful are selected for publication. Family history, the loss of a beloved pet, starting over in a new school—these are just a few of the themes found in Stone Soup. Many teachers tell us they build their creative writing lessons around Stone Soup stories, focusing on such elements as plot, character development, dialogue, sense of place. A story in Stone Soup might remind a student of a similar experience in his or her own life that can form the basis of a story. Poems in Stone Soup are keenly observed, lyrical depictions of nature, the seasons, a special time of day, a life-changing moment. Are the trees bursting with color on a crisp fall day? With a Stone Soup poem as the starting point, take your students outside with pen and paper. Have them sit quietly for a while and write about what they see and feel. Back in the classroom, discuss what makes a good poem. How do your students’ poems compare with the poems in Stone Soup? How can they be better?
