We are now thinking we would like to record stories we haven’t previously recorded. We are looking for drama teachers, or anyone with recording experience who works with children, to work with us to record children reading Stone Soup stories for posting on this website and on iTunes. We may even produce a CD. We have been publishing Stone Soup for thirty-seven years and have a wealth of material by children up to age thirteen to work with.

If you might be interested in this project, please write to me, william@williamrubel.com. I am thinking that making recordings of children might entail a collaboration between a classroom teacher, a drama teacher, and a radio presenter at a community college or university radio station who could do the actual recording, and possibly the editing as well.

I look forward to hearing from you.

William Rubel
Co-Editor of Stone Soup

Dylan Sauder wrote his first story when he was 4. He had just ridden in a semitrailer for the first time and, to capture the experience, he dictated a story to his mom, he said.

Ten years later, the 14-year-old got his first story published in the January/February issue of Stone Soup, an international magazine by young writers and artists.

“Behind the Curtain” is about a boy searching for his grandfather and finding home in an abandoned theater.

The story was sparked by one line: “The soft sound of a violin could be faintly heard.”

The line came to him from his imagination, Dylan said, and “It sounded cool to me.”

That was about four years ago. Then one day during a writer’s workshop at Raymond School, 2659 76th St., he went back to that line and wrote a story around it, said Dylan, an eighth-grader.

His story is one of two highlighted on the cover of Stone Soup.

Gerry Mandel, editor of the magazine, said she usually picks a couple she feels are the best of the issue for the cover. About 200 submissions are received every week, she said, and fewer than 1 percent get published.

When he saw his story in print, Dylan said he danced around the house.

What he loves about writing is seeing people enjoy what he wrote, he says, “and seeing my thoughts and ideas come to life.”

He finds the time to write whenever an idea pops into his head.

Out of the family of six – he is the second in a quadruplet – Dylan says he and his dad are the writers. His dad, Scott, a fifth-grade teacher at Gifford Elementary School, wrote a testimony about parenting quadruplets, “Raised by Grace,” shortly after they were born.

Dylan says his dad writes more than he does. He doesn’t get to write as much, because he’s busy with youth group and various school activities like Battle of the Books and a mentoring reading program.

“I’ve always been reading, so that got me writing too,” Dylan said.

In addition to reading, he says he also enjoys singing and playing music.

In fact, his interests are so wide and varied he’s not sure what he wants to do in the future.

“That list is a mile long too,” he said. “I really like music so maybe something with music.”

Writer, doctor, chiropractor or even a pastor are all possibilities.

Still, Dylan plans to keep writing. Music and violin, two of his passions, are common themes in his stories.

“Behind the Curtain” opens with a scene that draws readers in and charms them with the magic of music: “The old, worn curtain loomed over the stage. Chairs covered in faded, red velvet cushions were scattered throughout the theatre. A piano that had once been played in the most famous of performances now housed a family of mice. The theatre was falling apart, yet it still contained a certain beauty and elegance. If you listened closely, you could faintly hear the soft, sweet sound of a violin coming from behind the dark curtain.”

The subject selection is also useful for teachers of creative writing. Creative writing assignments are often thematic. For every theme you will find that Stone Soup writers have taken very different approaches. This can help you develop projects for your own classroom. More simply, you can send your students to our web site for inspiration.

We are looking for a commitment from you to post at least once a week. The Stone Soup website has approximately 20,000 visitors per month. Web visitor statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret — many people come and go in a matter of seconds — but we can say that several thousands of these visitors spend a reasonable amount of time at our site so we expect that your blog will immediately receive attention.

If you are interested please contact me, William, at the following address: william — at– williamrubel.com.

I look forward to hearing from you.

—————-
Now playing: Sanana Teresa
via FoxyTunes

A clear problem that we find reading through the stories and poems that are sent to us for consideration by children, their parents, grandparents, and teachers is that so much of the work sent is inspired by reading that it is itself not creative. The source of inspiration for writing that is genuinely creative is life itself. You will find that the stories in Stone Stone tend to be about life — and that is the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s first great writers, was also one of the first to use the term “creative writing.” In his Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1838 that “There is then creative reading, as well as creative writing.” Creative reading implies a dynamic act, it implies a reader who brings his or her own life to he reading — full engagement. It is the natural way with children to fall into books.

Amongst children it is common for the child who loves to read to also be the child who loves to write. It is often true that great writers are also great readers, but it is almost invariably true with children that reading and writing go together. of course, it is from reading that children learn to write.

The greatest problem we find in reading through manuscripts sent by children, their parents, grandparents, and teachers in the hopes that we will publish them, is that so many of the child writers are so clearly readers of writing that is itself not creative. To create is to invent. It it is to bring something fundamentally new into the world, to say something that hasn’t been said ideally in a way that hasn’t been said. Because we are each different, if we each write from the center of our own differentness, then it is not such a tall order to write creatively. The problem comes when we don’t write from the center of our being.

One of the biggest impediments to creative writing is the fact that stories and poems are themselves inventions of culture. There are many literary traditions — not all of which are informed by the goal of being fundamentally creative. Clearly, works that are produced for the mass market are, by definition works in which the goal of accessibility to the largest possible audience takes precedence over the goal of the author speaking from his or her soul. Unfortunately, there is a smaller literature written for children that speaks from the author’s souls than there is for adult writers. And children, I think, are less in control of what they take in than are adults. We negotiate the thicket of unlimited options to choose what we want, but we have more agency than children. But what children have is a remarkablecloseness to unbridled curiosity and a drive to learn. That drive to learn is part of the drive to grow up.

If you find that your child, or your students, are stuck in writing that is not particularly creative, that their stories and poems rely on formula and cliche on ordinary ways of talking about the world, then you will need to give them a little push. You will find at the Stone Soup web site hundreds of stories and poems that we have selected  for more than thirty years out of literally tends of thousands of submissions. The best of what you will find here are transcendentally best, works that reward reading and rereading. But even at our most ordinary, I think you will find in Stone Sou’s stories creative writing that engages creative readers and that will inspire your child or your students to reach into themselves to find the words and the way of weaving those words together that genuinely reflects the unique way in which they experience the world.

We think it is important to encourage children to observe and write down their observations. This the builds the practice of looking to the world for the source material for fiction and poetry. It also builds the practice of the struggle that is every writer’s struggle, regard of age, to say what we mean and mean what we say.