Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Hello friends! This week's Stone Soup Digest will have a fabulous guest host. But before I introduce her, I want to share a quick couple of resources for folks who are currently being impacted by the massive fires raging here in California:

• Download Watch Duty, a free, no-account-needed app that will keep you up-to-date on fire status, evacuation orders and resources, public advisories, and more. This app can send push notifications to let you know if you're in danger.
  • If you don't want to or can't download apps, you can use the website here.
• Here is a link to a document compiling mutual aid resources in the Los Angeles area.
• If you're not currently impacted by the fires and are looking for ways to help, donate to Watch Duty (linked above) or check out this direct relief fund for families who need cash grants.

There's plenty more to do, but those are a few good starting points for you. Now, your guest editor: Long-time friends of Stone Soup will recognize Allison Pottern from her contribution to the Personal Canons Cookbook, with this absolutely incredible piece about learning to care for her body and discovering the perfect recipe for oatmeal. We already know that Allison is a wonderful author, so I’m excited to share an opportunity to read more of her work with you today. Allison is featured in New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention. New Year’s resolutions and self-help gurus ask us to reinvent ourselves—be better, prettier, perfect. But the writers in this anthology know that reinvention contains both potential and pitfalls. From cutting-edge voices in science fiction and fantasy, comes a mind-bending collection of twenty-four tales that span the vast reaches of magic and space and delve into the intimate spaces between people. You can read Allison’s story as well as several others here – and in the meantime, you can scroll down to read her work guest-editing this week’s Stone Soup Digest! Take us away, Allison.-gailey

Allison Pottern is a reader and writer of all things speculative, and has happily made books her life’s work. She spent four years marketing and publicizing academic titles at The MIT Press before working for Wellesley Books as a children’s bookseller and event coordinator. She is now putting that industry experience and her B.A. in Creative Writing to good use as both a novelist and a writing/marketing coach for authors. Allison is a 2023 graduate of the Viable Paradise Workshop and was recently published in Trollbreath and New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention, as well as in Sarah Gailey’s Personal Canons Cookbook.  She enjoys science fiction, dark chocolate, and a hot cup of tea. Learn more at pottern.com or follow her on BlueSky @apottern.bsky.social.

Well, here we are, 2025. I’m not sure how I feel about you.

2025 feels locked in a time loop while also strangely unfamiliar, the future a sheet of clean, unbroken ice, beckoning us across. When contemplating the ways history repeats itself and how we’d like to write a different future, I find myself drawn to stories of time travel. I wrote one around this time last year, about a traveler, struggling with depression and isolation, reaching out across time over and over on New Year’s Day to get help in understanding how to unlock his own future.

We may not be able to time travel (honestly, probably for the best) but we can reach out. We can set intentions and break cycles. Here are some resources I’m turning to when setting the course for my year, in hopes they may inspire you too:

TAKE ACTION, NO MATTER HOW SMALL

If you subscribe to Stone Soup, you may also feel scared and frustrated with our current political climate. One of my favorite resources to combat this is Americans of Conscience Checklist which makes activism both accessible and manageable with a bi-monthly list of calls-to-action, complete with their requisite scripts, links, etc. BookRiot also has a comprehensive list of 50+ small tasks you can take to fight book censorship this year. And be sure to listen to Vienna Teng’s musical triptych We’ve Got You – both rallying cry and reassurance – to re-vitalize your spirit.

COME TOGETHER, RIGHT NOW

The best advice I’ve received about weathering a year of unknowns is leaning into community. For me, the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop (now open to applications until May 15, 2025! Go go go!) has been an indelible growth and community support system for me. If there’s a community you’ve been looking to enter, whether it’s Stone Soup’s Supper Club or a local knitting circle, let this be your year.

I know we’re just getting to know each other, but I’d love you to be part of my community. If you’re in the Boston-area, you are cordially invited to celebrate the publication of New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention with me and some pretty awesome SFF writers from Viable Paradise: Elizabeth Bear, Chris Campbell, Nick DePasquale, Brigitte Winter, Max Gladstone, Scott Lynch. Come hang with us at Porter Square Books on January 16^th (and yes, you guessed it, this is where that time travel story is published!)

EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS.

I love food. Except when it doesn’t love me. In trying to find ways to re-engage with cooking and eating fresh, whole foods, I’ve been scrolling the recipes and videos at Rainbow Plant Life. I’m not vegan, but I like to make sure plenty of vegetarian meals are in our rotation. Nisha Vora’s approach to veggie-centric batch cooking that let you mix and match for creative meals has made nourishing myself and my family feel both more manageable and more fun.

ALLISON IS CURRENTLY READING: The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return.

Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.

In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America.

A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

ALLISON RECOMMENDS A FEATURED NEW RELEASE: The Lilac People by Milo Todd

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.

In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him--not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies' vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.

Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

ALASDAIR STUART REVIEWS: Thank Goodness You’re Here

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

Coal Supper is a Yorkshire based game studio. I lived in Yorkshire for 18 years so playing Thank Goodness You're Here was a lot like going home–if home was a bit alarming. And had occasional rat kingdoms hidden in the ceiling of the local Spar.

You play a salesman. Who is a lemon. Sent to the Northern town of Barnsworth to do...salesman...things. You're told to meet the mayor. The mayor is busy, doing...mayor things(?) of course, so you can either wait or go and wander around the town. Brilliantly, both options are viable. A fifteen-minute wait in the mayor's office gets you a very different ending. But, trust me, you're going to want to go outside. 

Barnsworth is a delightfully crumpled, lumpy playground where everyone needs a favour and the only person who can help them is a salesman who is a lemon who is also on occasion very small. The town's layout is the story, as each task leads you into a new area, or back to an old one with something someone needs. A lot of the time you're going to be doing errands for shop owners, and a lot of the time, those errands are going to get WEIRD. My favourite was a cluster of quests for the belligerently Scottish handyman repairing the chip shop deep fat fryer. His cheerfully shouty flirting with the lady running the chip shop leads to one of the best jokes in the game and gives you some of the weirdest beats including scuba diving for a hammer. 

One that is temporarily bigger than you. 

I'm also very fond of the repeated visits to the local corner shop, punctuated by the two sisters who work there going full Waiting for Godot To Tell You To Sod Off. There's a running gag involving prank calls ('The Doctor called and the diagnosis is.. you're a bitch.') that's magnificently nasty. And a rat kingdom in the ceiling including a version of the shop below. Oh and a Napoleonic era Captain who lives in a dimensionally transcendental bin in the back alley with his army of seagulls.

Yorkshire. It's a state of mind.

Gameplay is not complex. You can do three things; move around, jump and slap. The jump is useful because you are a tiny lemon man who at one point fits inside a pint glass. The slap is useful to open doors, activate things and slap people. You won’t kill them, you’ll just slap them. Sometimes stuff happens. Sometimes they just get slapped. I particularly recommend unloading on the Brexit-supporter stand-in campaigning for the return of Asbestos in the town square. Super cathartic.

Thank Goodness You're Here is very very funny, occasionally very squishy (There's a side trip to an Akira-esque meat dimension. Just Northern) and despite the citric nature of the protagonist, honestly very sweet. Fundamentally, this is a game where you show up and help people and that's always going to feel good, even without the chips, the alliterative shop names (Raj's Chargers is my favourite) and the joyously weird Yorkshire spirit. With it, this is a game that's genuinely unlike anything else you'll play this year and you should absolutely play it.

Thank Goodness You're Here is out now for Mac, PC, Switch, PS4 and PS5.

Thank you, Allison! 

If you’re a paying subscriber, come say hello in the Supper Club and share the ways you’re connecting with and supporting your local community. Remember to drop your local mutual aid networks so we can put them in future issues of the Digest.

In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—gailey