Thirty-One Days of Stone Soup Stuff

A  Stone Soup logo by drawn by David McPhail. When Jack Powers passed away in 2010, Dylan Ford had this to say among his many memories of Jack and his group.

A dear friend of Jack’s who would stop by when he was in the city was artist and children’s book author David McPhail. If memory serves, David had as little knack for holding on to money as Jack did. One day he showed up and made a series of phone calls to a publisher demanding a hefty advance, and asking that it be messengered over to Stone Soup before the banks closed. The messenger eventually arrived, David went off to cash the check, and when he returned he immediately began distributing the money, by buying works off the walls (more, I suspect, out of generosity to the artists and to subsidize the gallery than anything else) including a pen and ink drawing I had done for the cover of a never-to-be-published Stone Soup collection of Paul McGee’s poems (Paul refused to do anything to move it forward. Paul would also be scheduled by Jack to give featured readings, and when the night arrived and an audience assembled, he would refuse to participate beyond repeatedly snarling, “Fuck Poetry!”).