Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
Inspiration Comes with Rain
By Ada Case,
a seventh-grader at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington
For me, inspiration comes with rain, all sealed up in the thin, shimmery skin of each drop, then spraying, exploding, out of the millions of delicate encasements. I love the smell right before a storm, lingering, waiting for the clouds to reach breaking point, a deluge hovering right around the corner. The unpredictability of it… Will there be thunder tolling out the seconds? Or will it be barely a drizzle, only a few drops here and there, just enough to be vaguely annoying. Or, sometimes, it comes down so hard, it literally looks like sheets of water are falling from the sky, each droplet bouncing off the already-soaking pavement and creating rivers in the streets. Rain makes me want to dance barefoot in the middle of the street, and not care if my clothes get wet, and just feel like a little kid again. To feel like everything is okay. Rain makes me want to write.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
