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.
Erin Bundock, a rising junior at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, wrote this piece as a sophomore during Young Writers Project’s Vermont Writes Day. She was writing in response to the prompt, Alive: Describe a place where you feel most alive. This piece will be published in Young Writers Project’s new Anthology 6, which will be released in September.
Champagne
By Erin Bundock,
a junior to be at Champlain Valley Union High School
I find myself looking through
the rose filter from my
Minolta film camera.
He’s clutching a piece of glass
from a cracked
champagne bottle.
A fissure in its misted surface
moors itself to his thumb,
which is coarse
but fits perfectly
when we hold hands.
His hair catches fire in my lens,
his eyes stark in contrast
to the red hue I have
placed here.
He skims the glass onto
the crests of the white caps
as they roll and break
at his toes.
A fissure runs in his thumbprint,
and he tends to sink,
just as I tend to stay
with the sand below
waves.
But when we are both
above the crests,
with a rose-colored
lens,
I call those the alive
sort of days.
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.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.
