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.
Finnian Abbey is a seventh-grader at Browns River Middle School in Jericho. He read this piece, Dog’s Perspective, at the Burlington Book Festival on Sept. 21 as one of 14 writers from Young Writers Project. This piece is also featured in YWP’s latest Anthology 6, which has just been published.
Dog’s Perspective
By Finnian Abbey,
Dear Department for Unappreciated Canines,
Allow me to introduce myself. I’m “Cookie Sugardrops” or just “Cookie” for short. I mean I’m a boy dog; could they at least do “Rusty?”
I’m the Jackson family dog. Over on Willow Street. They think life as a dog is easy, but it’s not. You know what it’s really like.
First, let’s start with the living conditions: I live in a nice, little house and I roam around protecting it, except for the cellar where I can’t go. But that’s not enough. I want to live outside in a doghouse. But whenever someone brings that up, my owner always says, “I’ll get around to that later.” It’s so annoying!
Also there’s the food. I mean, look at it. It’s brown and crusty and smelly and unappetizing and ughh, it makes me want to gag! They grimace when they look at it. Why do my owners think I like it any better? See these pointy teeth? Yeah, these. They’re called canines; they’re for meat. I’m not a cow. I want to eat cows.
Plus there’s a cat. Yes, always a cat. I’m cliché, but I just don’t like the way he looks at me.
Please help me,
Cookie Sugardrops Jackson
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.
