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.
Zoe Riell, a senior who is home-schooled in Poultney, has been writing on her Young Writers Project blog for four years. She is also a mentor for Young Writers Project and is being published this year in YWP’s Anthology 6 (which is being released at a Celebration of Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier on Nov. 8).
Zoe says she wrote “Gone Spacewalking” while thinking about the Columbia space shuttle disaster of 2003. “I’ve dreamed of becoming an astronaut since I was five, so I had asked myself, ‘if I had the chance to go to space but knew ahead of time that I would suffer a similar fate, would it still be worth it? Would I still go?’ I couldn’t come up with a black-and-white answer, but this poem was the end result.”
Gone Spacewalking
Her entire life is spent watching
the marathons. Never did like
to take part
in the cheering; sits quiet
by the roadside, blinking
slow.
Talks about space a lot; talks about
the stars and pulsars, and lists
off her favorite galaxies
on composition paper.
Always murmuring about
how she’ll go to space someday,
how it’ll be like coming home.
It’s gravity.
Gravity makes her watch
the marathons.
She cries every time
she feels the weight of her tissues
and bones shifting
in her heel. Weeps and makes lists
of black holes on composition paper.
During the marathons, she sits roadside
and thinks
about the universe.
Always talks about how
she can’t wait to go home.
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.
