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.
Audrey Dawson, a sophomore at Essex High School, says the inspiration for this piece came from a prompt: What does color outside the lines mean to you? “It made me think about how imaginative thinkers and those who don’t conform are often outsiders, but there is power in imagination. The results of “outside the box” type thinking are limitless! Also, I included the coloring book imagery because for a child, coloring books limit creativity.”
Spill the Paint
By Audrey Dawson
When we’re given coloring books,
we’re told to fill the pictures with meticulous strokes;
we’re ridiculed for unrealistic colors,
because
skies are blue,
sunflowers are yellow,
and grass is green.
Don’t let imagination get in the way of reality.
Don’t scribble like a 2-year-old.
But when those black barriers
were broken by uncoordinated hands,
unique masterpieces were created.
So, spill the paint
and smear your fingers and toes with color.
Walk away from the restrictions
and leave your own colorful path on the pages.
Walk where you will;
create a life, an art, that is your own.
Your world doesn’t have to mimic the picture on the cover.
Make the sky green and the sunflowers purple.
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.
