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.
Molly Austin, a seventh-grader at Camels Hump Middle School in Richmond, wrote this piece on Vermont Writes Day on March 12. Young Writers Project organizes this day each year to honor writing, and receives hundreds of submissions from students across Vermont and New Hampshire. Molly chose the “Free Write” prompt, to write about anything in any style.
Block Island
By Molly Austin
Five hundred twenty-four miles from home, I am sitting on the cliffs of Block Island, watching the sunset over the ocean. The sky looks like cotton candy, and the wind is blowing through the tall seagrass, making it dance. Once the sun sets, the crackling fire keeps us warm, and the s’mores keep us full. I dance around the beach with my best friend Mary until we decide to go for a late night swim. The water is warm here in August, about 75 degrees.
We make our way to the water, simply enjoying the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. It is cold at first, but not for long. My brother joins us in the water, and soon Mary’s brother Dylan does too. We swim and laugh, and then we return to the beach and light sparklers and fireworks. After that we head home. It is one of those moments that you never want to forget, when everything is perfect for a little while. Sometimes at school, when I am tired and just want to go home, I try to go to that place.
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.
