[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Isabel Blankenbaker, 14, of Rutland writes about saying goodbye to summer’s never-ending days and starry nights, as a new school year begins.
End of Summer Poem
By Isabel Blankenbaker
[G]old stains the green leaves,
the summer sun whispers goodbye
as the birds sing their farewells,
and shadows creep over the yard.
They beckon forth the days of cold.
Their shapes sinister and strange,
they are reminders of short evenings,
and the mountains of school work I am to face.
I long for summer’s empty warmth,
the unkeepable promise of never-ending days,
only accentuated by the starry night,
with those unreachable dreams of an infinite freedom.
From the safety of warm blankets I reach
toward those glistening stars in the nights of impossible dreams.
But you can never truly see the stars
until you stand outside on a cold and bitter night.
So I will throw off the warm comforter of summer and its promises,
and step out into the cold starlight.
