[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 Anna Forsythe at anna@youngwritersproject.org.
Maddie Crowne, 13, of Weybridge, writes about her frustration with being told what to do and how to act. She questions how you can live in a “free country,” and not feel free to be your own person.
Easy Things Can Be Harder than Hard Things
By Maddie Crowne
[I] am told:
Who I should be
Who I shouldn’t be
Who I should talk to
Who I shouldn’t talk to
What I should do
What I shouldn’t do
What I am
What I am not
When I can talk
When I can’t talk
When I can
When I can’t
Where I should
Where I shouldn’t
Where I can
Where I can’t
How I should act
How I shouldn’t act
How I should
How I shouldn’t
…
Excuse me, I’m sorry, I thought
that I live in a free country.
Whoops, my mistake.
I don’t get it…
We abolished slavery (kind of).
We earned a couple of rights for women (a couple).
But I still don’t qualify as my own person?
Why are easy things harder than hard things?