[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.
Family is everything. Burlington High School’s Ella Staats writes this week about an estranged relationship with a sister, going back several years. The emotional pain of her absence is felt strongly enough that a figure materializes – from memory into a more solid apparition – at an old, shared stomping ground, with which the speaker reflects on time spent together as she comes to terms with the loss. Staats uses double entendres and fluid wordplay throughout to convey a sense of grief as well as acceptance.
Canyon
By Ella Staats
[W]e walk together again through Coyote Gulch.
Sisters, side by side,
seven years of separation since our last excursion.
The water is so shallow now –
my legs sprouted while I wasn’t watching,
like the winter-battered trees will have sprouted
hopeful green buds upon my return.
We were always exactly the same height,
down to the wire,
competitive about it –
growing together but not in alignment.
By the time I won,
edged you out those few inches,
we weren’t talking anymore.
I wouldn’t have gloated, besides.
I wonder if you noticed.
Now here, with the river at my ankles,
you appear beside me –
an echo off the canyon walls,
a trickle of spring seeping from a rock face,
a pool of tadpoles scattering at my heels.
And we are sisters again,
singing gibberish,
sharing trail mix,
shaping fairy houses from storm-soaked mud.
You pause,
bend to the earth,
gathering a handful of fine, white sand:
your kryptonite.
It filters through your fingers
and I feel the time slipping away,
feel myself moving between bodies,
and together we grow and change.
Halfway between then and now I lose you completely.
And there is our glitch,
there is our fault in the sandstone,
there is the neat red dot,
placed perfectly between two Aprils.
Our D-Day.
I turn a bend in the river,
look back,
am peacefully alone.
