[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.
Spend enough time around small children and you’re likely to notice the stream of questions that spill from their mouths like water. For most, that natural intrigue begins to fade somewhere along our path to adulthood – but not for all of us. This week’s new poet, Eloise Silver Van Meter of Fairlee, rejects any tendency toward accepting the mysteries of the world without a magnifying glass and closer inspection. After all, she hints at, curiosity is the best inspiration for progress.
My Desires
By Eloise Silver Van Meter, 17
[H]ere is what I know:
When I feel something personal and meaningful,
my belly bubbles up inside.
My mind begins to expand
and explore,
pondering future possibilities.
I become unsure of what to do with the swirling
and my flushed cheeks –
all my past knowings are turned to
grains of salt
and I begin to consider all of the other perspectives.
That is how I want to feel every day.
I want my perceived ideas to be challenged
and my ideals to be questioned.
I want to wonder why I think what I think
and why you think what you think.
I should be curious about all things:
How the happenings in my small community reflect those of a larger state.
Why certain pigments look so incredibly pleasing together.
Why the vision of the Earth which nurtures all life is so surreal.
Why I have been conditioned to view unnatural, even harmful, things as beautiful.
How certain human constructs have become institutionalized.
How the mere illusion of confidence or love can impact a subject so immensely.
Why time seems to be unpredictable and inconstant.
The extent to which simple acts I commit affect others.
The power instilled through words.
The need to feel rebellious in fashion.
Poetry.
Literature.
Art.
Why driving a car by a place I had never been, but knew I would come to cherish, felt so liberating the first time that I lost my breath for two seconds.
The debate between the power of placebos and natural medicine.
How the mind and body are one.
Why going so low down can lead to going higher than ever before.
All the reasons why death is scary.
Being curious feels humbling and full.
It feels like my belly is bubbling
and all my knowing is turning to grains of salt,
until my mind is ready to collect more grains of salt.
