YWP: 'Brand-new Friend'

[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.

3 girls jumping in black & white photo — Photo by Carla Gentner/YWP Media Library

So long, summer. It’s that time of year again: new classes, new classmates … and, well, it can be hard to introduce yourself to someone for the first time. This week’s poet, Chelsea resident Marina Sprague, touches on the often-misplaced anxiety felt in the initial effort to strike up conversation with a stranger.

Brand-new Friend

By Marina Sprague, 17

I always have trouble talking to strangers.
It’s something that’s just not in my nature.
But this is a new school and new year –
might as well try, I have nothing to fear.
So I get the courage to ask him his name,
then see the book in his hand and know we’re the same.
We share our interests on various books and stories,
finding out that we love the same categories.
And before I can think or comprehend,
I end up having a brand-new friend.