Young 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.
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 email Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Photo of the Week: Katherine Moran, 15, Bristol
“Opposites attract” doesn’t just predict the kind of counterpart we’re bound to fall in love with but the counterpart in our platonic relationships, too. Colchester writer Maeve MacAuley, featured this week, imagines Earth’s elements as their own distinct characters, linked together in friendship despite the polarity of their forces.
YWP: A friendship of wind and sand
Maeve MacAuley, 16, Colchester
A friendship of opposites. At first thought, it seems unusual, yet possible. We have all heard the age-old saying “opposites attract,” but does that apply to friendships?
Opposite friends are the best kind of friends. An opposite friend is there to balance you, keep you honest. One is outgoing and loud, while the other is relaxed and calm. That balance is needed, that someone to tell you no or “that’s not the best idea,” that person to give you the advice you’d have never even thought of. Your weaknesses are your best friend’s strengths; if you need help with anything, you have the perfect partner to fix it.
A friendship of opposites is less like fire and water and more like wind and sand. Water and fire are mutually destructive. Water will extinguish a flame, just as fire will boil water away to nothing. Wind and sand go together, yet are very different. They have things that are each their own, the wind with air and the sand with Earth. When they come together, it might not be noticeable to people going too fast, but if you stop and look – I mean really look – you’ll see the wind gently pushing the sand along, and the sand happy to go.
That’s friendship – not opposites that destroy each other, but opposites that thrive together.
