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. 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 email Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Bookworm
Eva Corbett, 13, South Burlington
Images light up my vision.
I’m simply there,
nothing altered by my presence.
Just the words forming sentences
and sentences into reality.
Home
in a world that isn’t my own,
pain of my own realm gone.
This beautiful world takes me
in a warm embrace.
No friends there, but here trust and comradeship are rich and plentiful.
No need for time travel;
I am a thousand miles away
without leaving my room.
Love better than candy,
life better than ours.
Nothing matters;
everything’s here.
Gold couldn’t replace these words’ strong reality,
the pictures painted
across my thoughts
for me alone.
And then it disappears,
my world bleeding back into view,
the taste of words still sweet on my tongue.
Words that teach me more than anyone ever could.
The reminders words form in the back of my mind –
reminders, torturous reminders.
Heartbreaking:
“Just words on paper.”
The world can break my heart in two,
but
a book shatters it.