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 contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
“Between two pines is a doorway to another world,” conservationist John Muir wrote, and it’s true that enveloping ourselves in nature can shift our perspective and lighten our mood. This week’s writer, Lizzy Jutras of Putney, captures a moment of airy gaiety dancing among the trees, the stars, and the fireflies.
Afterglow
Lizzy Jutras, 13, Putney
As the tiny lights danced along the edge of the cabin, framing our faces in the pale-yellow light of the fading sun, we danced to the songs we’d learned in elementary school.
Daisies crowned our heads and the breeze brushed against our faces, trickling through our hair and blowing the willowy curtains from the windows. Outside, the dogs played tag with butterflies and the trees billowed up above in the canopy of green.
Salt, carried on the wind, tickled our noses as the songs ended, and the sun set, leaving us alone with the light of the moon and stars to guide us to our beds and curl up with the dogs till we fell, gently, into a deep sleep. The glow of the fireflies and sound of waves would keep us in a cradled bliss till morning.
