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.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” A present – yes. A gem that this week’s featured writer, Gretchen Fitzgerald of Burlington, has found for herself in her newfound appreciation of the here and now, of the past and future, and of all the lessons to be learned.
This place
By Gretchen Fitzgerald, 14, of Burlington
Looking up at the sun shining through the fire-tipped leaves above me, I realize that this will never happen again. This moment, the present for such a short time, will be the past before any of us can blink. Time is forever moving, and it won’t stop for anyone. What we do today will be history tomorrow. It is now or never to do what must be done.
This place where I stand, with the world happening around me, I won’t stand in it again. I won’t have another day exactly like today for the rest of my life. I won’t always be a student. I won’t always be young. I will never be the same. What happened yesterday has shaped me; what happens today will shape tomorrow.
What I do tomorrow will shape the rest of my life. In this place in time, I recognize what came before. The places I have been, the people I have met, the things I have done — they can’t be reversed now. I reflect on where I am now. How far I’ve come, how much further I have to go, the mistakes I’ve made that I’ve learned from.
I think forward. What do I need to do? How can I get to where I want to be? Though I can’t change the past, I am the present, and I will choose my future. We can all choose our futures. What we want for ourselves, what we want for each other. What we want for this place that gave us the gift of right now, and holds our opportunities for the future.
This place, that is an exact moment in time, significant in our making. This place, that will be gone tomorrow, but with us for the rest of our lives.
