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.
Bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and … can you remember the last one off the top of your head? It’s called “umami,” and can be described as the rich, meaty flavor found in cheeses, meats and wines. This week’s featured writer, May Thomasson of Norwich, shares the fireworks moment of exuberance she felt biting into another fresh and well-loved umami-heavy food: a tomato.
Umami
By May Thomasson, 9, of Norwich
I took a bite of tomato right off the vine. Umami, I thought to myself, the fifth taste…
(Umami is a delicious taste, unheard of by most people. But still, being the fifth, unheard-of-by-most taste doesn’t make it any less delicious.)
The skies parted so suddenly you would’ve thought someone shot an arrow to break the clouds into rain. Oh, how it poured! It was as if Zeus were dumping buckets from Mount Olympus.
I ran out of the garden. I turned a cartwheel. The wet grass felt good on my hands, and the feeling was strangely rebellious. I turned cartwheel after cartwheel. This moment felt as delicious as the ripe, fresh tomato itself.
