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.
Told to get your head out of the clouds recently? Stay where you are! Even a mild case of the winter blues calls for a little daydreaming and fantasy — something this week’s featured poet, Emmett Jarvis of Montpelier, honors well, with his dancer’s warm, glowing passage across an ashy sky.
Sky dancer
By Emmett Jarvis, 16, of Montpelier
I always seem
to lose myself
in the clouds,
the towering,
ever-shifting columns
of ashy smoke,
how they dance
in the morning sun
like the memory
of an almost-forgotten
ballet
unfolding in front
of my drowsy
mind. The dancer
enters stage
left with the
grace of an angel.
She slowly
glides across
the stage, presenting
her dress of
rose petals to the
mesmerized crowd.
She flares under
the spotlight of
center stage, extending
her arms to
the rafters
before slipping
across to
the midnight
curtains, leaving me
alone in a dark theater,
enchanted.
