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.
Praise Punxsutawney Phil (still)! We’ll speak for anyone with a season’s pass to one of Vermont’s beautiful mountain resorts when we say we’re thanking that fuzzy, little guy for the extension of our winter weather. This week’s poet, Benjamin Wetherell of Montpelier, charts the path of a skier zipping like a bird over the sparkling snow. (We’d also like to give a special shout-out to Vermont’s First Family of Skiing: Ryan Cochran-Siegle has won silver at the Olympics this February, 50 years after his mom, Barbara Ann Cochran, won Olympic gold — and this, after training at Richmond, VT-based Cochran’s Ski Area!)
The skier
By Benjamin Wetherell, 15, of Montpelier
Snow falls like leaves from a tree,
blanketing the land in beautiful white.
The skier, locked from outside but now free,
stands in the glowing light.
The sky blue, no cloud in sight,
the sun on the stage a brightened orb.
The skier like a bird in flight
soars on wings that were absorbed.
The trees bow when they go by
over hills paved with crystals, small and tiny.
As they look up at the sky,
they see pinpricks of light, bright and shiny.
As night falls, quiet and deep,
it lays on the land a veil of sleep.
