Young Writers Project is a creative, online community of teen writers and visual artists that started in Burlington in 2006. Each week, VTDigger publishes the writing and art of young Vermonters who post their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for youth, ages 13-19. To find out more, please go to youngwritersproject.org or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org; (802) 324-9538.
Truth telling
Ursa Goldenrose, 16, Hardwick
We manifest our fear in our hands, as a physical thing. Sometimes it pricks at our skin and leaves marks; sometimes it results in stiff fingers, cracking from a stiffened clench. The keyboard invites an unbeknownst realization to form, almost as if the clacking of the keys – spelling out the words of some reality – is the only thing to make the phenomenon itself real. When focus is placed on the fingertips, they jump and skip, and while they rearrange the saddest words, they also often confide a confidence that allows them to be free.
What we write pulls our fear out from underneath our hearts. Steady hands solidify each sound so that when the words are read aloud, they ring with truth and vitality. Sometimes these scribbles seem to be the only proof of our surviving those smaller mortalities.
