The YWP blog

The power of a ride....

The other night, after five hours of painting at our new offices at Champlain Mill, I headed to my car and saw a young man waiting for a bus. It was cold and, given the hour, I figured it would be a while before the bus arrived. John Canning, our board chair was with me, we said our goodbyes and then I walked over to the young man.

"Where you headed?"

"Downtown, Burlington."

"Want a ride?"

Turns out the young man was returning from his job at a Thai restaurant and was a senior at Champlain College in its Professional Writing Program. Turns out he's quite a poet -- was named the college's student poet and edits the school's wonderful anthology "Willard and Maple." I've asked him to mentor and he's interested in interning.... All from an offer of a ride. Here, by the way, is part of  a note he sent me:

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Mentors

In the spring of 2007, concerned that the volume of submissions to our Newspaper Series was so large that we were disappointing far more students than we were encouraging, we teamed up with University of Vermont Writing Center Director Sue Dinitz to see if we could get some of her top, trained tutors to provide feedback to the young writers. She jumped at the chance and each semester we've had at least a handful of student mentors from UVM providing feedback. We've also had students from St. Michael's College and Middlebury.

This fall, we involved students from Castleton College. They've been great. Castleton, interestingly, is one of the few colleges in the nation that requires all students to pass a rigorous writing test in order to graduate. Last semester and this we have about 40 to 45 students participating. Andrew Alexander, a professor at Castleton, is leading the group this spring and sees the program expanding to many more students at Castleton.

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