The journey Van Ert and other First Wave students take each time they think about their lives, transform their thoughts into words, commit the words to paper, and speak the words aloud as others listen is a liberating and moving journey.
“If you write the piece and you memorize it and then you perform it, especially for the first time, you go somewhere else, you revisit that moment,” Van Ert says. “Whatever is hurting you ... it’s out there, you just let it go and you feel a lot lighter. And I feel like a lot of kids don’t understand ... how powerful that is, in any art form.”
Jenny Price ’96 is a writer for On Wisconsin. To learn more about the national Youth Speaks organization, visit www.youthspeaks.org. For more information about UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and First Wave, visit www.omai.wisc.edu.