Talent unleashed during YoungArts Week in Miami is cause for awe and optimism | Guest Opinion

I’m an optimist. As the child of Cuban refugees, I was taught that you can rebuild — re-create — even after all seems lost. Another reason I’m an optimist is that I begin every year with National YoungArts Week.

What these two have in common is an absolute faith in the act of creativity, which allows us not only to survive, but thrive as human beings.

Every year, at National YoungArts Week, hundreds of the most talented young creatives around the country, ages 15-18, gather in Miami, across 10 disciplines: classical music, dance, design arts, film, jazz, photography, theater, visual arts, voice and writing. These artists are chosen from thousands of applicants.

As a panelist in the writing discipline, I help guide the winners, alongside three other professionals in the field: novelist Christopher Castellani, poet Nicole Cooley and nonfiction writer Grace Talusan. It’s a week of workshops, exercises, cohort building and visits from masters such as presidential poet laureate Richard Blanco and Miami’s own, Edwidge Danticat, culminating in a public reading.

Each individual discipline goes through its own version of this process, also culminating in a showcase that’s open to the public. This year, these presentations take place between Jan. 8-15 at the New World Center in Miami Beach. Attending these will, I promise, change you.

Every year, the young writers stun me with their words, with their capacity, far beyond their years, to connect to something bigger than the individual. It reminds me that our souls are created to create, and that when we align with this, we are better people. To say that this week plants seeds is true, but truer still would be to say that it propels. It is a sustainable engine that gives young artists what they need to, in turn, give the world what it needs.

Among those in the room with us in early January are students from all walks of life. There are kids who have never slept in a bed and some who are the children of celebrities. The application process, because it is completely blind, allows for a magical and organic diversity. Each winner, once in this room with us, becomes eligible for financial awards. This program changes lives.

I didn’t know about YoungArts as a teen, I wish I had. But when I was about the age of some of the winners — a sophomore going into my junior year in high school — my mother sold the little jewelry she had so that I could spend a month at Bennington College’s July Program. My family was completely broke, but I had a hunger in my heart to build things — paint and write. I spent that July with writers such as Rick Moody and other young artists like myself, exploring what it meant to live in the world as someone who believes in the power of art.

To this day, the spirit of that July Program sings inside me like a hummingbird, driving me forward. That is the power of YoungArts — what it gives is eternal.

My mantra, and the thing I tell my own children when my toddler daughter has a tantrum or when my son is up to his 5-year-old antics is: Construction, not destruction. Make things; don’t break things. This is what allowed my family to rebuild, after all was lost. This is the soul of what I took from Bennington at 16 and what YoungArts leaves me with every year. It’s what my mother likes to call “deposits of love.” Art has the power to pick up the pieces, to make something out of nothing, to push us forward and illuminate new paths, new possibilities.

Without art we are left in the dark.

Once you start your year like this, you’ll never go back. No matter what has happened, these young artists will bring out the optimist in you. I urge you to join us.

Vanessa Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of “What the Bread Says,” a picture book about how her grandfather taught her family’s history while teaching her to bake bread.