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2010-11 Play Project
The Telling Room Community Celebration 2010-11 from Jay Brown on Vimeo.
Hundreds of young writers, parents, artists, and community members showed up on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at the Portland Public Library to join in PLAY, The Telling Room's community celebration. Attendees drew their own comics, found hidden stories, posed for photos in a PLAY photo booth, made paper airplane stories, added to a story tree, and much more. The performance featured members of the Pihcintu chorus performing an original song with Sontiago and members of Women in Harmony, a scene from a play by a middle school playwright, a reading by a member of the Young Writers Council, and a series of pieces by this year’s Young Writers & Leaders, an amazing group of immigrant and refugee students.
Also featured was the release of How to Climb Trees: 40 Poems and Stories about Play, our 5th anthology of student work. This book collects the best writing from our work this year with more than 2,000 students from all over Maine, and it marks over 5,000 Telling Room books in print. 32 panels of photos and writing from PLAY will remain up on the lower level at the Portland Public Library through the end of June.
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The Resiliency Project - A Cultivating Community Partnership
The Telling Room partnered with Cultivating Community's Youth Growers program in summer 2010 to help young urban farmers tell their stories. The participants elicited the stories, through interviews held in the field (literally) with farmers who are a part of the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project (NASAP). The NASAP growers are Latino, Somali, and Sudanese farmers and gardeners who are excited about the opportunity to begin farming in the U.S. and look forward to producing for local markets. The Youth Growers learned about what it takes to prepare for, conduct, and produce a good interview, through audio recording, still photography, and by filming the process, and learned a lot about these recently resettled refugee and immigrant farmers living in greater Lewiston and Portland. The most powerful part of project is traced in the interviews, available for viewing and listening here. It is the connection between young people and older people, each with incredible experiences, trading sweat for stories. One youth wrote later, “Through this work, I’ve realized to live a good life it’s important to connect to the land and people that surround you.”
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2009-2010 At the Table Project
During the current school year, The Telling Room’s annual community-based art and writing project will be offered under the umbrella-theme “At the Table.” We will offer writing and arts workshops in local schools, at our Writing Center, and in the local community to give students the chance to explore the cultures, politics, senses, stories, and geographies represented in the food we eat and the tables where we sit down to eat together.
As part of this project, The Telling Room will design and offer a series of free, innovative in-school and afterschool writing and arts workshops with food and the act of sharing a meal together at their core. Telling Room teachers will visit cafeterias and classrooms around the Greater Portland area engaging middle and high school students in writing and storytelling activities. These activities might include mapping their lunchrooms—who sits where and why?—or creating their own imaginary recipes, or telling a story about something amazing that happened in their lives while sitting around a table. All activities in this project are designed not only to explore relevant issues and facilitate creative expression, but to make a significant impact on literacy skills and writing abilities.
In May of 2010, to celebrate the entire At the Table Project and highlight the work of all our students and of local community members, The Telling Room will collaborate with local artists and foodies on a multi-disciplinary showcase event and feast. Local restaurants will provide great local food, and our students will provide inspirational stories in written, audio, and video form. This event will bring the students’ best work to the community at large and give us the opportunity to see the talent, hard work, and profound stories of Portland’s youth; it will use the written word and the arts to cross boundaries of culture, geography, income, and age.
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Fufu and Fresh Strawberries
Thanks to support from Unity Foundation, two local high school students were in residence at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for a few days, dreaming and writing up a children's book with the help of The Telling Room. Their story, about the magical transformation of a Maine street by two young boys, one a native Mainer and the other a newly arrived neighbor from Sudan, was created in an idyllic setting in Deer Isle, Maine. The book is now for sale in our store!
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On the Street Where You Live / Tearing Down the Playground / Neighborhood Stories
With the help of Telling Room writers, artists, and teachers, more than a hundred local middle and high school students spent days, weeks, and months during the 2008-09 school year documenting and capturing their own versions of Portland's neighborhoods. The students’ writings and photographs, many of which are collected in the anthology, Tearing Down the Playground —not to mention the songs, performances, and videos created by students participating in our “On the Street Where You Live” projects—created a neighborhood of their own, one that exists only among their pages and images. Students found stories on every sidewalk and stoop, every backyard and basement, every cut- through and corner store. They documented the streets, byways, and neighborhoods of Portland: Sherman, Valley, Sagamore, KP, Riverton, Deering, and the wharves.
We worked with a diverse cross-section of Southern Maine's student population during this project, connecting with writers from West School, Deering High School, Portland High School ELL, Waynflete School, and with students of all ages from the greater Portland area in our theme-based workshops. Beginning with simple prompts and one-on-one interviews, The Telling Room's staff and volunteers ably guided young writers through the entire writing process to form polished pieces of fiction, personal essay, poetry, songwriting and visual art. Their journey culminated in a heartwarming book release event at Space Gallery that drew hundreds of community members together to celebrate their efforts.
Check out this video recap, courtesy of Brooke Brewer:
With each of our writers, we found that their places define them and are defined by them. We found that their grit and wisdom, humor and attitude are the constants that have helped them navigate their streets. They created their own versions of a neighborhood: a landscape made of lobster traps, dinner tables, and sewer grates. Each made sure that we'll never see our streets, our neighbors, or our playgrounds the same way again.
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The Belief Workshops / The Stuff That Matters / I Carry It Everywhere
What do you believe? In 2007-08, the Telling Room brought this question to nearly every student we worked with—from eight-year olds to high school seniors, from South Portland to Sudan—altogether over 400 young writers, who helped us morph it from a consideration of belief to their personal convictions of what really matters to them. Their beliefs became beautiful stories and poems and photo portraits, the most provocative of which were selected and bound into an anthology, I Carry It Everywhere: 50 Teenagers on What Really Matters, a title that sprung irresistibly from a young woman’s story about wearing a hijab like her religion on her head.
Our workshops began in two different Portland high schools, and during class time once a week English language learners worked on their storytelling with Telling Room staff and supported by professional writers and artists volunteering their time. We strove to learn from the kids what got them going in the morning, aside from, we hoped, a decent breakfast. We invited them to write “I Am From” poems—filling in lines of verse that revealed their complete names, food they eat at holidays, games they play, and more. Excited by what we were seeing, we realized that we could make this a cross-cultural project, as belief transcends students’ backgrounds.
We soon crisscrossed Greater Portland to ask groups of students to come visit our Writing Center, where we worked intensively with young writers of all ages and abilities. We created lists and stories, song lyrics and poems. We read and talked and tried to describe the particular smell of Commercial Street on a given day. Soon they led us directly to the source of their lives—to their sacred objects and memories, to their music and secrets, to their joys and fears. Through them, we met the great glory of dragonflies and the stark shadow of alcoholism, watched as one’s city sunk underwater, and heard the news of a grandfather’s death once he reached Mecca. Some students worked with us for a few hours, others we met during an intensive week or two, and still others we had the pleasure of coming to know over the better part of a year.
All of these young writers worked with our collective of professional novelists, journalists, poets, screenwriters, artists, and teachers, being and becoming the storytellers they truly are. In the end, whether we worked with students visiting us from an experiential high school in the Bronx, or middle schoolers from Scarborough, we discovered that boys believed not just in the power of a strong home and family, but in fried chicken; and that girls, even in a racy, IM world, still believed in roses and unicorns as passionately as learning to dance to honor a sister’s death.
The Belief Workshops helped us build on our appreciation and admiration for today’s kids, and more importantly, we got to help, in unprecedented numbers in our organization’s history, children explore in writing what really matters to them. Check out our amazing slideshow for a sample of our many amazing participants!
We highly recommend "Iwoya" by Angelique Kidjo and Dave Matthews as a soundtrack - copyright permissions sure can be tricky!
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The Story House / Coming to America Project / I Remember Warm Rain
During the 2006-2007 school year, the Telling Room ran a community-based workshop called the Story House Project, in which 15 Portland-area students originally from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan worked with accomplished local writers on their coming to America stories, resulting in the anthology I Remember Warm Rain. These storytellers also worked with students in artist Christina Bechstein's Art for Social Change course at MECA to design and build sculptural story houses that serve as homes for these stories.
In May, hundreds of people crowded into SPACE for the exhibit opening, which featured the anthology, three story houses with panels designed by the storytellers, photographs taken by Sean Harris and Laura Lewis, and a short film put together by docu-director Emily Bernhard and a wonderful crew:
The energy in the room was incredible; one student said, "I had no idea so many people would show up!" Another said, "I just signed my autograph!" The exhibit later left SPACE to travel to USM, the Portland Public Library, and various local schools and libraries —stay tuned, it may come soon to you!
Below: two of the Story House structures at SPACE. Photos by Justin Van Soest, all rights reserved.
Their fame continues...
Eighteen 18-22-year-old undergraduates from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia later met at our Writing Center and talked with Hassan Jeylani, one of our student authors in I Remember Warm Rain, about immigration, race and culture, and storytelling.
Aqila Sharafyar, another author of a story in I Remember Warm Rain, has made the air waves, appearing on the National Public Radio show "Day to Day" with help from local radio producer Josh Gleason. Listen to it by clicking here.
