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Anthologies Back to Top
When you sit down to build an encyclopedia from scratch, you think a lot about how to do it. It seems a daunting task—after all, can’t anything go into an encyclopedia? Can’t entries be short or long? Can’t they be organized alphabetically or sorted by theme? Early on, we decided that this encyclopedia would include poetry and prose, and it would be literary rather than a compendium of facts. We hoped that the volume could teach us what today’s youth value in objects, people, places, and events. Please take your time and read these pieces in many settings, in the early morning and late at night. Absorb them slowly. Let them sink into you and haunt you later or raise a chuckle. After you read this book, pass it along, just as many of our ancestors bequeathed their own beautifully crafted encyclopedias to their younger generations, and as we are meant to do with good writing.
If you went searching for the real Maine, not "the Pine Tree State," or "Vacationland," or "The Way Life Should Be," or "Dirigo," where would you find it? And where would you find yourself as part of the journey? We asked real Mainers–our kids–this question, hoping their answers could form the guts of a real guide to Maine. Here it is, for the taking. Exit 13 is a new kind of guidebook, a compilation of sixty stories and poems by the kids who live here and know what Maine really is.
In our 2011 anthology, you'll find a group of stories and poems that will transport you through childhood imagination, to a time when you didn't know the rules, through teenage mind games, to the ways we handle our losses and triumphs. Culled from hundreds of submissions sent by students statewide, this book is built on the theme of 'play' in its many forms. Younger writers imagine the inhabitants of a fairy house village and play bike tag, while high schoolers make eyes across a room, play guitar in their basement and reminisce about childhood adventures.
Our 2010 anthology is a collection of 35 stories and poems about food. The product of our "At the Table" workshops, a yearlong project that reached hundreds of Portland-area students, the book is an lively tour through the culinary and cultural geographies of its writers. Some reminisce about specific foods that bind them to their heritage, while others describe a single dish rich with the memory of the people with whom it was shared.
A collection of Portland neighborhood stories and photographs, our 2009 anthology is the end result of year's worth of hard work by hundreds of young area writers. Students' collected words and images create a vivid neighborhood of their own in its pages, documenting every sidewalk and stoop, every basement and backyard, every cut-through and cornerstone to be found in Portland. Let our young guides lead you - we promise you'll never see your streets, your neighbors, or your playgrounds the same way again.
Our 2008 anthology poses this question: If you had only one story to tell about what matters most to you, what would it be? For Halima, a student at Portland High School, that story begins and ends with her hijab, her head scarf. She is joined by seventeen other local students as authors of stories and poems about what matters most to them. Also included in these pages are photographs of high school students holding single statements, many of them distilled from stories they wrote.
Fifteen students, from countries such as Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Iran are represented in our first anthology. In it, you meet Ali killing hyenas and Aruna speaking to his father by phone after ten years of believing he is dead. You meet Kahiye, revealing his first experience of snow, and Stella doing something once forbidden to her, playing a game she loves: soccer. 15 young storytellers bravely tell their tales of leaving home in hopes of finding a new one in America.
Books Back to Top
Kenyi was five when his village was lit on fire, the day he heard the screaming. Unable to reach his parents, he ran to the plantain fields, where he lay on his stomach for a day, unmoving, and then he got up and ran again. So began his epic journey of escape—walking by night across the great expanse of Southern Sudan with his brothers, hiding by day, haunted all the while by crocodiles, bombs, and hunger. Between Two Rivers is the story of Aruna Kenyi's improbable journey from East Africa to Southern Maine - a story, still in progress, of the events, people and places that have helped to define him.
Our first children’s book, Fufu and Fresh Strawberries, is a story about a young Sudanese boy named Robert and his neighbor Joe. Together, the boys make their neighborhood a friendlier, more welcoming place by starting up a community garden, outwitting a pesky squirrel, and sharing a huge feast of fufu (cassava) and strawberries with everyone on their street. Caitlin and Charlotte wrote Fufu and Fresh Strawberries as part of a Telling Room program for young writers. For children ages 4 through 8.
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Made exclusively for The Telling Room by Portland-based clothier Rogues Gallery, these limited-edition heavyweight tees feature bold lettering sourced from Portland’s maritime history. Limited sizes available
Made exclusively for The Telling Room by Portland-based clothier Rogues Gallery, these limited-edition heavyweight tees feature bold lettering sourced from Portland’s maritime history. Limited sizes available
Paraphernalia Back to Top
Teaching artist Sonya Tomlinson and filmmaker David Meiklejohn created the film The Whole World Waiting to showcase all fifteen students from The Telling Room's Young Writers & Leaders program (2011-2012) in three-minute segments. Each story tackles the myths of America told from the perspective of immigrant and refugee youth. This product is a standard DVD.
Profess your love of writing and your appreciation of 80's hip-hop lingo by pasting our hip sticker to your car's backside. Word.
Bound with 100% post-consumer recycled cardboard and embossed with the TR logo, our journals are sure to inspire. Carry one in your bag to capture fleeting ideas. Write a novel. Doodle. We’ve supplied 100 lined pages, the rest is up to you.
Write with the Telling Room in hand. Our pens are made of bamboo and biodegradable plastic–the only mark they'll leave is on your page. Sold out!