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Each year, the Telling Room publishes a theme-based anthology of student work. We crisscross Greater Portland to ask groups of students to come visit our writing center where we work intensively with young writers of all ages and abilities. We begin by creating lists and stories, song lyrics and poems. We read and talk and try to describe the particular smell of Commercial Street on a given day. Some students work with us for a few hours, others we meet during an intensive week or two, and still others we have the pleasure of coming to know over the better part of a year.
In our newest anthology, How To Climb Trees, 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 highschoolers make eyes across a room, play guitar in their basement and reminisce about childhood adventures. Our 2011 Founder's Prize winner, Fadumo Issack's, story about climbing trees in Ifo refugee camp sets the tone for this lively and sometimes heart-wrenching book about what it means to play.
Can I Call You Cheesecake? is a collection of 35 Stories and Poems about food. The product of our 2010 "At the Table" workshops, a year-long 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 girl dances on her dining room table in shiny red cowboy boots eating sticky cantelope, while a boy recalls his father through the taste of lemon stew. One girl imagines herself as a carrot swimming in gravy, while another becomes a measuring spoon, coated with fudge and flour. This anthology is richly flavored and satisfying to the last morsel.
A collection of Portland neighborhood stories and photographs, our 2009 anthology Tearing Down the Playground is the end result of year's worth of hard work by hundreds of young area writers. The 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. Here you'll find the truth of the city's streets, byways, and neighborhoods: Sherman, Valley, Sagamore, KP, Riverton, Deering, and the wharves. Come explore the city with fresh eyes. 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, I Carry It Everywhere, 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, including Abde, Andrew, Colin, Ekhlas, Nestor, Rickey, Samakab, and Zaki - young storytellers from A to Z, from fourteen to eighteen years old, from South Portland, Maine to Mogadishu, Somalia - 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, I Remember Warm Rain. 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. These rich stories were written as part of The Telling Room's yearlong Story House Project, a multi-media initiative built on the collaborative efforts of local artists, writers, filmmakers, sound technicians, teachers and the 15 young storytellers who bravely told their tales of leaving home in hopes of finding a new one in America.
All of our young authors worked with our collective of professional novelists, journalists, poets, screenwriters, artists, and teachers, being and becoming the storytellers they truly are. We are proud to present these anthologies, as they represent truth in action: we believe that young writers deserve an audience, and that by bringing their writing from imaginitive play to full blown publication they are getting one.
To order our books, please visit our online store or head over to Longfellow Books, where our anthologies have been their most popular sellers!
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