Thank you to all the Kickstarter supporters that funded our screening of The Whole World Waiting at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA on Saturday, June 2nd!

Cyrus Hagge, Molly McGrath, Kate Cox, Carol Wishcamper, William Dean, Maxine Sclar, Lauren Wayne, The State Theatre, Winky Lewis, Lauren Dietlin, Matthew Taylor, Johanna Franzel, Tanja Hollander, Justin Hoenke, Pemaquidc, Andrew Griswold, Christoph Deeg, Emilia Dahlin, Molly Haley, Darcy Lynch, Kinsey Peeler, Peggy O’Kane, Evelyn and Donald Fulton, Dianna Leighton, Therese Workman, Ellen Forsyth, Jessica Tomlinson, Laurie Smart-Pottle, Mercedes Grandin, Kai Smith, Gabriel Faulkner-Macklin, Rant Howard, Jen Waller, Cecily Pingree, Crash Barry, Christina Mesevage, Lydia Paiste Badger, Allison Hurlburt, Jaime Parmelee, Chelsea Holden Baker, Portland Theater Collaborative, AppletonRadio, Gina Mastroluca, Heidi Powell, Ahmed Ewing, Jord Plourde, John Marshall, Bob Colby, Cathy Kidman, Melissa Rivard, Tom Quinn, Meg Villarreal, Valerie White, Hannah Tarkinson, Jean Moses, Matthew Erickson, Mary K, Ned Warner, Bodi Luse, Meldh, Kevin Thai, Karen von Haam, Michaela Cavallaro, Ashley Kotzur, Rosemarie De Angelis, Michael Perry, Jan Holmquist, Neil Reese, Jason Wilkins, Airiedemann, Jessica Thomas, Nicole Fonsh, Alicia Sampson, Hillytown, Eternal Otter Records, John Le Flambeur, Sarah Mills, Connie Cross, Emily Dix Thomas, Hillary Krapf, Courtney Moy, Sarah Heile, J. Ashley Odell.

The Young Writers and Leaders Film Project emerged out of The Telling Room when instructor and local hip-hop artist Sontiago recruited filmmaker David Meiklejohn to help fifteen immigrant teens develop and produce their own three-minute video shorts. The honest and heartfelt works created from this collaboration take a magnified look at the teenage assimilation process and perception of American culture prior to, and after arrival. The project participants will be present for a Q&A following the screening.

Tickets to the Brattle Theater event are available here.

More info about the theater here.

Sonya Tomlinson - Hip-hop artist and YWL Mentor

There is something magical that happens when you see something come to fruition that has long been talked about, explained, pictured and mapped out- to bear witness to the moment when an idea finally become real. That is what it feels like to see David Meiklejohn behind the camera and the students of Young Writers and Leaders on the other side of the lens. For months these fifteen students have known about our idea to make a piece of their writing come to life in the form of a video short. Through periodic check-ins we attempted to all get our heads around the ideas, locations and writing topics. Admittedly, none of us knew exactly what this would look like.  Two weeks in, we now know this looks amazing. Each week brings it’s own reward. This week a grateful student, Chrispo, (pictured) caught a peak at a playback of his short and exclaimed, “Thank you, thank you David. This is better than a music video- this looks like a Hollywood movie.” Nerves, adrenaline and excitement collide and a performance, unlike any that can be emulated in a classroom is captured. Two weeks down, the works of four students documented. Six weeks and eleven students to go……..

Mt. Ararat Middle School Residency

Oren Stevens - YWL Program Coordinator and Teacher

Thanks to a generous grant from the Mateosians, Molly McGrath and I taught a five day residency with the 7th and 8th grade Alternative Education class at Mt.Ararat in Topsham last month. For two of the days, they came to us at The Telling Room where we explored Portland—-the abandoned Occupy Maine encampment and of course, Widgery Wharf. Back up at Mt.Ararat we wrote primarily poems and fiction. We discussed life without Facebook, a narwhal apocalypse, bullying, and nuclear fission. We took walks through a nature trail where students flipped down an embankment in the snow. For sure, the strength of this group of ten students has to do with their teacher, Matt Lunt, a calm runner.

Sounds like a contradiction right? Or maybe it’s the balance that the students resonate with—-the inner reflection and the physical expression. The why is not so important, but this group was so kind to each other and so hardworking. It gave me pleasure to have young writers not be able to stop writing and to have to beg them to stop so we could come back together to talk about specific elements of writing. On our last day, they returned to Portland and The Telling Room staff jumped in for editing conversations with the students and discussed how they might take their work to the next level. Afterward, the students held a coffee house reading at The Telling Room where they proudly shared their work.

From start to finish, working with Matt, Carol, Molly McGrath, The Telling Room staff, and the streets of Portland, it was high fives all around. Below is a piece that Matt wrote while working right along side his students during our workshops.

Polarity

Watching my students from a distance helps me see them better than when we are in close. From spot free of snow on the shore of a mid-winter pond, I stand still for the first time in weeks to observe them as they circumnavigate. They move at different rates, accelerating and decelerating, tumbling along through the uneven snow but always within meters of the shoreline, as if tethered by elastic to the center of the pond.

At 200 feet, I can see them as individuals, people working out their lives, spinning in wobbly revolution around their own suns. When contained within 20 feet, however, we are affected by each other’s gravity, our personal orbits elongated, curved, or receding from the influence of others. It’s no wonder that these planets collide now and then, that momentum oscillates, swings unpredictably, and certainly it is no wonder that I cannot expect to be the attracting center of mass at any one point in time.

Most often, we somehow make it work as a temporary jumble of individual solar systems. The study of group dynamics has its roots in psychology and sociology, and we can thank Freud and Maslov for elucidating the motivations of individuals. For a while, we can manage as leaders with these two as useful sidekicks, keeping in mind the Ego and a hierarchy of human needs. But to guide us through the most challenging days, we might do better to look to Kepler, Newton, and their laws governing solar systems, the pushes and pulls of celestial bodies in orbit.

Mathew Lunt - Mt. Ararat Middle School Alternative Education Teacher

Her application said her name was Maryan. She was one of the 40 or so immigrant and refugee high school students that applied for the Young Writers and Leaders program (YWL) this year. I remember talking to her in Mr. Talarico’s sunny room at Portland High when she was applying. She looked me right in the eye with her dark, intense eyes and with strong conviction said, “I really want to go to the Telling Room. I applied last year and didn’t get in, but I want to write my stories.”

We accepted her; we had too. Molly Haley, our volunteer coordinator who has a genius for recruiting volunteers and pairing students with mentors, paired Maryama with me. We started meeting every Thursday in October with the other 14 YWL students and 14 mentors at the Portland Pubic Library to work together to write some stories.

The first thing she told me was that the name she was given at birth wasn’t really Maryan; it was the more beautiful Maryama. When her family immigrated to the United States, whoever helped them with their papers misunderstood her mother and wrote Maryan instead of Maryama. Now her legal name is Maryan. I thought that sort of thing only happened on Ellis Island after WWll, but evidently it is still happening.

Maryama was born on the border between Somalia and Kenya as her parents were emigrating from Somalia to Kenya. She never really lived in Somalia, though her heritage and culture are all Somalian. One day a woman at the mosque here in Portland asked her what tribe she was from–Maryama knew what tribe her parents were part of, but she didn’t know it mattered anymore. But this woman at the mosque was so curious about it, it made Maryama curious and she started talking to her friends. They wouldn’t tell her what tribe they were in until she told her them her tribe. Maryama started doing a little research about tribes and realized that all of Somalia’s troubles stemmed from tribal identities, and she thought that Somalians in the United Stated should let go of their tribal identity, and just be united as Somalians.

Maryama has a strong voice, clear eyes and a direct way of speaking. I often think that I get more out of mentoring than she gets from me. My very understanding of the world expands when she tells me, in her determined way, what she believes in. You are going to hear more from Maryama, and my advice is to listen closely.

Last week, as millions of people around the world were preparing for Super Sunday, a slightly smaller number were engaged in our own Super Thursday. February 2, 2012 was an epic day for us here at The Telling Room and I thought I would offer a slide show of the programming that occurred in a magical twelve hour period. We’re not always quite this busy, but we all welcome days like this when we test our limits and see how finely tuned our machine actually is.

Click. Nineteen 2nd graders from Dyer Elementary School in South Portland arrive at the Telling Room for a literary field trip. Our goal is to engage students as writers and to facilitate a studio experience that encourages them to play, take risks and make discoveries about the writing process. Over the course of 2.5 hours we spend our time moving, thinking, listening, talking, drawing imagining, snacking, writing and sharing. Every student leaves with a really good start for a new story and a collection of drawings of settings and characters with descriptive word banks for each.

Click. At Memorial Middle School in South Portland a team of Telling Room teachers and volunteers returns for another visit in a 6 day residency. Our teachers lead the students through a workshop that asks them to consider the art of photography and how a photographer captures a moment in time. After “reading” some sample photographs and picking out the details that make them compelling, the students are asked to use these same ideas to capture a moment in time with words on the page.

Read More

Here’s something worth peeking into—a group of Telling Room kids and their writing mentors sit together in a circle of chairs in a Portland Public Library meeting room. Everyone in the circle leans forward in their chairs to hear one boy. He is Richard Akera, a.k.a. “AK,” a kid from Sudan by way of Uganda who, about a year ago, arrived here in Maine and is now a student at Portland High School. AK is part of our Young Writers & Leaders program, and he is writing a story with his mentor about his wish to go home again, and what it means when home is a place you’ve never been before, a place you’ve never even set foot in, or seen, or smelled. 

His speech is muffled a bit. AK clears his throat and says again, “Will someone be recording us? Because I just think this will be something that should be recorded.” He is talking about a party coming up that should be EPIC. It is the planned gathering of these fifteen kids and their mentors at The Telling Room (I can’t disclose date or time because it should be epic without becoming legendary). The partygoers will take to the mic, telling stories, rapping, juggling, singing songs, reciting poetry…there will be no holding back. We know this because we now know these kids. We are half a year into our work with them, and there is no stopping them. These kids are going places and they’ll lead us there.

Take AK, for example. He sits in a packed room and all eyes are on him. Everyone’s been talking about what food to bring, and there are rumors of a disco ball, and now here’s AK, feeling the fever of it grow and build. He knows he’s part of something big, and so he dares himself to speak up. He takes that risk—this kid who’s been here, in this country, speaking English, for less than a year—to be sure we hear him. Yes. We do. And yes, we’ll record it. And you can see it, because this group is worth peeking in on…please stay tuned.

Molly McGrath - Program Director

Help spread the word about our 2012 Statewide Writing Contest!

Sometimes we have to struggle, push ourselves beyond what makes us comfortable to accomplish something, whether it is playing an important game or reading to a group of our peers.

When Andrew and I walked into Dyer Elementary school in South Portland , we saw a nervous teacher, Paula Blake, fiddling with her perfect arrangement of cheese and crackers and fruit. She said, “The kids are all so nervous about reading. And I understand, because so am I and I am not even reading.”

Paula was preparing for the celebration of the chapbook we had made for her students after our ten session residency with 12 fifth graders. Paula had carefully arranged chairs for the audience, left space for the fifth graders who didn’t participate to hear what their buddies had been up to, and she had arranged printed copies of their stories and their collages around a cozy nook of the school’s library.

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One of my greatest surprises at The Telling Room happens every week on Wednesday afternoons. Wednesdays are catch up days for me, so I often sequester myself in the office part of our writing center on Commercial Street and tend to some of the desk tasks that support the much more fun and exciting work that we do with students. There’s always a time in the afternoon when I emerge from the back room and walk into the front studio portion of our space to find that it’s happened again. The surprise has returned!

My weekly surprise is that once again the doors have been opened for WordPLAY and our space has become populated by student writers ages 6-18 and volunteers who have come to help them in whatever way they can. Unstructured by design, this open studio time lends itself to whatever work needs or wants to be done. In the past several weeks I have witnessed student driven writing contests, college essays, iMovie editing, hip -hop recording, postcard making, picture taking, snowflake creating and homework help. It’s quite a sight to see so many different students engaged in their creative activity of choice and it’s one of those weekly surprises that make my days here at The Telling Room rewarding in so many ways.

So if you belong to a young writer who’s looking to be supported in their creative endeavors, please get them to the Telling Room for WordPLAY from 1:30-4:30pm every Wednesday during the school year. I look forward to the surprise! 

Write on!

 John Holdridge - Creative Director