Our plan
The idea that inspired this project is simple: in our increasingly diverse community, Portland, Maine, there has emerged an ever more urgent need for us to hear and understand each other’s stories. As a refugee resettlement area, Portland has changed immeasurably in the last decade or two, yet many Portland residents have little meaningful contact with members of the immigrant community. As a nonprofit community writing center, our mission is to help young people tell their stories to each other and to the community at large. We find that, along with increasing their literacy skills, telling their stories has the potential to change young people's conception of themselves and the world, while also changing the community that receives these stories. We hoped that building actual “story houses” — multi-media representations of the students' stories —would help make the stories even more accessible and more powerful.
What we did
After a series of initial workshops at three local schools, 15 local teenagers originally from Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan committed to working afterschool on this project. Mentors and students met weekly to create and edit stories over a period of months. Many pieces, at least initially, were based on interviews carried out by mentors and other volunteers. During the writing and editing process, The Telling Room was lucky enough to host an evening featuring Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, and Deng also met and talked with our young writers. Eventually, our young writers' stories became the anthology "I Remember Warm Rain: 15 Teenagers,15 Coming to America Stories." Each student was paired with a Maine College of Art group who helped the story to come alive with photographs, sketches, and pieces of text.
Our results
In 2007, "I Remember Warm Rain" was the second bestseller behind only the Harry Potter series at Longfellow Books, a locally-owned bookstore, and is currently in its fifth printing. Hundreds of people crowded into the SPACE Gallery in downtown Portland for the exhibit opening, which featured the anthology, three story houses with panels designed by the storytellers, photos, and a short film put together by filmmaker Emily Bernhard. To date, the stories have traveled to many public venues including the Lewiston Public Library and the University of Southern Maine and have inspired similar projects in several schools. The young storytellers have met with community and school groups around the state and appeared on local television programs, Maine Public Radio, and National Public Radio. While remaining a place for all young writers, The Telling Room continues its in-school literacy and storytelling projects with immigrant and refugee students.
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