The Telling Room

Residencies provide the opportunity to work with us for an extended period–usually 12 sessions–on an intensive writing curriculum built around our yearly theme or a subject your classroom or school is exploring. We typically run eight to ten residencies each year in area schools. In these sessions, students work extensively with writing mentors and have their original writing published in a 6x9 inch, professional grade chapbook that is unveiled at a community celebration at your school.

The Telling Room's Young Emerging Author (YEA) fellowship is our writing and publishing program that offers successful applicants the chance to plan, write, edit, design, and publish their own books in a single year. In weekly sessions at The Telling Room, fellows work collaboratively, writing and sharing their work, and independently with professionals in the writing and publishing industries, including authors, editors, agents, designers, and publishers.

When classrooms leave the school and come to a field trip at The Telling Room's downtown Portland writing center, students join us for a morning of creative activity, expression and get the full experience of working as writers with their classmates and teachers! At the end of the trip, each writer departs with his or her own creation and the kind of skills that bolster performance in school, across all disciplines. Our Field Trip curricula are geared toward learners of all ages and abilities. These programs are designed to foster young writers—those who already love writing and those who come to it more reluctantly—so that all participants can benefit equally.

In this weekly, semester-based program, Publishing Workshop participants receive a working tutorial on the book publishing industry in an apprenticeship environment. They learn writing and publishing skills alongside professional editors and designers, often during the real-time editorial and production processes of Telling Room book assembly, covering topics such as book writing, development editing, copyediting, proofing, design, marketing, and printing.

A fun and supportive place to develop your writing among a group of peers. The Telling Room offers this free afterschool program to ages 7 through 18. We host three weekly sessions focused both by age and interest. Writers Block is a fun and supportive place to develop your writing among a group of peers. The mix of structured and unstructured writing time lets students explore and practice elements of the craft, whether fiction, essay, poetry, or visual storytelling. As in all our programs, we will encourage students to share their work. Writers Block is open to those new to The Telling Room as well as experienced writing veterans.

All sessions take place after school from 3pm to 5pm at our writing center at 225 Commercial St.

Every year since our founding, The Telling Room has undertaken a yearlong Anthology Project, a themed writing and art project that engages hundreds of youth at our writing center and in local schools. The Telling Room reinvents itself annually under the auspices of a new theme that permeates our daily writing programs for young people and sets the stage for a new set of ideas, questions, projects, and activities. These themes serve as a way for our community to learn about contemporary life from the perspective of the young people who tackle these questions and ideas in their writing with us. In the past, we have explored themes of belief, neighborhoods, place, food, and more. The theme serves as an anchor to our diverse and multi-faceted programming, and each yearlong project culminates in the publication of our yearly anthology of student writing. Our anthologies are as diverse and amazing as the students we work with!

We are so excited to be able to offer an exciting slate of virtual writing and publishing experiences to children and teens throughout the State of Maine in 2020. And we look forward to returning to in-person summer camps in 2021!