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2011's Maine Writers on Memoir conference featured four outstanding authors, all of whom published this year:
Susan Conley, TR founder and author of 'The Foremost Good Fortune'
Melissa Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of 'This Life is in Your Hands'
Caitlin Shetterly, author of the timely memoir 'Made for You and Me'
Jaed Coffin, author of 'A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants,' and boxing champion
Each enlightened a crowd of 500 eager high schoolers from around the state with tips on writing great personal narratives and staying true to their story.
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Our 2009 Maine Writers on Maine, "A Sense of People," event features award-winning Maine writers who discuss the craft of writing and the writing life with high school students from all over Maine, from an hour north of Bangor in Lee, to the south coast in Wells.
Panelists included:
Monica Wood started the morning off with a reading and a musing about how her characters arrive. She advised us all to observe and ask why? and what if? of the characters we build from real life. She told of immersing herself in the Guiness Book of World Records for a character once, and of learning Lithuanian to build the empathy toward another.
Lewis Robinson read an excerpt from "Puckheads," a short story about two faculty kids growing up at a boarding school in Maine, and about their glory as hockey players transfixed by their new world as actors in the drama club. His details included the rocks in milk gallons fans shook in the hockey rink, and getting a cheerleader in a headlock--details that make good characters fascinating.
Betsy Sholl spoke of the way the voices of her characters just come to her, sometimes haunting her. She read a poem about Thelonious Monk, and we could hear the sometimes conflicting strains of his jazz through her poetry.
Sontiago performed a powerful spoken word piece, "Old Orleans," and showed the photos she'd collected of the aftermath of Katrina that had channeled her work, and how they had disturbed her into writing about some of her strongest characters--Katrina survivors. All in all it was a stirring and inspiring day!
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Other authors who have visited us in the past include:
Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert spent an evening at Portland’s Merrill Auditorium on September 23, 2008 to benefit The Telling Room. Gilbert is the author of five books, including the smash-hit memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert spoke to a packed house about her life as a writer and spiritual adventurer. She also came to our writing center in the Old Port on Monday, September 22. Sitting in a close circle with a rapt audience of young writers from six Greater Portland high schools she shared stories, advice, and whimsy.
Gilbert's advice to young writers? “Don't worry about being published; concentrate now on your craft, on being masterful.... Make it a ritual, make it a religion. It's divinity, and it takes devotion.... This can be a beautiful life, this work.... Make it your own, and live as if you have no choice about it."
She had these kind things to say about The Telling Room:
"One of the oldest human impulses is to tell stories, to share narrative, and those of us who love the human story always live in fear that this ancient art is being lost, swallowed by technology and modernity. So there was something phenomenally moving for me about discovering The Telling Room—a small, steadfast storefront enterprise in Portland, Maine, where young people from all sorts of backgrounds come willingly (eagerly! sometimes even desperately!) to learn how to better tell their stories. Some of those stories are heartbreakingly autobiographical and some are tremendously fantastical, but all of them do what stories have always done—shape their narrators and change their listeners forever. I love this place. It's a little all-access humanities cottage industry, and it fills me with great hope."
George Saunders
In September of 2007, George Saunders packed SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress Street, and had his audience gasping for breath--gawd, we were all laughing so hard! George Saunders' stories devastate, surge with humor, and somehow retain a sweet compassion for even the saddest of sad-sack characters. Author of three acclaimed collections of fiction, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a novella and a New York Times bestselling children's book, his first book of nonfiction, The Braindead Megaphone, had been released in early September. Saunders stayed afterward to answer questions and then sign books.
As Saunders spoke with his audience, he drew on that afternoon's experience, when he sat in a circle with high school students at the Telling Room's Writing Center. There, he recalled a bright group of kids who listened at turns seriously and then with amusement while Saunders advised them to pay attention to the "lineage of writers" who attracted their readership and "revise, revise, revise!" See below:
First Annual Maine Writers on Maine
In May 2007, over 150 students from eight local schools gathered for a writers’ forum
entitled, “A Sense of Place: Maine Writers on Maine”,
in which four award-winning Maine writers—novelist Monica
Wood, writer Lewis Robinson, state
poet laureate Betsy Sholl, and local spoken
word and hip-hop sensation Sontiago—shared stories about how Maine shapes their work. USM Historian Joe
Conforti moderated and talked a little about the tradition of Maine
writing.
Below: (from left) Sontiago, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Susan Conley, Monica Wood, Lewis Robinson, Betsy Sholl, and Joe Conforti after Maine Writers on Maine.
Campbell McGrath
Also in May, the Telling Room presented an evening
with MacArthur Prize-winning poet Campbell McGrath, one of our country's
most original and wide-ranging writers: a poet "who will be forever
nineteen driving a white Impala convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway."
Between the sets of Nate Schrock and Steve Jones of Maine's own acclaimed acoustic band The Coming Grass, McGrath read poems steeped
in the rock and roll music heard on the radio while he criss-crossed the
continent in search of Kerouac's ghost. Earlier in the day, McGrath also met and talked about poetry and music with students at Casco Bay High School and Deering High School.
Dave Eggers and Valentino
Achak Deng
In February, celebrated author Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng spent an evening discussing
their collaboration on the novel, What is the What:
The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, before a sold-out audience of over 500 people in support of The Telling Room. The event, which was co-sponsored by Longfellow Books, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, the SPACE Gallery, and
USM, was originally scheduled to be at SPACE, but had to be moved to a larger venue because of the overwhelming demand for tickets. Hear Eggers and Deng's conversation by clicking here.
Prior to his public appearance, Deng had a round-table discussion with fifteen Portland-area students involved in the Story House Project, who are themselves originally from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. Students read from their own coming to America stories and asked questions about Deng's own journey, his collaboration with Eggers, and the foundation he began to help Sudanese students in the United States and his native land. Of his time with Portland-area students, Deng said, “They are wonderful students! I listened to their stories, which are almost like mine. They are willing to tell their own stories, and they are working with a group of [writers] who are tutoring them through this process. That's the best thing we can do to learn about other people.”
In January of 2006, an inquisitive group of students spent an afternoon session asking author Susan Orlean for her insight on things such as revision, character development, story structure, and truth. Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief, said afterward, “I came away thrilled by the entire experience. It’s inspiring to feel you might have stirred excitement in kids that age, and encouraged them to keep reading and writing.”
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, winner of both a MacArthur and National Book Critics Circle Award, came to Portland in October of 2005 and gave a public reading at SPACE Gallery. He also joined a dozen young Telling Room writers from three Portland high schools for a fascinating round-table discussion. Lethem had this to say about his time with Telling Room students: “The kids were unflinching in their curiosity. It's always a pleasure to feel the pulse of younger writers discovering what it is they want to do; I hope it felt as essential for them as it did for me.”
