THE TELLING ROOM'S 2025 STATEWIDE WRITING CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED.

The Telling Room’s annual creative Writing Contest invites youth from all over Maine, ages 6 - 18, to show off their writing. A panel of professional writers and youth selects one grand prize winner, a winner from each of Maine’s participating 16 counties, and submissions are considered for publication in The Telling Room’s annual anthology. If you have any questions on the submission process, please email Jude at: jude@tellingroom.org.

Submissions for this year’s contest are now closed. The contest will reopen in October of 2025.

To submit your writing as a hard copy submission, please send a printed copy to:

The Telling Room
c/o Statewide Writing Contest
225 Commercial Street, Suite 201
Portland, ME 04101

Be sure to follow the above guidelines, and include a completed copy of this form with your writing.

We look for writing with...

• An impactful message

• Creativity and originality that stand out

• A structure that supports the clarity of its message

• A strong voice

• Elements of writing (such as setting, characters, or figurative language) that support its message

  Submission Guidelines

• Entrants must live in Maine.

• Entrants must be between the ages of 6 and 18.

• All forms of creative writing are considered, including: poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and songwriting.

• All forms of poetry are welcome, but poems must be 40 lines or fewer.

• Fiction and nonfiction prose should be 1500 words or fewer.

• Youth may submit up to 2 different pieces of writing.

• Submitting to our contest constitutes an agreement to be considered for publication in our annual anthology.

• This statewide contest runs from October 1st through November 15th each year. If we do not receive your submission in this time span, it will not be considered. 

 PRIZES

• The Grand Prize Winner will receive a $250 award, will be published in our spring anthology, and may be published in other publications and media.

• One County Winner will be selected from each of Maine’s 16 counties. Each County Winner will receive a $50 award, will be published in our spring anthology, and may be published in other publications and media.

Congratulations to our 2025 Writing Contest Winner, Molly Trainor!

Survival of the Flawed
by Molly Trainor

I have trouble throwing things away. Inanimate objects that no longer function, food that falls to the floor, things that logically have no reason to be retained are difficult to discard. I find myself personifying the blueberry that I accidentally dropped. I feel sorry for the old laptop that will never work again. But when I start to malfunction, that compassion gets thrown to the wind. 

Sometimes I am inclined to write a strongly worded letter to my manufacturer and complain about how impractically I was made. I am like a dishwasher that stopped working two months after it was bought. “They just don't make 'em like they used to.” It feels like I was built to break. A piece of machinery made to be meddled with, to be fiddled and fought until it is certain that I am broken. At which point I am to be discarded. Or at least, my vessel is. 

The flaw lies in the fact that I forget I am not a machine. I am not composed of wiring and code meant to function pristinely. I am a messy miracle, with bits and pieces of me working in tandem, existing the only way they know how. Their primary objective is to make sure I survive, but that is a monumental task. The least I can do is cut them some slack. 

Were it not for the persistent drumming in my chest, I would forget I had a heart. But the sound that should so easily go unnoticed forces itself to be heard. It is an ever present rhythm that keeps me operating, but agitates me endlessly. Like when I lie in bed in an unfamiliar house, and the world is silent, except for the distant tick tick tick of an analog clock. A sound so faint, yet relentless enough to drive a person insane. 

I would keep going without a hitch, were it not for the fact that my brain knows it is a brain. If it could function without questioning why it functions, why it is here, why it lacks control in the most complex of places, I wouldn't feel the urge to make it stop. Make the drum stop pounding, the hands stop shaking. To make the skin and the nerves and the lungs stop. To tear myself apart at the seams in frustration and fear. 

But I do not know where I end and the flesh that holds me begins. When am I no longer responsible for the problem that I am? When is it a matter of flawed design, not of user error? For all I know, all this time I have been pushing when I should have pulled, and yet I chant this venomous vitriol like I have an excuse to feel betrayal. If it's been my fault all along, what worth do these words hold? What more would my letter be than the ramblings of a lunatic? 

Some days my heart is little more than background noise. Some weeks my brain only thinks about the delicious soup I will be having for dinner, or the people I have the honor to love, or the squirrels that I see on my walk through the neighborhood. Sometimes my hands only shake because it's cold out, and my body only hurts because I have been exercising more than usual. Those are the days that keep me from going deaf from the sound of my heart. The moments I can feel happy without preemptive mourning. When food doesn't taste like ash and the world is as vibrant and colorful as it's supposed to be. Those are the days that grant me proper perspective. Despite how often I may feel that there is gunk in my gears, discardment is not the proper treatment. I am to treat myself with all the care and understanding that I extend to the things that are not living. If I can give grace to the phone case that’s fallen apart after four years of use, I can give grace to the body that is still going seventeen years strong.

County Winners

To recognize the wide geographic participation in this year’s contest, The Telling Room honored one writer from each of Maine’s sixteen counties as a county winner, in addition to the grand prize winner. Each county winner will also be published in The Telling Room’s upcoming anthology, and receive a cash prize of $50. Read on below to celebrate this exceptional writing from across Maine, and congratulations to these authors!