Can I Call You Cheesecake?
Published by The Telling Room
Our newest anthology, Can I Call You Cheesecake, is a collection of 35 Stories and Poems about food. The product of our "At the Table" workshops, a year-long project that reached hundreds of Portland-area students, the book is an lively tour through the culinary and cultural geographies of its writers. Some reminisce about specific foods that bind them to their heritage, while others describe a single dish rich with the memory of the people with whom it was shared. A girl dances on her dining room table in shiny red cowboy boots eating sticky cantelope, while a boy recalls his father through the taste of lemon stew. One girl imagines herself a carrot swimming in gravy, while another becomes a measuring spoon, coated with fudge and flour. This anthology is richly flavored and satisfying to the last morsel.
The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland, Maine, dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers. Focused on young writers ages 6 to 18, we seek to build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real audiences for our students’ stories. We believe that the power of creative expression can change our communities and prepare our youth for future success.
Each year, the Telling Room publishes a theme-based anthology of student work. We crisscross Greater Portland to ask groups of students to come visit our writing center where we work intensively with young writers of all ages and abilities. We begin by creating lists and stories, song lyrics and poems. We read and talk and try to describe the particular smell of Commercial Street on a given day. Some students work with us for a few hours, others we meet during an intensive week or two, and still others we have the pleasure of coming to know over the better part of a year.
