I Carry It Everywhere

Published by The Telling Room

Our 2008 anthology, I Carry It Everywhere, poses this question: If you had only one story to tell about what matters most to you, what would it be? For Halima, a student at Portland High School, that story begins and ends with her hijab, her head scarf. She is joined by seventeen other local students, including Abde, Andrew, Colin, Ekhlas, Nestor, Rickey, Samakab, and Zaki - young storytellers from A to Z, from fourteen to eighteen years old, from South Portland, Maine to Mogadishu, Somalia - as authors of stories and poems about what matters most to them. Also included in these pages are photographs of high school students holding single statements, many of them distilled from stories they wrote.

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.