RETURNING in SPRING 2024
Home Places: Stories From Lewiston/Auburn Transplants
Have you ever wanted to tell the story of how you made your home in Lewiston or Auburn? Or hear from other people with BIPOC backgrounds about how they’ve created homes and found or formed communities here?
Please join instructor, Ian-Khara Ellasante, for a series of FREE writing and story-sharing gatherings at Maine MILL in Lewiston. No writing experience is necessary. Just show up with writing tools and an openness to connect. Snacks will be provided.
These gatherings are open to ALL people of color who have moved to the Lewiston/Auburn area. Registration is preferred and can be completed below. For more information, email Taryn Bowe.
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary parent, poet, and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Pipe Wrench, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a VONA alum whose awards and honors include the 2023 Cave Canem Fellowship, the New Millennium Award for Poetry, the Ashley Bryan Fellowship, and the Point Foundation Scholarship. Their critical writing, including the essay “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?,” has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Families in Society. Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they teach at Bates College.
These writing gatherings are co-sponsored by Maine MILL, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and The Third Place.
The Community Word Program reaches back into the long history of the MWPA to offer writing workshops with a social mission. We are a fragmented society, with fewer and fewer opportunities to see outside our bubbles of class, race, and geography. Telling and hearing each other’s stories is one way to see across that gulf. There are particular segments of our society, including the homeless, the working poor, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, recovering addicts, the elderly, and veterans, who we often hear about, but much less often do we hear from them directly.
Community Word workshops empower participants to learn how to tell their stories effectively, building confidence and literacy skills, while also bringing those stories into the public sphere, building more empathy in our community through the airing of such stories. Each workshop is a partnership between MWPA and a local community organization.
2018
Thanks to support from the Robert and Dorothy Goldberg Charitable Foundation, MWPA worked with Greater Portland Health and the Portland Public Library on two pilot Community Word workshops led by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and an amazing team of local writer volunteers. Participants in the two workshops included immigrant, refugee, and asylee writers and folks who have struggled with homelessness. MWPA designed and printed a chapbook of stories and poems from these workshops, How to Survive: Stories & Poems from the Streets of Portland.
2019
Thanks to support from the Horizon Foundation, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and volunteer writers from MWPA led a long-term workshop at Portland Adult Education. The resulting chapbook, It’s the Climb: Stories About Washing Dishes, Scaling Cliffs, Giving Mercy, Learning to be a Wizard, and Finding (and Leaving) Home, was released in the spring of 2020.
2019
Thanks to support from the Horizon Foundation, nonfiction writer Mira Ptacin and a volunteer writer from MWPA led a long-term workshop at the Maine Correctional Women’s Center. The resulting chapbook, Hushed Voices, was released in the spring of 2020. Mira’s introduction notes, “Although the women featured in this book are incarcerated, they are some of the most liberated writers and minds we’ve ever come to know. Their work is exceptional, honest, raw, compassionate, kind, and beautiful, just as they are fully, as human beings. These are their stories and poems.”
2021
Thanks to support from the Virginia Hodgkins Somers Foundation and from MWPA members and donors, writer Cody Mower taught a 9-week online workshop for Maine veterans. As You Were, the culminating chapbook, was released in March 2022. As Cody notes in his introduction, “these are stories of misunderstandings, pain, trauma, healing, and righteous anger at an imperfect and dangerous system.”
2020
Thanks to support from the Virginia Hodgkins Somers Foundation, writer Jenny O’Connell led a long-term workshop at the Layman Way Recovery Center in York County. The resulting collection of stories, The Next Right Thing, pushes into life-changing moments where time is divided into before and after. In her introduction, O’Connell writes, “There’s no right way to navigate this too-big world, but these authors have walked some of the hardest terrain and come out on the other side, and they have something important to tell us: Sometimes, the only thing you can do is the next right thing.”
2022
Queering Friendship arises out of the ten-week Community Word writing workshop hosted by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum in Fall 2022 and facilitated by Jan Bindas- Tenney. A multi-generational group of nine LGBTQ+ writers came together to read, write, and build community. In this chapbook, nine luminous, Maine-based queer and trans writers present essays, stories, and poems that queer friendship.