About 50 people gathered May 31 in person, at Waldo Theater, and more online for a Celebration of Write ME: An Epistolary Poetry Project spearheaded by Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma. The evening featured poems from youths, a French language exchange, the project’s core pen pal poetry correspondences and a slide show highlighting the best of the project’s 230 entries across the state.

The project was supported by Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA), The Telling Room, several public libraries, organizations and private booksellers. Last fall and winter, Write ME hosted 23 free public poetry workshops across the state, in each county, and then paired up poetry pen pals, strangers from different parts of the state, who were tasked with exchanging at least four poems with each other. Four pairs of participants shared their exchanged poems, sharing their process for getting to know each other and what the project meant to them. “This project was the right idea, at the right time,” said MWPA Executive Director Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. “People have forged real connections across the state.”

Bouwsma came up with the idea in 2021 after attending a love letter writing workshop taught by Audrey Gidman, who also read from her poetry exchange with t love smith. In 2023, 120 poets participated in the project’s successful pilot funded by the Maine Arts Commission.

Other renowned poets participated in the project and read their poems before the audience, including Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine Poet Laureate 2016-2021; former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer prize finalist Don Colburn and his pen pal Nancy Walters, a poet, essayist and visual artist; Amy Tingle, collage artist, published author and Waterfall Arts program director, and her pan pal, Kennebec conservationist Theresa Kerchner.

The French poetry exchange was added to the project at the suggestion of Jeri Theriault, to try to preserve the language in Maine’s rich heritage of Franco-Americans. French poems and their English translations were read by poets Claire Gelinas, Suzanna Sylvain and Charlotte Agell.

Youth workshops were arranged through The Telling Room, Monson Arts High School Program and Maine high school teachers and began last summer. Bouwsma appeared at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb to work with students participating in the youth project. Students Alice Morier, Adley Cawthon, Nathalie Wilson and Enilea Burns shared their poems with the audience via pre-recorded recitations. Poems by students Kelly Manahan and Lucie Hollen were read aloud by Bouwsma. Hollen’s poem won best in Lincoln County in The Telling Room’s poetry competition last February.

Funding for the project was awarded through American Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. “I wanted to create a project that used poetry to actively build connections across Maine’s disparate communities, foster listening and collaboration among strangers and perhaps even help frame and nurture difficult social conversations,” wrote Bouwsma. “I came to poetry first as a child, and I came to poetry first—like many people—as a private endeavor, a way to channel strong emotions. My earliest poems were all written in journals, behind folded-over pages marked ‘do not read.’ And as an adult, many of my poems have remained highly personal. And often I’ve pushed myself to be my bravest self on the page by pretending no one will ever read the poems I’m writing. Serving as a poet laureate has meant I’ve had to think much more about audience, to learn to widen the scope of my poems at times, to write poems that speak as a ‘we’ rather than as an ‘I.’”