By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
    Current and former students of Long Creek Youth Development Center will gather at One Longfellow Square in Portland tonight to share their life stories. At 7 p.m. the students will read from Smoke Signals: Oral Histories from Long Creek, a book of stories generated from transcripts of interviews conducted by oral historians and instructors from Teachers College, the graduate school of education at Columbia University. Six of the students scheduled to read excerpts from the book are no longer residents of Long Creek.
    “They really have this insatiable desire to share their stories,” said Bill Lundgren, a consultant for the Teachers College Student Press Initiative (SPI). Lundgren, a teacher, went to Long Creek last summer and asked the administration if he could teach a writing class. A former teacher at King Middle School in Portland and Poland Regional High School, Lundgren was familiar with Long Creek and said he has always had an interest working with incarcerated youth.
    In fact, Lundgren said SPI, which is headquartered at Columbia University in Harlem, did a similar project with students at the Rikers Island Correctional facility in New York City. Lundgren said SPI strives to encourage student writers by providing them a means to publish their work.
    “When I first went out, there were a couple of kids interested in being published,” he said. As news of the program spread, Lundgren said more students became interested.
     After the team of oral historians left, Lundgren said it was a “one man show,” although he did invite artists from various disciplines to come in and speak with the students. He recalled one student who said he had never realized he could make a career out of writing screenplays.
    Lundgren said the project made one thing clear to him: public schools are failing students. He said he thinks it is easy for some kids to get involved with the programs schools do offer, but for other students school is boring or low on their list of priorities. Lundgren said, however, the book is not meant to make excuses for the students’ behavior.
    “It’s not easy to end up there (Long Creek),” he said. “You’ve got to screw up over and over again, but the issues are much more complicated than these are bad kids. Many have had substance abuse problems.”
    Lundgren said the stories have a “redemptive” quality. In telling the stories, Lundgren told students there was to be “no posturing and no romanticizing” of the events that led up to coming to Long Creek. He said some students came to the realization that coming to Long Creek was the best thing that ever happened to them.    
    In one story, Lundgren said a 16-year old boy, abandoned by his drug addict parents, was left to raise his sister on his own. In another story, a young man finds himself living in northern Maine and dealing drugs after a childhood filled with foster parents and group homes. When a fellow dealer tried to rob him, the young man shot him in the head. Lundgren said the young man is currently out of Long Creek and he is a born again Christian.
    Lundgren also shared a story from a female student, who was so addicted to cocaine, she gave up her son to her mother. She went off to live with her dealer until one day her older brother tracked her down and took her away. When she saw her son, he ran right past her and didn’t recognize her.
    At the heart of the work, Lundgren said, is an opportunity for kids to read these stories and learn something from them. What really comes through in each story he said, is a message of “this is what happened to me, don’t do this.”
    As of last Friday, the books were at the printers and Lundgren said he hopes to distribute copies to every high school in Maine and he hopes teachers will buy sets for their classrooms.       
    Attempts to reach Long Creek school administrators were unsuccessful.