From Across the Globe to Across the Street: Telling the Stories of “Boston in 100 Words”
by Jessica A. Kent
June 21, 2021
You may have seen something different among the advertising posters filling T stations and trains this past year: A short story about Boston. Maybe it was about the Red Sox, or a snow storm, or a favorite café, or a favorite memory. Short enough to read before the train came or between stops, these stories constituted the winning entries of “Boston in 100 Words,” a writing contest featuring local stories by and about everyday Boston residents, now open for second-year submissions.
While the contest might be locally-focused, it's an extension of an international short story contest that started twenty years ago, and that was launched in Boston in 2019 by Bentley University professor Jane De León Griffin. "The project started in Santiago, Chile in 2001, and it really caught on like wildfire," Griffin explained to me over a Zoom call in early June. "Within a couple years it had spread from Santiago to multiple cities around the country. I found out about it in 2007 when I was working on my PhD in Santiago, writing about Chilean literature."
The "Santiago en 100 Palabras" contest calls for submissions of micro or flash stories under 100 words about everyday life in the city, and the winners are paired with a piece of artwork and posted in public spaces throughout the Metro system. The country responded incredibly well to the short-form storytelling. Griffin fell in love with the initiative and what it intends to accomplish, showing "that everybody has artistic talent, everybody has a story to share, and everybody should have access to really good literature." She even included a chapter about it in a book she wrote about Chilean literature.
Then she noticed the contest began popping up outside of Chile, in Mexico, Colombia, Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Why not bring it here? "I thought, Boston is the kind of place where this could really work. This is the type of city where this can thrive," she said. Boston would then be the first city in an English-speaking country that would host this contest, and the first location in the US (which, she added, fits with Boston's character of being the first to do things in the nation).
Griffin had already been in conversation with the Santiago organizers from researching the program, and started the conversation about what a “Boston in 100 Words" contest would look like. With the support of the Plagio Fundación, the Chilean organization that oversees "Santiago en 100 Palabras,” Griffin turned her efforts to get key Boston players on board, and was able to pitch the contest to Kara Elliott-Ortega, Boston's Chief of Arts and Culture, as well as representatives from the Boston Public Library, GrubStreet, and the Boston Book Festival, who all gave a thumbs up, as well as support, to the project. WERS, Emerson's radio station, also came on board as a partner. Novelist Gish Jen, radio host Callie Crossley, and Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola agreed to be the judges for the first iteration of the contest, where, like in Santiago, winning stories would be paired with artwork and posted across the MBTA system.
In 2019, “Boston in 100 Words” was ready to launch — but would the writers show up?
Uncovering the Stories of Boston’s Community
For the inaugural year, 596 individuals submit stories, who were located across 22 Boston neighborhoods and 13 surrounding towns, with Jamaica Plain the most represented. The youngest submissions were from a third grade class in Chinatown, with 30% of authors under the age of 20, and 47 authors were over the age of 70. Even a 92-year-old grandfather and his 11-year-old grandson submitted their own individual stories to the contest.
Many are writers and storytellers already, but many are not — and that’s the point. As Griffin explained, this project "wants to find the stories from people who might not consider themselves writers, or who are striving to be, but are not yet. What are the stories that they tell — and that really only they can tell because they live in the city and they see it from a really unique perspective. Let's find those voices and put them on display."
The stories that came out of the first year's contest are simple slices of life that don't just tell a story in less than one hundred words, but ground the reader in place and experience. They're not grand, sweeping narratives of Boston's history or future told by famous authors, or stories the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing industry chose to promote.
Instead, they're stories by locals that tell of everyday yet universal moments in Boston.
For example, the winner of last year's contest, "Freedom Trail" by Louis Frank of Dorchester, tells of the narrator's visiting friend walking a redefined Freedom Trail through the international neighborhoods of Codman Square, Blue Hill Avenue, and the Southwest Corridor. Second place, "Finding Home in Chinatown" by Melanie Han of Revere, evokes the smells and sounds of Chinatown, which are connected to memory and comfort for the narrator. The third place winner, "Bittersweet" by Jill Hilliard of South Boston, tells a multi-generational story centered around the 2004 Red Sox win, in just a few lines. The story that won the Youth Prize, "Flight Patterns" by Isabelle Goodrich of Hyde Park, starts with the seals at the Aquarium and ends with a commentary on urban development and climate change.
Honorable mentions include stories about two friends playing on swings in Roxbury ("Near the End of a Summer, at a Corner of Franklin Park" by Sherell Barbee of Jamaica Plain), buying a sandwich in a Chinatown eatery ("Bánh Mì in Chinatown" by Christine Chen of Downtown Boston), neighbors shoveling out neighbors after a storm ("Neighbors" by Kristen Paulson-Nguyen of Jamaica Plain), memories of a prom night walk up Summit Ave. ("Prom Night 1969" by Louise Kuhlman of Brighton), watching jellyfish pass under the Charlestown bridge ("Jellies in the Charles" by Chandreyee Lahiri of the North End), the horror of yet another Red Line breakdown ("The End" by Scott Colby of Somerville), and the regulars at a cafe in Brighton ("The Locals" by Sandra Rago of Brighton).
Each story doesn't just describe a setting, but has an arc, character development, and an observation or a twist at the end — developed literary elements in such a short space. What's most notable is that they all take place in recognizable locations, neighborhoods, streets, and places mentioned by name within the text. The contest is also only open to current residents, making it even more locally-focused. "It's about a place-based community," say Griffin. "It's really by people who live in the community, for people who live in the community."
Griffin adds that “the project is also about empowerment” and describes how having stories printed and posted in such public spaces has inspired the writers to want to do more. “I've received notes from at least two of our winning authors last year who have told me that winning ‘Boston in 100 Words’ inspired them to submit to bigger for-pay competitions or submit for publication in anthologies, and that is exactly what we're hoping will come out of this.”
Like in Santiago and other contests, each story is accompanied by a piece of artwork capturing the moment of the story, and WERS helped connect artists from Emerson College and the radio station (another artist affiliated with the contest organizers participated as well) to illustrate the winners and honorable mentions.
Posters of the stories were then printed and installed in MBTA stations, train cars, busses, and commuter rail cars, and the awards ceremony was set to be held at the BPL's Newsfeed Cafe on March 21, 2020.
And then the world shut down. The awards ceremony was held remotely in May on Facebook Live, with each of the winners and honorable mentions giving a reading and some backstory on the creation of their submission. But while some story posters remain up in T stations today, the visibility of the inaugural year, like everything else, was stifled by the pandemic. Griffin chalks it up to "just a really bad stroke of luck."
However, “Boston in 100 Words” wasn’t ever going to just be a one-year event.
A Second Year of “100 Words"
Submissions recently opened for the second year’s contest — due July 14, 2021 — and the judges for 2021 were just recently announced: memoirist and teacher Grace Talusan, spec fiction writer Ken Liu, and GrubStreet program coordinator Laniesha Brown. The assignment is still the same — tell a story about Boston in one hundred words or fewer — but Griffin has some updates and hopes for this round of submissions.
"One of my biggest goals for the contest is that we really double down on the neighborhood aspect of it,” she said, clarifying that she’d not only like to have a contest winner from each neighborhood — “the best of Dorchester, the best of Roslindale…” — but see neighborhood organizations find and promote authors, and help find spaces in which to promote the stories, too.
This year, there will also be an expanded youth category as well, with first, second, and third prizes. Griffin also hopes to be able to translate more of the stories into languages found around Boston (two of last year's winners were translated into Spanish and Chinese).
Another change will be where they're distributed. The MBTA posters were only guaranteed for the first year, and Griffin is still looking for the right plan and the right financial backer to "help us really expand the footprint of where our stories end up in the city."
Eventually, Griffin would like to catch up to where other contests are around the world and offer a published booklet of top stories, and “take the 100 finalists stories from each year, publish them as a pocket-sized book, and give them out to the public for free. That is something that has been very successful in Santiago. Every year they give out 100,000 copies of these pocket-sized books for free to the public and people love them. So, eventually we'd like to do that."
Being free is one of the biggest drivers for “Boston in 100 Words,” as well as for Inspired Masses, Griffin's non-profit that oversees its implementation. "Our number one goal was to never sell the stories, so we will never charge anyone money to read these stories," Griffin affirms.
Yet a massive public contest and installation needs funding, so “Boston in 100 Words” has put together a local cookbook as a fundraiser, with “recipes from important Boston restaurants and personalities in it: Darryl’s Corner Bar and Kitchen, Flour Bakery, Tiziana Dearing from WBUR gave us a recipe, Jared Bowen from WGBH gave us a recipe. That fits our brand because it's all about the culture of Boston and the people of Boston."
Still, Griffin admits getting Year Two off the ground amidst the shifting priorities of the State’s reopening has been a challenge. But she also sees how Year Two might be easier for participants. Writers who want to submit a story can now see a kind of template from Year One submissions as they read the winners from last year, and have an easier time of crafting their unique submissions.
The winners for 2021 will be announced in October, capped off with a public reading. And as we gather together to hear stories about our common experiences locally — sometimes situations and locales only Bostonians will recognize and understand — we’ll still be connected to other writers and readers around the globe sharing their common experiences, all attempting to articulate our lives today in one hundred words.
Submissions for “Boston in 100 Words” are now open, due July 14, 2021. Find more information, as well as the winners and honorable mentions from last year, at their website. On Thursday, June 24 at 7:30pm, “Boston in 100 Words” will hold a virtual conversation with last year’s winning authors, hosted by WERS’ Phil Jones.
Jessica A. Kent is the founder and Editor in Chief of the Boston Book Blog.
