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.

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