Hello World, and hope you’re doing well. I’m writing to you today from the confines of what professors sometimes jokingly, sometimes despairingly call “grading jail,” that period of time between the end of the academic semester and the due date for final grades to be posted during which we are assessing and grading final projects, exams, and late assignments. It’s an interesting point in each term because it seems like that wall of things to grade is never, ever going to go away no matter how much time you devote to it, and yet you also know that sometime between start of marking and 5 p.m. the Monday after finals, it always does. There is both comfort and terror in that knowing: this grading will never get done! it has to get done! I can’t do it! I have to do it! How though? Oh, wait . . . okay, got it, last one, great. All done. It’s like a once-a-semester personal psychic roller coaster for one.
I was cheered this week as I began undertaking this important but also lonely and difficult and mentally taxing work of grading a few hundred things in the space of a few days by news that my little ghost story–and I do mean “little,” as it’s a micro-story clocking in at 100 words, exactly–has found a home. If you have five minutes or so and like ghost stories, I invite you to check out “Crossing the Threshold” at A Story in 100 Words: http://entropy2.com/blogs/100words/2021/12/06/crossing-the-threshold/?fbclid=IwAR0nDkXkBdX4Ap_JTUsMoAce3Z9cDJ7ZOKN-UVShWvgApym8h3otku2nxAo
While you’re there, check out some of the other tiny stories, many of which surprise and delight and make you reflect on things, as good stories do. I love the tagline for the website: “Literature in tiny bursts.” I love the image of it, as when I think of “tiny bursts” it’s usually in association with a delicious bite of something tasty, or a flash of brightness as in fireworks; the idea of tiny bursts of flavorful, colorful words truly appeals to me. Delightful.
Melissa Ridley Elmes 