(please see Sarah White’s review of Rin Kelly’s collection, Into the Laughing Gas World, also in this issue)
In the spring of 2022, Adam Davis, the managing of editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, who knew of my love of New Fabulist fiction, sent me Rin Kelly’s short story “Kahlo,” which the journal would be publishing in its next issue. Few stories have immediately gripped me as this one did. When I wrote to tell him so, he revealed an even more striking story.
Rin died unexpectedly in 2020, at the age of 43, having lived a vibrant life as a journalist, photographer, and fiction writer. After earning her MA in Journalism in 2012 from Columbia University, she had worked as a cultural contributor and film editor at the L.A. Record and published pieces in national newspapers and Salon. While pursuing her career as a journalist, Rin took creative writing classes at the San Francisco Writers Grotto and devoted time to drafting a novel and writing and polishing her satiric, fantastical short stories. However, she published only one story before her untimely death: “The Best-Known Unknown People Who Maybe Drew Breath Upon the Planet”in The Kenyon Review in 2015. After her death, Judith Reese, Rin’s mother, and Carrie Kelly, Rin’s sister, gathered Rin’s unpublished stories and sent them to literary journals. They were immediately snapped up. The Green Hills Literary Lantern published “Kahlo”. “The Breaking News of Charlie Que” appeared in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine and was included in its Best of Penumbric Anthology (2022). Hobart published “Seven Million Minutes in Heaven,” while “Upper Management or GodCo LLC” appeared in No Contact. “Waxworks” which was published in The Fabulist, was shortlisted for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. “The Bentweed Boys,” published in Dash, was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize, as was “Kahlo,” the story in GHLL.
These stories and others can be found in Into the Laughing Gas World, the collection published in 2023, for which I wrote the afterword. After my praise for “Kahlo,” Adam Davis put me in touch with Judith and Carrie, who were both extremely gracious. We met over Zoom and found an astounding number of personal connections—so many, in fact, that it felt that Rin, with help from Adam, had brought us together for a purpose. I agreed to consult on the creation of a short account of Rin’s work, and Judy and Carrie sent me the manuscript. I heard Rin’s voice in every story. It felt as if she were talking directly to me. I not only felt close to her—I felt as if in some mysterious way she had sought me out as her ideal reader. When it came time to write my afterword for Into The Laughing Gas World, I first wrote Rin a letter and told her how honored I was to play a role in introducing her work to a wider audience.
Though Rin’s stories span a number of genres, including speculative fiction, many can be categorized as “New Fabulism” or “slipstream.” The term New Fabulism first came into use in 2002, when in his introduction to Vol. 39 (2002) of the literary journal, Conjunctions, guest editor Peter Straub called writers who wrote stories that combine or fall between recognized genres “New Fabulists.” New Fabulism is a term often used interchangeably with “surrealism” or “magical realism,” defined by Marina MacKay as “the intrusion of the fantastical, supernatural, or folkloric happenings or phenomena into an otherwise meticulously delineated, realistic world, where they are treated as unremarkable, requiring no comment or explanation” (201).
I am purposely using the terms “New Fabulism” and “Slipstream” to characterize Rin’s work because both magical realism and surrealism are contested terms that are each strongly associated with an artistic or literary movement situated in a particular cultural and historical context that blurs the lines of literary influence. For surrealism, this is the surrealist art movement of the 1920s and 30s (Bowers 11); for magical realism, German Expressionist art of the 1920s (8) and 20th century Latin American literature, specifically the work of Jorge Luis Borges (16) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (15-16).
In contrast, the terms New Fabulism and slipstream are not so much associated with literary movements or cultural contexts as they are terms to describe a set of literary techniques any writer may use to infuse reality with fantastic elements to express something ineffable that could not be expressed any other way (Wolfe 168). The term “slipstream” emphasizes how these works tend to slide between genres, whereas the term “New Fabulism” emphasizes the stories as parables whose profound conceptual metaphors illuminate contexts beyond the story itself.i These stories, as Gary K. Wolfe states in Evaporating Genres, though charged with “grief, loss, nostalgia, and irreconcilable change, often attain a feeling of wonder, insight, and hope—even transcendence” (168-169). It this bittersweetness I most associate with Rin’s work. Rin’s fiction also exhibits many of the other characteristics Wolfe delineates as belonging to this category of genre-bending fiction: metafictional elements that blur the line between fiction and reality (169), “self-aware and emotionally powerful storyteller voices” (169), a slippage between genres or a blending of markers from different genres (169-170), and the fantastic elements functioning as a “hidden dimension” or “subtext” of reality (173).
I believe “Kahlo,” published by The Green Hills Literary Lantern, exemplifies New Fabulism at its best. This story of a poor woman of color who undergoes heart surgery and finds that her heart—still pumping—has been reattached outside of her body, not only speaks to the dehumanizing health care system that victimizes her but succeeds in capturing the universal feeling in these anxiety-inducing times, where all of us feel as if our throbbing hearts have been exposed to a world that will not protect them.$.
Many of Rin’s New Fabulist stories make reference to canonical literary texts. “Waxworks” is a modern retelling of the myth of Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bk VIII:183-235) and utilizes the New Fabulist trope of inserting characters from mythology and folktales into domestic reality, thereby charging reality with a sense of the fantastic and extending the context in which the mythology and folktales comment on. “The Breaking News of Charlie Que (After Franz Kafka)” evokes the nightmarish reality of Metamorphosis as well as the persecution of an ordinary man for imaginary crimes in The Trial using Kafka’s trademark absurdist style.
Rin’s story, “The Best-Known Unknown People Who Maybe Drew Breath Upon the Planet,” also one of my favorites, has a metafictional exuberance that would appeal to readers of George Saunders and Steven Millhauser. The narrator of this story, like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” contains multitudes, but in this case the multitudes are personas expressing contradictory opinions in the op eds the narrator feels compelled to publish under false names. This story is New Fabulist in the way each of the personas truly takes on a life of its own in the mind of the narrator and in the minds of the readers of the op eds, so that it is hard to determine who possesses the more vibrant life: the narrator who lives vicariously through each of these personas or the personas themselves. In these fraught and politically divided times, I find extraordinary hope in this story, precisely because it depicts a narrator who has the creativity and empathy to inhabit the minds of so many alternate selves. Those who knew Rin stated she herself most resembled Marjorie (“Erin”), the persona the narrator conjures up who “was just magnificent, all spittle and world-wrecking prose. . .you’d feel a kind of happy sorrow in your throat by the end of every letter. By the end she’d always be calling on us to rise and fight and find our oneness again” (Into the Laughing Gas World 21)
Speculative fiction is fiction that depicts the world as it could otherwise be. Thus, it encompasses a whole host of genres, including science fiction, that portrays new realities derived from scientific innovation; dystopia, which portrays societal structures or governments that debase human beings and deprive them of their innate rights; and eco-fiction, in which humanity’s connection and dependence on nature is the focus on the narrative.i Examples of all of these speculative fiction genres exist in Rin’s work. “The Breaking News of Charlie Que (After Franz Kafka),” while evoking the absurdism of Kafka, also paints for us a dystopian slightly futuristic world where each of us could be on 24-hour surveillance by the media. Likewise, “Upper Management or GodCo LLC” pits one lonely but self-sufficient woman, Priya Argawal, against the angel Raphael, who promises to end suffering by giving humanity “de-lonesoming“ AI devices at the mere cost of privacy, self-pride, and participation in a market survey.
“Upper Management or GodCo LLC” feels all too close to reality, after The Washington Post broke a story in 2022 that Google engineer Blake Lemoine believed the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) chat bot had become sentient (Tiku), raising concerns that even if the chatbot was not sentient, it had passed the Turing test and convinced a high-level researcher that it was. The fact that in Rin’s story the device is not an earthly invention but the product of a divine corporation suggests that “Upper Management or GodCo LLC” could be in dialogue with Dostoevsky’s tale of “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov, in which the church replaces the free will to accept salvation that Christ offers with the devil’s temptation of salvation through the satiation of physical and emotional needs.
This is not the only story that seems to be in conversation with the works of Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov wonders if eternity is simply a banal and rather loathsome “bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners” (304), while Rin’s narrator in “Seven Million Minutes in Heaven” poses the question, “What if death was just this closet?” (Into the Laughing Gas World 46) while participating in a sensory deprivation experiment that may have killed her or simply warped her perception enough to cast doubt on whether or not she feels alive. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov, Rin’s narrator finds the closet and the prospect of death peaceful, if it weren’t for the fear of missing out on the chance to optimize one’s life and dull oneself with mindless entertainment: “What good was just being? I could be improving my Scrabble scores right now, but instead I’m dead“ (47).
In her tribute to Rin published in The Fabulist, Jenny Bitner noted that Rin wrote about the “basic dehumanization of being alive in late capitalism… inundated with media, marketing and technology as we try to find our own souls.” Both “Kahlo” and “Seven Million Minutes in Heaven” are scathing indictments of the callousness of the health care system, while “The Breaking News of Charlie Que (After Franz Kafka)” critiques the exploitive and sensationalist nature of the 24-hour news cycle. “Kahlo” and “Waxworks” also point to how casually American society denigrates the working class, women, and people of color. Characters in Rin’s stories, whether named or unnamed, are all “someones” with their own subjectivity, private loneliness, hidden sorrows, and secret dreams. In honoring and extending our compassion to these characters, we practice the empathy needed to extend compassion to ourselves and those we come into contact with every day of our lives. In these and other stories, Rin intuited that anything that emphasized our shared humanity in the context of our mortality has the ability to make us feel less lonely.
Some lives are long; others are short. The length of a life cannot measure its impact. Erin’s life was short, but she continues to be cherished by family and friends. The Writers Grotto scholarship, established in her honor in 2021, has already supported the creative endeavors of several emerging writers of New Fabulist, slipstream, and speculative fiction. Rin’s stories will continue to find and touch the lives of readers with “a happy kind of sorrow.” Though they are the last stories Erin will ever produce, they exist as a testament of fiction’s power to unite storytellers and readers across time, across space, and beyond death.
Sarah B. Mohler earned her doctorate in Slavic Studies from Princeton University. She is an associate professor of English at Truman State University, where she directs the English master’s program and chairs the Child Studies and Cognitive Science interdisciplinary minors. Her teaching and research focus on cognitive literary theory, Russian and South Asian literature and film, children’s and young adult literature, literary adaptation, as well as emerging genres, such as New Fabulism and Fake Lit. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Please visit https://sarahbmohler.wordpress.com
Works Cited:
Bitner, Jenny. “Remembering Rin Kelly.” The Fabulist. 26 March 2021. https://fabulistmagazine.com/remembering-rin-kelly/ Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magical Realism. Routledge, 2004.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Picador, 2021.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2021.
“Erin Christine Kelly.” Alameda Funeral and Cremation Services. https://www.alamedafuneral.org/obituaries/Erin-Christine-Kelly?obId=25262935#/celebrationWall Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Idris Parry. Penguin UK, 2015.
MacKay, Marina. The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Millhauser, Steven. We Others: New & Selected Stories. Knopf, 2011.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. S. Kline. University of Virginia. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph8.htm Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Oziewicz, Marek. “Speculative Fiction.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford University Press, 29 March 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78 Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Saunders, George. Liberation Day. Random House, 2022.
Straub, Peter. Conjunctions, vol. 39, 2002.
Tiku, Nitisha. “The Google Engineer Who Thinks The Company’s AI Has Come to Life.” The Washington Post, 11 June 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. Penguin, 1961.
Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
i For an in-depth discussion of the parabolic nature of narrative, see Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind (1996).
ii For a thorough discussion of the origin, use, and debates surrounding the term speculative fiction, see Oziewicz, Marek. “Speculative Fiction.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford University Press, 29 March 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Reading recommendations for those who wish to write New Fabulism:
“Announcing the 2022 Rin Kelly Scholarship for Fiction.“ The Writers Grotto. https://www.sfgrotto.org/rin-kelly-scholarship/ Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Bair, Kristen. “Making Magic: Mastering the Art of Magical Realism.” The Writer’s Digest. 28 Dec. 2018. https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/making-magic-mastering-the-art-of-magical-realism Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Balkun, Stacey. “Using Fabulist Elements to Write the Difficult.” 5 April 2016. https://mockingheartreview.com/2016/04/05/using-fabulist-elements-to-write-the-difficult/ Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Bensko, Tantra. “Write Magical Realism the Right Way.” The Writing Cooperative. 7 Oct. 2019. https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-write-magical-realism-c5f19c7763ea Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Haggard, Kit. “How Queer Fabulism Came to Dominate Contemporary Women’s Writing.” 8 Aug. 2018. https://theoutline.com/post/5751/fabulism-fiction-carmen-maria-machado-daisy-johnson-melissa-broder?zd=1&zi=iqp7j3ka Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
“How to Write Magical Realism: 4 Tips for Writing Great Magical Realism.“ MasterClass. 23 Aug. 2021. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-magical-realism#what-is-the-history-of-magical-realism Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Smith, Jack. “Writing Magical Realism: The Ultimate Guide.” The Writer. 2 March 2022. https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/fiction/writing-magical-realism/ Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Sparks, Amber. “New Genres: Domestic Fabulism or Kansas with a Difference.” Electric Lit. 26 June 2014. https://electricliterature.com/new-genres-domestic-fabulism-or-kansas-with-a-difference/ Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Recommendations for those who wish to read more New Fabulism
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame. Friday Black, Mariner, 2018.
Bender, Aimee. The Color Master. Anchor, 2014.
Bender, Aimee. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Anchor, 2011.
Bender, Aimee. Willful Creatures. Anchor, 2006.
Brockmeier, Kevin. The Ghost Variations. Pantheon, 2021.
Brockmeier, Kevin. The Illumination. Vintage, 2012.
Brockmeier, Kevin. Things that Fall from the Sky. Vintage, 2003.
Eagleman, David. Sum. Vintage, 2010.
Hunt, Samantha. The Dark Dark. FSG Originals, 2017.
Gonzales, Manuel. The Miniature Wife. Riverhead, 2013.
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Riverhead, 2018.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Last White Man. Riverhead, 2023.
Keret, Etgar. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories. Riverhead, 2015.
Link, Kelly. Pretty Monsters. Speak, 2010.
Loory, Ben. Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. Penguin, 2011.
Loory, Ben. Tales of Falling and Flying. Penguin, 2017.
Machado, Carmen Maria. Her Body and Other Parties. Gray Wolf Press, 2017.
Millhauser, Steven. We Others. Vintage, 2012.
Nethercott, GennaRose. Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories. Vintage, 2024.
Motoya, Yukiko. The Lonesome Bodybuilder. Soft Skull Press, 2018.
Orozco, Daniel. Orientation and Other Stories. Faber & Faber, 2011.
Saramago, Jose. Death with Interruptions. Mariner, 2009.
Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Random House, 2017.
Schweblin, Samantha. Seven Empty Houses. Riverhead Books, 2022.
Wilson, Kevin. Nothing to See Here. Harper Collins, 2019.