Tributes

Between whimsical prose lies poignant images, from a school shooting survivor emerging from red waters to a shattered rock, reincarnated into a beautiful necklace. These images speak to the shared mortal experience of human life and its flaws, troubles, and imperfections.

Sarah White, The Green Hills Literary Lantern
Truman State University
Into the Laughing Gas World

 

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, The Green Hills Literary Lantern
Truman State University
“A Happy Kind of Sorrow”: The New Fabulist and Speculative Fiction of Rin Kelly

 

Rin wrote about trauma, about the basic dehumanization of being alive in late capitalism, about mass tragedy and about absurd speculative futures that are just around the corner or happening right now. She wrote stories of futuristic collapse and possibility, as her lens moved between dystopian and utopian possibilities.  Her fictional world is a dense, surrealistic, often absurdly funny place where our lives are inundated with media, marketing and technology, as we try to find our own souls.

Jenny Bitner
Here is a Game We Could Play

 

~ on her manuscript for The Bright and Holo Sky:   What she has produced is real, and powerful. It’s a story about society and its abuses, about commercialism and capitalism, about trying to stay human despite all that, despite the incredible external pressures that seem to warp and deform our very concept of ourselves, and rob us of our ability to fully experience and manifest our joyful selves unhindered and uninhibited.  So, while it is science fiction, it is 100% true and real.

Josh Wilson
Editor, The Fabulist Magazine

 

Her writing demonstrated her creative range as a poet, an inventor of characters, a witness to inequalities, a debater of public policy. In one of her stories, published in the Kenyon Review, she describes one of her characters who writes letters to the editor: [She] was just magnificent, all spittle and world-wrecking prose…you’d hear 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…”  And here, in these words, is Rin herself.  She noticed things.  She was a soul voice, a woman working at knowing people and justice, a woman writing with “spittle’ and verve and a play of mind and heart.

Carol Samson
Goose Summer

 

I find her story to be sharp and clever and, most of all moving in the ways it dramatizes literally the ways in which women’s humanity and vulnerability are often subsumed into the dehumanizing world of medicine and/or male objectification.

Professor Jonathan Fink, Panhandler Magazine
Western Florida University
White is for Complacent

 

“In this wicked little stinger, social satire and speculative fiction converge to burst some techno-utopian bubbles.”

The Fabulist
Wax Works
shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize

 

“…we love this story, its wonderful language and surprising, fresh voice.”

Elliot Alpern and Gauraa Shekhar, Editors, No Contact Magazine
Columbia University
Upper Management or GodCo, LLC

 

“…the boundaries of reality and surreality swim in an out”

Professor Adam Brooke Davis, Green Hills Literary Lantern
Truman State University
Kahlo

 

“…an amazing story of loss, wit, and hope”.

Kimberly Bliss, Editor, Hobart Pulp
Seven Million Minutes in Heaven