Erin “Rin” Kelly (1977-2020)
As of Saturday, I am one of three winners of the 2023 Rin Kelly Scholarship for Fiction. September 30th was apparently her birthday.
Rin Kelly was a creative writer, journalist, and photojournalist. Her creative pieces have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Fabulist, Penumbric, Hobart Pulp, No Contact, Panhandler Magazine, The Courtship of Winds, and Contemporary Magazine. Her work also has been accepted by Green Hills Literary Lantern, Breakwater Review and Steam Ticket. One of her stories was shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize for 2021.
I did not know Ms. Kelly, except now through her web page and obituary (both of which are careful not to say how she died). I didn’t even know what the Pushcart Prize was until I searched for it just now, so I’m not the most aware member of the writerly community. However, before my submission to the contest, I did read her nominated story “Wax Works,” at The Fabulist, and based on that story, I wish I had known her.
He had the world’s biggest corporations regularly coming to him looking for a new labor force, a pleasant army of workers who wouldn’t belch or unionize or die, who wouldn’t get their bodies all shot off or shoot up the place. Workers who certainly wouldn’t need to be insured.
I wrote my own corporate riff on the Daedalus / Icarus myth once. That story, currently called “Unsung,” is still floating around the spaceways, being rejected by various editors. I personally think it’s one of the best things I’ve done, but my opinion clearly doesn’t matter much. The Rin Kelly contest winner, “To Foster,” has also been rejected at least five times, but now, as a follow-on to the contest, I was invited to submit that piece to a specific magazine editor. (I’ll let you know how that little bondage game goes.)
Here’s my portion of the announcement from the organizers, The Writers Grotto in San Francisco:
One scholarship is awarded to Randall Hayes for his story “To Foster.” Hayes uses his meandering narrator to walk city streets and to make mental notes on such things as empty store shelves and on facilities offering donations to the homeless. This human and humane “intelligence” measures cultural values and limits and, in time, returns home to confront other knowing, if artificial, relations. Bravo for a speculative fiction gem.
The prize was a scholarship to one of their writing courses. I’ll let you know how that goes, too.
As a thank-you and boost to the Writers’ Grotto, I include a link to The Sample, a newsletter referral service that will forward this around.
Jim Funaro (?-2023)
I also got a message on LinkedIn a few days ago that the founder of the Contact Conference, Jim Funaro, has died.
In the 80s and early 90s, Contact was the place to be, a yearly gathering of academics and artists and NASA people pushing the boundaries of their respective communities. In addition to lectures / talks, isolated teams built scientifically responsible alien species and then LARPed a first contact scenario at the last session of the weekend. Lots of famous SF writers attended, and there was much bar room banter and lore over those 25 years.
During the summer of 1979, I took a vacation to visit a friend in Port Townsend, Washington. After waiting until I had finished enthusing about the course I had so recently proposed, she smiled coyly: "Do you want to meet Frank Herbert?"
Did I? Dune was a novel I had planned to use in class, being one of the best examples of a credible created culture . . .
I lurked on the website starting around 2004, and eventually joined the e-mail list, but only attended the Contact Conference in person twice, in 2009 and 2012, the second time along with my colleague from A&T, Chad Rohrbacher, himself a writer of mostly crime fiction who has since gone over to the dark side of academic administration.
By that time, the shine had worn off the idea a bit, and it felt to me as though the principals were treating CONTACT as a family reunion as much as anything else. Givent that we were the “new blood,” we were made very welcome, but I also probably annoyed the crap out of them trying to freshen up the atmosphere by breaking all the rules. They were mostly anthropologists who cared about culture and religion; I was a biologist who wanted to see how changing the underlying biology might ripple up through those later systems.
Contact was a large influence on the creative astrobiology class I developed, which I wrote about here and here and here.
I might be recreating the class for a college audience at UNCG, and I pitched a session on that project for a conference scheduled for Finland next summer (which means I probably won’t be doing it for Science & Math).
I happened to catch the Michael Palin movie The Missionary on some streaming service last week, which had me thinking about him, and the song above, from the Contractual Obligations album back in the 80s. Sir Michael lost his wife this past year, to kidney failure, and mentioned during an interview for a new book last month that he still hears her voice,
‘Get on with it. Don’t mope about. Don’t look gloomy’.
which is not at all unusual, despite the media trying to turn it into clickbait.
The most detailed and moving discussion of the idea that I’ve read was in Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop. He devotes a whole chapter to the conversations he continues to have with the model of his wife that he carries around in his head. He is very clear that this is a virtual copy of her, based on his memories, not a haunting or a possession.
Once we realize that all of our perceptions — every single one of them — are a complex hybrid of currently incoming sensory information and memories stored from previous sensory information, this no longer seems quite so strange.
It doesn’t seem so strange at all once you look at hearing the voices of those you loved from a neuroscientific perspective. - signed, a girl who hears the voices of her grandparents
A follow-up on "To Foster." The story is still under review, and I heard part of this episode in the car this morning, on my way back from an Easter hike.
https://revealnews.org/podcast/cashing-in-on-troubled-teens-update-2024/