Join the family of Rin Kelly and The Writers Grotto as we celebrate the launch of Into The Laughing Gas World. Introduction of Into The Laughing Gas World will be by Sarah B. Mohler, with readings by Jenny Bitner, Josh Wilson, Carrie Kelly, and Chrissy Bar to follow.

Proceeds from this event will be donated to the Friends of Alameda Animal Shelter in Tony Bar’s name.

Rin Kelly was a collector of oddments, a critic of culture, a poet. She translated for us, helped us to see what we are. A reader, a lover of words, she graduated from the New School in New York City and earned an M.A. from Columbia University’s Toni Stabile School of Journalism. Rin was the life partner of Anthony Bar. They lived in Alameda, California, where she became an investigative journalist, photographer, and fiction writer. She worked as a cultural contributor and film editor at the music publication L.A. Record, and as a freelance journalist, publishing articles in Salon mag- azine and in newspapers in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Bay Area. She interviewed the drummer of Talking Heads, traveled on tour buses with drag queens, made friends with animal rescue groups, and fostered small dogs and kittens. And, too, Rin continually wrote fiction and worked on her soon-to-be released novel.

This collection contains stories published in many literary journals and magazines, including The Kenyon Review and The Fabulist. Two of these stories are recent Pushcart Prize nominees, one shortlisted for the Prize. The collection, published posthumously, is Rin’s legacy to us. Mostly speculative fiction, the stories show her to be a writer much like the letter writer she describes in one of her stories: a writer with “spittle,” one capable of “world-wrecking prose,” yet one who demonstrates “so much dignity and clemency that you’d feel a kind of happy sorrow in your throat by the end.” Rin Kelly understood the power of words. She was a quick questioner, a witness to broken things, a writer who asks us to consider the “matters” of the world—some that will melt us, some that will offer us calla lilies. Her stories have been published in: The Fabulist, The Kenyon Review, No Contact (Columbia University), Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine and the Denver Post among other publications. She was a Writers Grotto aficionado. Her website: RinKellyWriter.com

Sarah B. Mohler is an associate professor of English at Truman State University in Kirkville, Missouri, where she also directs the English master’s program. She earned her doctorate in Slavic Studies from Princeton University. Her seminars and research focus on Slavic and South Asian literature and film, children’s literature, cognitive literary theory, and emerging literary genres, such as New Fabulism and Fake Lit.