"Skin" gone more feral still

So this is interesting: since we “read” Skin, I've brought it up twice outside class for very random contextual reasons in conversation with two different people, and both of them cut me off mid-sentence to say, "hey, ______ wrote a story about that!" Prior to our conversations about Skin, neither of them had known that this person’s story, which they read for a fiction workshop, was based on an actual project -- they’d thought it was ______’s own very insane, very original idea.

This struck me as a fascinating instance, and one that our class didn’t come up with during discussion, of how a hypertext can go feral. So what if Shelley Jackson says that no one but the participants, i.e., the “words,” will ever read the full text of Skin? One could go so far as to say that another author, in appropriating Jackson’s idea, and writing a narrative about it, has made an edition of the text available to a larger readership. Perhaps we can call it a translation. I think this is a valid stretch, because the two people I spoke to, along with all the other members of the workshop class who read the rewritten story of Skin, have, in essence, read Jackson’s project -- they knew exactly what I was talking about, and perhaps in greater detail than I did myself, before I’d even finished my first explanatory sentence.