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.

Given Shelley Jackson's guarantee to not republish Skin in any other format, do the criticism and discussion of those who meet her "words" not become the story itself as the original words die off?

Does Jackson not also thereby distribute authorship?

If so, is the story fictional?