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Kelly says: I met Jenna at a convention just after she and Rob had bought a story from me, for Century, a magazine that I had never seen, and which when I saw it, was much more beautiful than I would ever have guessed. I seem to recall that there was a hot tub involved, and a stolen inflatable cow. I kept running into Jenna in the hallways, dripping wet and wearing a towel, with a small army of followers in two, engaged in strategically hiding the forbidden cow. In fact, I never saw the cow. But I saw a lot of Jenna after that. The first time I came to Brooklyn, it was to meet Jenna and Rob and Bryan Cholfin at a diner. When I moved to Brooklyn last summer, we found an apartment down the street from Jenna. She was our consultant on all neighborhood things - on grocery stores, 24-hour diners, places to get really good bread and coffee, places to buy music and hats. We also relied upon her as an arbiter of typography, layout, printers, and all things book-related. It's still impossible to think about living in a Brooklyn where Jenna isn't just down the street. Either she should still be here, or else Brooklyn shouldn't be. I really mean that.
Justine says: I don't remember meeting Jenna. I know it was October 1993 at the World Fantasy Con in Minneapolis. My first science fiction convention; my first contact with the sf community. I remember being overwhelmed, meeting lots of wonderful people - Jenna was one of them. I saw her again during the six weeks I spent in NYC in the winter of 1993/94. I remember being shocked to discover she was only seventeen years old (she seemed years older) and also not shocked when sometimes she seemed incredibly young and unsure. She loved my accent; I loved hers. We made each other laugh. Over the next six years we saw each other at conventions in full party mode: a billion volt Jenna - laughing, dressed in loud, absurd, wonderful - sometimes ugly - clothes, hats, and shoes that always looked incredible and glamorous on her; watching her racing around with an inflatable cow; winning at I Never. She had hordes of admirers and even more friends. Then in September 1993 I moved to NYC and got to know non-convention Jenna who taught me NYC - the east village, and Brooklyn, mostly Brooklyn. Like Kelly I won't ever be able to walk along a street here without thinking of her. Jenna was generous, frustrated, frequently depressed, a wonderful flirt, a wonderful cook. We loved listening to her talk and we loved her huge, exasperated sighs. She loved cooking and she loved books (she loved books about cooking), which was a problem: she and Rob owned so many books that there was never enough space to eat at their dining room table. She wrote poetry and also letters to Salon.com in praise of men who loved oral sex. She was a witty, curmudgeonly and easily outraged correspondent. She was deeply fond of the semicolon and had strong opinions about serial commas. She was a passionate and committed editor of good books, and an outstanding copyeditor. One day, we were sure, she would write a book about her life. She claimed not to know the names of any of the characters on the television show Friends. She loved pork rinds. She was a pedant who never wrote down two three-letter words in Boggle when she could make a compound word instead. Mediocrity distressed her. She was superstitiously afraid of a particular Brooklyn stop on the N/R train. She had an abundance of beautiful, corkscrew hair, which was apparently a bother and a trial to her, although she loved her best friend Veronica Schanoes's identical hair. She owned a snood. She turned down a job at a bookstore because it would have meant giving up Sunday afternoon football. She captained a volleyball team - we never got to see her play. She had a crush on Gillian Anderson, and wanted a wardrobe of Issey Miyake clothes. She loved Elizabeth Bishop. She had never read Tolkein, but she was planning to read it soon. Until last August when Justine and another friend, Liz Wickersham, took her for a weekend in the Adirondacks, she had never peed in the woods. She loved Ethan Frome, Anna Karenina, and the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. She had complicated feelings about oysters. She stopped to talk baby-talk to every dog that she met on the street - she was pleased to have had a speaking acquaintance with Paul Auster's dogs. She was not very good at burping. She sang off-key. She loved most kinds of music. She always smelled good. She was an orphan who had constructed her own very large family of friends and admirers and co-workers. She wanted very badly to have children - instead, we suspect that in the next few years, there will be a great many children named after her. There were a lot of things that she was still planning to do. She wanted to take up Aikido. She was going to visit Australia. We were planning to take knitting classes together - we had recently bought knitting needles and picked up class schedules. She wanted to see O, Brother Where Art Thou? (She already had the soundtrack.) She was going to proofread and copyedit the manuscripts of the two collections that Gavin and Kelly had been putting together (with much advice from Jenna). One was Kelly's book - Jenna was going to write the flap copy. She wanted to start her own press. We were going to drive down to Fort Lauderdale for IAFA. She was going to get her learner's permit this week. At the hospital, she was surrounded by people who loved her, all of whom were in constant contact with other people who loved her, and were unable to be there. At times, her alcove in the hospital and the waiting room outside the RCU seemed like some sort of nightmare science fiction convention. Someone had put up a picture on the wall, of Ellen Datlow and Jenna, both in velvet dresses. One of the nurses looked at it, and told us, "I remember her now." She had been on duty the last time Jenna had come in after a severe asthma attack. Kelly says: I have been thinking a lot about Readercon, two years ago. Once again there was a hot tub involved, but this time Jenna was sitting on a couch. She had a beautiful dress on, instead of a towel. She looked tipsy, elegant, radiant. Gavin and I had been talking to her, and then we got up to get more drinks. When we came back, we couldn't get within a yard of her. There were editors and agents and science fiction writers crowded all around her. She was flirting with all of them. Nobody could take their eyes off her. I also remember World Fantasy two years ago in Providence, Rhode Island. We were at the Fedogan and Bremer party, drinking sidecars. She was hiking her dress up over her black tights to show us her navel ring. I'm also remembering Jenna, at a party at our apartment in Brooklyn, reading Robert Burns poetry with a Chaucerian English accent. I remember sitting and reading through a pile of Century slush a few weeks ago with Jenna and Bryan Cholfin, eating pizza and watching Strictly Ballroom, one of her favorite movies. I'm trying to pin down these memories. I don't know anyone like Jenna. I don't want to forget her voice, how brave she was, the advice she was always willing to give me. Justine says: The Jenna that I've gotten to know in the last eighteen months was not the convention Jenna. Yes, she was as up and bubbly and funny and magnetic as that Jenna but she was also often depressed and convinced that she had achieved nothing in her life, full of regrets that she had not finished college, and worried that her career was going nowhere. My memories of Jenna mostly revolve around me and her and Kelly hanging out together, sometimes in bars, or at Chat'n'Chew, or at Kelly and Gavin's apartment. I also remember us cackling a lot together. Just recently we spent all night in a bar in Brooklyn, drinking and gossiping until 5 am in the morning. Jenna had put a ton of money into the jukebox and was on a rant about how outrageous it was that one of her songs had not come on yet. I loved Jenna's rants. She would gain several inches in her outrage, thump the table, get hugely indignant - and yet never be without words. Jenna on a rant was always articulate, and could make Kelly and me weep with laughter.
We will miss her laughter, we will miss her sadness, we will miss her tremendous courage that pulled both her and her sister, Vanessa, out of what could have been a very dark place. We will miss desperately trying to convince her how loved, cherished, respected and admired she was. We honestly believe in the past few years she was starting to believe it.
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