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When I talk about Jenna Felice, I often use the phrase "feral child." And I don't mean anything untoward by it; indeed, I mean it as a compliment. I mean she's someone who, despite her youth, spent more years taking care of herself than many people a decade older than her. By the time Jenna was in her early teens, almost everyone in her birth family was dead or in jail. She more or less raised her younger sister herself. I don't know a lot about this part of her life, aside from a magazine essay she once wrote (and sold) about being a survivor of a family destroyed by AIDS. For me, the camera first zooms in on Jenna in 1991, when she came to Tor as an intern from Hunter College High School. She was fifteen.
She was a terrific intern--mouthy, funny, perceptive, immensely practical and direct. A great fit for Tor, an organization that tends to favor self-starters. Which is another way of saying we're less efficiently organized than we ought to be, so that the kind of people who flourish at Tor tend to be those with a certain kind of confidence and flair--people willing to roll up their sleeves and remake the universe as seems sensible to them. Jenna had that kind of fearlessness from the start. So when, a few years later, I needed a new full-time, on-staff editorial assistant, Jenna was the obvious choice. And an outstanding assistant she turned out to be. In a very real sense a senior book editor is only as good as his or her assistant, and Jenna was very good indeed. She made it her business to know everybody, not just at Tor (where our growth has long outstripped my ability to remember who all the new faces are) but all the people who get stuff done in the service departments of St. Martin's and Holtzbrinck. Jenna could make the bureaucracy jump through hoops of fire. Packages held up at a Canadian customs broker? Warehouse making it hard to mail Nebula-nominated books to everyone in SFWA? Need to cut a check instantly and ship it by overnight mail to Brazil? Jenna knew how to make it happen. She was Radar O'Reilly with a tough, often exasperated, always funny, and very Brooklyn attitude. And she was smart. All through this time she was working with Rob Killheffer on Century, the excellent (if maddeningly infrequent) small-press magazine of ambitious, edgy SF. She was an insightful editorial reader for me. She had canny self-taught taste and judgment. She read widely and voraciously outside of SF, and had strong opinions about what was what. She had a knack for spotting talented people and making friends with them. She could be kind, and she could be tough. Being a good editor entails all of these qualities. That she had them was evident when she was an intern and when she was my assistant. So in the natural course of things, eventually she was promoted, becoming a full editor at 21--the youngest in the SF book industry. Which under the best of circumstances would be a stressful thing to be. And real life never happens under the best of circumstances. Jenna could also be dismissive, tactless, and wrongheaded. I wanted to drop-kick her out the 14th floor of the Flatiron Building at times. No doubt she wanted to do the same to me. We were very similar in some ways, and we baffled one another in others. Our relationship as friends and colleagues was always a little wary, punctuated by moments of hilarious self-recognition. Every so often, we had the refreshing ability to call one another on each other's bullshit. The news of her sickness, hospitalization, and coma reached Tor on Monday. Multiple Tor employees visited her as she lay unconscious in the respiratory ward; over that week, it seemed, so did practically everyone else in New York. Visitors read to her, played music, talked to her, cajoled her, held her hand, stroked her hair. As far as I could tell, the flow of people never stopped. Even at two in the morning, the hallway outside her ward was like a small convention. People ran into one another in that hospital who hadn't seen each other in years. Back at Tor, as that week went on, I would walk past Jenna's office and the light would be on and what I would think in that first microsecond would be "Oh, good, Jenna's back," and of course she wasn't back, and all the insupportable, barely real, impossible-to-encompass news of the last several days would return to me. Now that terrible week is over, and we know she won't be back. All we have is what she left us. Dash. Attitude. Enthusiasm tempered with style--and style tempered with a sense of humor. Rather than all those admirable qualities, though, I'd rather just have Jenna. I want for her to be behind her desk, peering nearsightedly into her dusty computer monitor, about to say something funny and wryly dismissive about this piece of writing, because she'd be appalled at all this sentiment, and embarrassed on my behalf that I should be perpetrating it.
That would be Jenna. I just want her back.
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