Jane E. Hawkins

Another stop to pay tribute to the recently departed, again among Seattle fans of the olden time.

Jane Hawkins (the middle initial was for byline use, to distinguish her from others of that name) was the first local fan I met when I came to Seattle, and she provided me with a verbal road map of the cultural neighborhood. She was a good person for such an analytical task, because while most of us were fuzzy literary types, Jane was an engineer, and had a technician's crisp and clear view of the world around her. But she was as far as possible from the typical technician's failing of treating human beings as just more machinery. Her skills at both organizing and enabling social events were legendary.

I've known a few other people who've held private invitational conventions, parties to which they invite enough people and which last multiple days and have organized time slots, so that they function more like small conventions, and which are consequently held in hotels or other such spaces. But Jane is the only person I've known to have invited me to two of them: JaneCon, which was held at the now-departed "Tudor Nightmare Villa" that was the site of so many of the smaller Seattle conventions, and CroneCon, hosted by Jane and 3 other women known to me, all turning 50, in a warehouse space in San Francisco. They were both wonderful and memorable occasions.

I wasn't as close to Jane as many others who are mourning her today, but it was a pleasure to be somewhere in the orbit of the physically small and unimposing but gravitationally intense and captivating planet called Jane Hawkins.