I read the eulogy at Robyn Herrington’s funeral. We’d long been friends, and she’d known she was dying—she fought cancer for two years with all those clichéd adverbs: bravely, stoically, heroically.

In March 2004, I—an atheist—flew from my home in Toronto to Calgary because the University of Calgary, where she worked in information resources, was holding a prayer service for her and I wanted to see her one last time.

At that service, she asked me if I’d read the eulogy at her funeral, and of course I said yes. But she made it easy: she was a writer, after all—a damn fine one whom my wife Carolyn and I had published in the anthology Tesseracts 6—and she knew what she wanted said. And so she wrote her own eulogy, and before she died, she gave it to me.

Everybody who knew Robyn loved her—seriously: everyone. As the U of C newspaper The Gauntlet reported after her passing, “In a gesture usually reserved for students, professors and heads of government, the University of Calgary made an exception and flew its flags at half-mast for Robyn Herrington.” The eulogy she’d written for herself ended thus, “I once heard, on some TV movie, an old man say that his friends would remember he was alive as long as they could feel the wind on their faces. I kind of like that idea. So when you feel the wind in your face that’ll be me—right there. In your face.”

And I do still feel Robyn’s presence constantly. She was mentored not just by me—she’d been my student twice for week-long writing workshops at the Banff Centre for the Arts—but also by Hugo-winner Mike Resnick. And, as I write these words, almost seven years after Robyn’s death, I’m just back from a science-fiction convention in Cincinnati at which Mike and I had dinner together—and, of course, Robyn came up in the conversation, and we both spoke of how much we missed her.

Doubtless Mike and I would have been in the acknowledgments of Robyn’s first novel, if she’d lived long enough to publish one; it’s not unusual for students to thank their teachers. What is unusual is that Mike and I both dedicated books to Robyn; she had touched us both that much.

The novel I dedicated to her was Rollback—and in it I have the main character go to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see an exhibition of works by Robyn Herrington. Besides being a wonderful writer, Robyn also created exquisite works of blown glass, and although she never got the major gallery showing she deserved, there are several of her works on display in my home, and I proudly tell people about them when they visit.

Robyn was active in the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, Calgary’s venerable SF&F writing workshop, and IFWA renamed its annual short-story contest the Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Fiction Competition in her honour. Robyn, who was born in Australia, also did editorial work for Calgary-based EDGE, Canada’s largest science-fiction publisher, which helps explain how Australian writer K.A. Bedford came to be published by them. Robyn had a keen eye for talent: Bedford’s books for EDGE have twice won Australia’s Aurealis Award.

Robyn Meta Herrington was forty-three when she died; she’d have turned fifty this year had she lived. The best way to remember a writer is by reading his or her works, of course. Right now you should read Robyn’s ChiZine piece, but please also seek out her other writings, including the poem in Tesseracts 6, and her stories in three of Mike Resnick’s anthologies: Return of the Dinosaurs, Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, and New Voices in Science Fiction. And, once you’ve read, and been moved by, Robyn’s stories in those books, do yourself a favour: take one of the books, hold it close to your face, and rapidly fan the pages, until you feel the wind.

—Robert J. Sawyer

The poem "Glass, Redux" is presented in remembrance of Robyn Harrington.