By Joseph Sullivan: On August 1, 2024, Deb Wunder passed away of heart failure in NYU Langone Hospital in Brookyn. She was 71.  Deb had suffered from serious heart problems for many years.  For the last year, she was in and out of the hospital. Deb was a well-known, mostly loved, NYC fan.  This is why.

Deb was born and raised in Queens, the borough of NYC where municipal statuary goes to die.  She enrolled at Queensborough Community College, where she was mentored by Ginny Carew, an English professor and SF fan.  Deb was one of the founders of the QCC SF club, and an editor of its fanzine, Entropy.  At Ginny’s parties, we club members met such fannish luminaries as Janet and Ricky Kagan, Fred Lerner, and Jon Singer.  We also attended conventions, and made connections with Brooklyn and Manhattan fans.  After QCC, Deb got a bachelor’s degree in Business Management, and worked in real estate and at Franklin K. Lane High School.

From a young age, Deb was interested in music.  Her taste in music was very wide.  She liked clasical, rock, folk, and hip-hop.  In the early 1970s, she became a roadie for several bands, including Yes. She naturally fell into the filk scene, where she became close friends with Abby Cinii and Marc Glasser.  She was Listener Guest at the Contata 6 filk convention in 2011.

She was a gluttonous, indiscriminate reader of books!  Fiction, non-fiction, biography, poetry (Du Fu), theology (St. Paul) were all food for her plate.  She was like a gourmet who, after a full-course meal, turns to her shaken and terrified companions, and says “Let’s get pizza.  I know a place.”  In 2023, the last year before her health broke, she read 234 books).  Deb was a published short story writer.  She was also a freelance editor, and wrote numerous book reviews at Goodreads and Not Just a Grouchy Grammarian.

Deb was also an amateur artist, primarily in colored inks. Even in rehab, she continued to draw.  Her color abstracts were particularly good.  Deb was a talented knitter, and this abstract style shows up in her knitting.  She knitted for friends and for commissions.  You can see her work at A Skein of Yarn (or Ten).

However, this is not where Deb’s real talent lay. Her real talent was friendship.  If she liked you, or found you interesting, she would batter down your shyness or reserve until you accepted her friendship.  Her closest friends (excluding lovers) were other women.  The loss of these friends, through disagreement or death, was a heavy blow.  The recent death of Abby affected her deeply.

She was not perfect, as she would admit.  She had a temper, and the instrument to announce its arrival.  But with some rare exceptions, there was no malice behind this.  It was the result of frustration, physical pain, and fear. The last of these was an emotion that Deb was unfamiliar with. She would occasionally misjudge people, but would apologize when proven wrong.  She was tolerant to a fault.

After Deb died, one of her best friends said that she was “a true original. We will not meet her like again.”  According to Susan Levy, Deb’s wife, her only real regrets were that she didn’t have children or a good singing voice.  She told me, “I want people to know I enjoyed my life.”  Now you do.