Lissa Hunt

Daniel S. Comiskey

What I remember most about meeting Lissa Hunt is wishing she would slow down.

People had warned me that the new editor of the Indiana Alumni Magazine was an intellectual Roadrunner. Brazen as usual, I assumed I would be able to keep up.

In my first week as arts and culture editor of the magazine, I was scribbling down Lissa's story ideas so desperately that I tore several holes in the pages of my notebook. One of her early complaints about the publication was that "it had the turning radius of a battleship." The fact that she had an Ivy League Ph.D. didn't begin to explain how fast this woman's mind churned. Every conversation was a sprint.

But it was not speed for speed's sake. Lissa wanted us to be ahead of the consumer magazines in tackling international issues. Last year, she assigned me a story on endangered languages, a problem of which I was only vaguely aware. Within a month of its publication, the article ("Last Words") was excerpted in The Christian Science Monitor. Within three months, The New Yorker ran an article on the same subject, with the same title. As usual, Lissa had been just a little faster than the competition.

Around the office, that velocity was contagious. Those of us who had been lulled into writing anniversary stories became inspired to keep up with editorial trends in GQ, one of the magazines Lissa loved and had delivered to work. And she made readers quick too--quick to notice the drastic redesign she brought to the magazine, quick to respond with hate mail when she smeared the word "SEX" all over the cover of an issue.

As a writer, Lissa was drawn to science. It's easy to imagine her gleefully inserting the words "momentum" and "acceleration" into those features about particle physics and microbiology. As an editor, she was quick to spot a cliché and even quicker to remove it. One of Lissa's columns seized upon the phrase "failure of imagination," which after the 9/11 Report became so overused that she vowed never to allow it in our pages again.

In the end, bad luck proved to be the only thing quicker than Lissa. Six months after being diagnosed with cancer, she was dead at age 42--her 23 months as editor having passed with devastating haste. It was almost as if she knew that her time was short, that what she lacked in distance, she would have to make up for with speed.

Then again, maybe she was just a little smarter than the rest of us.

http://alumni.indiana.edu/lissahunt/