Jennifer Alexander, longtime Contributor vendor, artist, poet and writer, died Sept. 19 after suffering from a terminal illness. She was 74 years old.
Jen was known at the newspaper for her rigorous approach to art and writing. Every piece of the piece meant something to Jen, and she applied a judgemental eye to any artistic approach she thought was lacking. Jen could be kind, self-deprecating, but her wit was standout. Whether a text message, a letter, an email or a poem, it was always clear she had drafted it to her exact liking before hitting send.
Many at The Contributor remember when Jen first arrived to sell the paper. She crafted a sunhat covered in sunflowers, sewed a smock from a Contributor T-shirt and often added sunflower embellishments to any item she wore on her person.
Jen was not an open book, but her writing often revealed deep personal (and universal) truths. She was both a brilliant and prolific writer who focused on marginalized experiences and loved to pick a fight with her words. During the pandemic in 2020, Jen wrote a letter to The Contributor’s amateur astrologer Mr. Mysterio. It was both packed full of satire and injected with the truth about how she was really feeling.
“I don’t have a television — haven’t for many years,” she wrote. “But when I heard on my magic radio box that George Floyd had been murdered, something inside me broke. In the early days of the lockdown, because of a heart condition and my type A blood, I was afraid if I went outside I’d get Covid and die. After the horror of hearing George in the throes of death call out, “Mama”, I was now afraid that I wouldn’t die. I could not remember any event in my life that was more heartbreaking than that. And I’ve had some heartbreak.”
Piece by piece, over the more than dozen years she was a friend to folks at the paper, details would reveal themself about what Jen had suffered in her life, though she rarely ever revealed those details directly in conversation.
She is survived by her four children: Joshua Frost, Matthew Thiele, Elizabeth Lutes, and William Ramsay. She was predeceased by her son Evan Thiele, who died by suicide in 1998. Her son Joshua Frost was the only child she remained connected to in late life, and though they struggled to find footing in their relationship, he says he feels grateful that she found a way to cope with the things life threw her way, and that finding any way to connect with her was “always worth the fight.”
“She was always willing to talk about her art,” Frost says. “She was always willing to talk about writing. She pushed me as much as anyone in my life has pushed me to write and to do my art. I’m a maker, so I am heavily into making things, but not just kind of passively. I obsess about them, and I think I get that from her. I think she had this obsessive quality about her to create and to interpret the world around her in a unique way. My mother was a genius … but she also had a lot of difficulty processing her own reality, so she would create fantasies about her reality that helped her to cope with what actually was going on in her life.”
Jen was a staunch supporter of women’s rights. She absolutely hated guns and the American obsession with them. She was an avid reader who passed her love of literature on to her children.
“She made sure that when we were small children that we were exposed to all kinds of different literature, and she obsessed over our reading level,” Frost says. “So she would go, at least with me anyway, she would go over with us individually, the things that she wanted us to read. And from a very early age, she read to us, and it was a point, not a point, let’s say it was a quality of my upbringing in the beginning, to have literature and writing and reading as a fundamental basis for interpreting the world of things for negotiating and interrogating my natural world.”
The Contributor’s Director of Finance Cathy Jennings called Jen one of the most gifted writers she’d ever known.
“She had a way of going straight to the heart of a matter — her words could move you to tears, or to anger, depending on which side of the truth you stood,” Jennings says. “Jen never soft-pedaled the reality she saw around her. She was unflinching in naming injustice and transparent about the ugliness she witnessed. That honesty sometimes made her a difficult person for those who didn’t really know her, but to know Jen was to see her gentleness, her empathy, and her heart.”
Jennings says Jen was quick with a shy hug or a quiet I love you, adding that she felt everything very deeply. When her neighbor died during the COVID-19 pandemic alone, Jen was in deep grief, weeping with Jennings and carrying grief as though she was heartbroken for how they suffered in loneliness in their final moments.
“Jen was also fearless. When her apartment building became unsafe and unclean, she chose to leave, even though it meant facing homelessness as an older woman,” Jennings says. “She believed it was the only path toward a better life, and she walked it with courage.”
Jen struggled with homelessness almost her entire life, but her son says she always expressed a great love for Nashville and probably was the most settled here in her adult life. She lived in an apartment in East Nashville before moving into Hospice briefly where she died.
“She loved the area, she loved the people, she loved the fight,” he says. “She wrote to me when she took on [issue] of making sure that unhoused people, unhoused women, were able to access feminine hygiene products with their SNAP benefits. She was just absolutely over the moon about it. She was determined to really get somewhere. She loved contributing, and it was something that made her very happy. I remember vividly of her getting to Nashville and being happy about taking on that fight and meeting people she felt understood her.”
Frost says she was always intent on making Christmas time special, and he can now see that she was trying in all the ways she could to be a mother, even though in the traditional sense she was not a great mother figure to him.
“Life was really, really super unfair for my mom,” Frost said. “I mean, greater than normal. Life is not a fair thing to navigate anyway. But for her, it was especially unkind. … She still made sure that we felt loved though in her own way. I don’t remember anything from that early experience where I would admonish her. I know now that we probably suffered from malnutrition and some other pretty horrible stuff, but I think that my mother, as well as the stardust that made up her body, was made of love. She just absolutely was 100 percent made of love, and life did not end up the way she wanted it to. I guess we can all have a small measure of that, but my mother did understand love and she did love us, and she was just dealt a shit hand.”
In a poem in 2021 as part of our annual Poetry Edition, Jen asks the question “Who Are You?” and it can be hard to tell whether the content is focused outward or inward. Either way, her work always left us something to think about.
You’ve forgotten who you are
Cast adrift in a sea of
Fear and loathing
You watch and listen
But you do not see or hear
Buffeted by wave after wave
Of cruelty and despair
You taste the bitter brine
You struggle for breath
You grasp at the
Most convenient straw
You used to be so cocksure
You captained your ship
Confidently performing
Complicated fiduciary tasks
Loop the loops
Acts of kindness
Detached from your
Purpose driven life
You’ve lost your sense of touch
You’re cowed
By a swatch of cloth
A slight jab in the arm
That community relies on
To prove your will
Your power
As you struggle
To find firm footing
In your bottomless pit of
Suffocating quicksand
You’ve lost your faith
You’ve lost all hope
You’ve lost one of another
Who are you?