When I heard about the sudden passing of Jef Murray, artist in residence at St. Austin Review, I felt that I’d lost a distant family member, or a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a long while. But the truth is, I’ve never even met him.

Probably everyone has had the experience of hearing on a news program that some celebrity or famous person has died and feeling that they’ve lost someone they knew personally. This was not that kind of loss experience, but something quite other, and it made me think about how I “knew” Jef, and why I should feel a personal loss.

Our lives, I think, are woven together in ways we don’t know about or understand. A distant unknown person influences us more than the person sitting next to us, someone with whom we’re intimately acquainted. I don’t mean they influence us because of something they’ve written or painted, some sermon they preached, or a film they made. It’s not so direct as that; it’s more of a warp-and-woof involvement, so that when a loss occurs, it’s as though we become aware that there’s been a rent in the fabric of our life.

I knew Jef before I ever heard of StAR, or Joseph Pearce; and before it ever occurred to me to write a single word for anyone else to read. Jef was, in the warp- and-woof way of things, responsible for eight or ten stories—enough for a collection, I think—numerous reviews and essays, two novels, and for my long and happy association with StAR.

The year I retired from teaching I read Lord of the Rings for the first time and was utterly enchanted. I was familiar with the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis as the best Christian apologist of the twentieth century, and with Owen Barfield, whose linguistic theories fascinated me, but in 2003, J.R.R. Tolkien hit me so strongly that it was almost an assault. I was deeply infatuated. Unable to bear my isolation, I joined the Tolkien Society and searched for the nearest chapter—over 300 miles away in Atlanta, way too far away to attend meetings, but Tolkien artist Jef Murray was the leader and launched a newsletter and a “chat group” for members. I became acquainted with Jef through emails.

Living as I did in Lothlorien at the time, I felt a compulsion to write a story about it. I sent the story to Jef. He loved it, illustrated it with a couple of sketches and sent it to Amon Hen, the literary magazine of the Tolkien Society. There were a few people in the Tolkien Society who wanted more—and certainly my muse, Aldariel, was not done talking. She told four or five more stories. Publication in/about Middle Earth was not possible because of copyright prohibitions, so I made, by hand, a few copies of the little volume of Aldariel’s stories and sent them to the people who had enjoyed reading them as email attachments and given me so much encouragement.

Aldariel was done then. She had no more stories to tell, but the veil between me and imaginative prose had been lifted. I started to write short stories for publication. During this time, Jef mentioned some artwork appearing in St Austin Review. He thought I’d like StAR and suggested I subscribe. I’ve read every StAR since then. It’s the best publication of its kind—Jef wasn’t wrong. It was in the pages of StAR that I read an invitation for a pilgrimage to England. My novel Treason is a result of that pilgrimage.

My association with the Tolkien Society waned quickly after attending a giant Tolkien convention in Birmingham in 2005, but Jef remained a major Tolkien artist, whose works are craved and bought by Tolkien lovers all over the world. My own love affair with Tolkien bore a different kind of fruit, in learning to become a child in my old age, and learning that we actually do live in a Mystical Realm and we always have.