Shannon Zelazny says she was in the hospital room with her hand on her brother’s chest when his heart stopped beating.
It was Jonathan Trent Zelazny’s 48th birthday—also Thanksgiving—when he succumbed to acute liver failure sparked by an out-of-the-blue stroke from earlier in the year. Shannon says she’s not positive what caused the stroke or what ultimately caused her brother’s death, though it might have had something to do with overuse of acetaminophen sparked by post-stroke forgetfulness, she says. Whatever the case, Zelazny was far too young to die, and he’s survived by his son Corwin, sister Shannon and brother Devin, as well as a veritable army of friends, former artistic collaborators, well-wishers, et al.
A born-and-raised Santa Fean, Zelazny’s name might sound familiar, likely because of his dad, the sci-fi writer Roger Zelazny. Trent was a prolific writer himself, however, with myriad titles under his belt including Voiceless, Fractal Despondency and Shadowboxer.
“A long time ago, in a past life, I dated a guy with a very famous writer father,” says Emily Mah, a longtime friend and collaborator of Trent’s. “I wouldn’t say I understand what that’s like…but I actually think that when it comes to prose, to wordsmithing, he was better than his dad. There’s no denying Roger Zelanzy was a great writer, but on all kinds of technical levels, I’d say Trent surpassed him.”
Many agreed.
“Trent Zelazny’s work is as powerful as a .45 slug,” Hap & Leonard scribe Joe R. Lansdale once wrote, and Game of Thrones progenitor George RR Martin memorialized him in a recent post to his Not a Blog blog. “Even SFR took note of Trent’s writing chops and tapped him to judge our 2019 Writing Contest, and the city is lousy with people who’ll tell you they knew, read or collaborated with Trent.
“The funny thing about our friendship is I don’t much remember when we started hanging out,” Mah says. “He and I both being part of the local writing community were in each other’s orbit for some time—we probably all met up as a group…and it eventually shifted to just Trent and I hanging out.”
Mah says she and Trent had long exchanged plot and premise ideas for their various writing projects, and that she even has a character based on him in her next tome.
“I want to memorialize him with this character and memorialize our friendship,” she says. “And a lot of our friendship was based around the crazy circumstances of life.”
Musician Matt Miller says he’ll remember Trent as a talented musician and quick study.
“We were friends since 1993, and when I met Trent he had hair down to his back and this huge beard, even though he was only, like, 16 or 17,” Miller says. “We started playing music, and he was a drummer and—actually, Trent could play anything, any instrument.”
Miller cites Trent’s solo project, Snirch, as a varied project with multiple instruments, as well as his involvement in Miller’s punk band The Floors.
“The thing that struck me is how he could always pick up [songs] after two times through,” he says. “One time, [Floors drummer] Tom Trusnovic and I had a show lined up and our bassist quit, so we needed one fast. We had one night to practice and after two times through each song, he had everything down.”
As is known to happen, Miller and Trent lost touch, though ultimately reconnected at a Dickies show in Albuquerque. This led to a coffee some weeks later.
“I know it’s clichéd to say it, but it was like there was never a time we weren’t talking,” Miller says. “The next time I heard from him, he’d had the stroke—and I talked to him on the phone not that long ago. It sounded like he had gotten better. I was hoping he had.”
Childhood friend Matt Suhre says Trent’s creative drive dates back to elementary school.
“We met in what would have been, I think, fourth grade at Rio Grande Elementary,” he says. “I was new, he’d been there, and I remember we were good friends right from the start.”
The two would form a rock band called The Glues while still in elementary school, but there was more creative collaboration than music.
“What I remember most is making stuff,” Suhre recalls. “His dad had a camcorder and we were always trying to make movies, y’know, edited in the camera, very low-tech, and I remember I broke my wrist doing a stunt for one of the productions—but I still just remember he was so creative and he always just wanted to make stuff. The important thing was making it, commercial thoughts…everything else was secondary.”
When he was 18, Trent went to work for Lisa Harris at Santa Fe’s Video Library.
“We both had a great love of The Monkees, and it was hysterical because people would come in and he’d be playing these mixtapes with The Monkees and people would think it was me, but it was this 18-year-old kid,” Harris says with a laugh. “I saw him six months before he died, and he was nice enough to bring me a drumhead autographed by Micky Dolenz.”
This, Harris says, is part of the Trent Zelanzy ethos: He knew who he was and what he liked.
“He was certainly an individualist from day one,” sister Shannon tells SFR. “He taught himself bass, piano, the guitar; he took drum lessons; he had the one-man band Snirch—he was not just another brick in the wall; he had this fire within him that demanded to come out.”
For longtime friend Andy Kirkpatrick, Trent’s fire was unignorable.
“Musically he was very prolific,” Kirkpatrick says. “I would say he recorded 60 tracks under that Snirch moniker—and I have a chunk of those recordings. What I’ll remember…he at one point Trent asked [a friend] to lock him in the trunk of her Volvo because he was writing about that and wanted to experience the feeling of being locked in a trunk. I’ll certainly miss him.”
In addition to his writing and musical pursuits, Shannon adds, Trent was fond of illustration and martial arts, the latter of which remained a lifelong pursuit through karate and Shaolin kung fu. Trent had also nearly completed both a new book and album. The family hopes to make them available in some format down the line. For now, Shannon says, she’s just grateful to have reconnected with her brother before his death.
“I wasn’t living in Santa Fe, but in 2016, I moved back, and it was supposed to be temporary, but it has been nine years,” she says. “We started hanging out, and there was just so much craziness with life and the pandemic, and that solidified our bond. It has been the biggest blessing of my life.”
In the end, she says, things were looking up for Trent’s health. He just didn’t pull through.
“We were open and honest with each other,” she says. “I’ve literally told him everything I’d ever want to say to him. I told him I was proud of him. I told him he was a survivor. I told him, ‘you have such a deep strength inside.’ And he did. The last time I saw him and hung out with him, it was ‘I love you, brother,’ and ‘I love you, sister.’”