Persis Gerdes (1958–2002) was a music educator, novelist, and visual artist whose private life ran in close parallel with the public founding of The Journal of Experimental Fiction. She was the wife of JEF founder Eckhard Gerdes and a co-namer of the press itself. Her novel 99 Waves, published posthumously by JEF Books in 2015, is her only book in print, but her imprint on the press is older and larger than that single title suggests.
When her husband was founding what is now JEF Books in 1986, it was Persis who gave the journal its name. In a 2018 interview with 3:AM Magazine, Eckhard recounted the conversation: "I talked with Persis about what to call it, and she said I should just call it what it is, The Journal of Experimental Fiction." The phrase has been the press's literal identity for nearly four decades. She also worked as a visual artist for the press: she did the cover and interior art for a Depth Charge Press book by Arthur Winfield Knight, the first non-Gerdes title the press ever issued, with Eckhard designing the rest.
Her professional life ran in a different register. Persis earned a Master of Arts in Teaching and worked as a music educator with underprivileged elementary school children, inspired in part by her well-known grandfather Seth Phelps, a long-time teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory School.
Her novel 99 Waves, a 339-page utopian work in eighteenth place in the JEF journal-numbered series, grew out of a meeting Persis had with R. Buckminster Fuller. The book follows a group of friends disgruntled with capitalism who set out to remake the world along new lines. She left the manuscript at her death in 2002 from metastatic breast cancer, and JEF brought the book to print thirteen years later, preserving her work as she wrote it, with no editorial intervention into her prose, so that the voice and spirit of the original are intact. All proceeds from the book go to the American Cancer Society.
Her optimism and vision for a better future were unwavering, and they live on through her work.
