On Monday Seattle lost Kim Ricketts, founder of Kim Ricketts Book Events and former events coordinator at the University Book Store.

Last year, Seattle Met had the good fortune of being a media partner with Kim Ricketts Book Events, and Kim treated me and my colleagues the way she treated everybody, as instant friends. If she met you for the first time and heard you were interested in philanthropy, for instance, she would offer to introduce you to Bill Gates. I’m not speaking hypothetically; I actually witnessed her do that.

Kim brought very important authors to Seattle, people like Malcolm Gladwell and Mario Batali and Salman Rushdie, giving us impossibly intimate access to them over glasses of wine or sprawling, multi-course dinners. She took these towering figures off the stage and into the audience, connected us to them.

But of all her events, the two that stick with me most concerned local authors. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Food" was Kim’s bi-annual gathering supporting Seattle writers who had recently published books on food and cooking. In each of the last two What We Talk Abouts, a writer read an essay detailing the pain of losing a loved one.

What surprised me, on both occasions, was how baldly the room reacted to these pieces. People were crying openly, loudly even. The air grew dense with sympathetic grief. In a stony-faced town like this one, that doesn’t happen all that much. But Kim was a connector. She brought people out of themselves and drew them towards each other. Seattle will miss her terribly but remember her so fondly.