Jane's Phone: I Love Christina (And You, Unsubscriber)

I generally have to gird myself before opening this page in the system that shows the reasons people unsubscribe to AJPT. (I could just ignore it, like bad press or like the fact that I have never read one single book that was written about or that included me—except Bob Iger's, which I am mentioning here as an excuse to say that Bob Iger mentioned me in his book!!! Can you believe that shit?! I LOVE him—largely because I feel like I was there and I get bored reading about it again. But when it comes to comments from you guys, I care so I am compelled to look.) And now revealing this page to you makes it exponentially more vulnerable.

But I wanted to show you this list of AJPT subscribers who quit and the reasons they wrote in as to why, because not one person on the whole (long) list mentioned a specific author or story, except for this one about Christina Kelly. And I completely agree. Never enough Christina Kelly, in my opinion. Fortunately for us all, I knew when I saw this note that Christina was looking to write something else for us, so I knew I could make Unsubscriber happy again, and I am beyond grateful that Christina did.

Whenever I read Christina’s stories, I react more like a new reader than an editor, because I love her simply beautiful writing so much. And then I send her text upon text like I did the other night at midnight gushing about the parts I love the most. So I'm with you, Unsubscriber. We all cherish one-of-a-kind Christina and always will. If you haven't already read it, look at her most recent brilliance here today.

PS for those of you who don't know the history: Christina was the first writer I hired at Sassy magazine. I called her to come up to our pink offices and perfunctorily interviewed her, but she was already hired in my mind based largely on the incredibly spoken-sounding and blunt wording in her cover letter to me. She was working at the time at Footwear News (and I'm sure she was writing brilliantly there too, even if it was captions, because she can't do it any other way).

For one of the early issues of Sassy, she submitted a story to me (we didn't have any editors or freelancers - just the three writers and me) and one of the paragraphs started with the word “But” with a period after it. But. I have seen that device used since then, but I had never seen anything like it at the time. I danced around the office, holding up that piece of paper with that But. on it for a good long time, I was so so so excited. Then she came to work at Jane magazine also. However, she and I are best known for her band that I played electric violin in, Chia Pet.