Unpopular Opinion: Coffee is NOT Your Friend
How I discovered coffee isn't just a harmless necessity - it was destroying my life. Plus: Jane's behind-the-scenes inappropriateness.
Hello people,
If you want to skip this italicized part and go straight down to the "Unpopular Opinion” story below, I won't fault you for that at all. I will applaud you for knowing what you want and I am very much a skipper of prologues and that kind of thing myself. Except when I am in a more OCD state and feel I have to read every single word. (My daughter and I used to watch “Dance Moms” together, and if I missed one word that one of the moms said, I would make us rewind so that I could hear it clearly. Don't be like that! Sorry Charlotte! But that is one reason I do, like many of us, watch everything with closed captions now.)
So skip this if you want to and go down to the part in regular font. If you stayed, this is backstory stuff that might be interesting to people in publishing in particular, or maybe not even them.
One of the things that's really new to me about AJPT is the friendships – deep, funny, day in day out, DMing at 3:30 am, able to be our weird ass selves with each other – that I'm making with the people in this community who are becoming writers here.
I think the reason that it's so unique this time is because with Sassy magazine, it was just me as editor with three staff writers. I knew them all very well and worked with each of them on sometimes 20 and more drafts of every story and even caption to get them right to where we wanted them. So that was close quarters for sure.
But then with Jane Magazine and xoJane, I had other editors who worked directly with the writers and gave me the manuscripts to look at after they had been worked on, and so my contact with the writers was mostly through other (amazing, better than me) editors.
Now, with AJPT, I'm back to being a completely hands-on editor who works directly with the writers from that tiny, impetus, inception, not even necessarily an idea yet, nascent, baby bird cracking its shell, amoeba stage to the finished piece when I push send on it. But because these are people coming from this community who I'm finding in Substack notes or AJPT comments or sometimes on social media, they are a bigger group than my little Sassy team, and I have such unique individual relationships with each one of them.
Genevieve and I are both Scorpios who can write whatever shit we want to each other and just laugh it off. She doesn't care if I forget things that I told her to do before and completely negate my own advice. I don't care if she rambles and just bangs on her keyboard for a while to get some letters down on there. We are very sisterly in a teasing lighthearted way together.
Judith, who I respect as a writer as much as any writer I've ever worked with in my whole career, wows me with her words every single time she submits anything. Our editing process can be lengthy because we are both very tied to words. I have a strong sense of how I want things presented on AJPT, and she is an artist and I understand fully that the headlines and all of the words around her stories are a part of her art that need to remain as she wants them. So we push each other. What she has given to this site – and what she gives to the world through her other writing outlets – is one of a kind and I am thrilled to be able to collaborate with her and be any part of getting that out for more people to read. We finally get to meet in person when she is in NYC for this “Pen Secrets” panel I'm speaking on May 3, which will be cool and we will take pictures for you if you’re interested.
And then there's Jade… I found her because of a Substack comment she left and I thought that her tagline was so good that I wrote her to tell her that. It was, “It’s not pretty being this easy.” Then we got into a whole discussion of how she put that on her backpack straps when she was a teenager, but all people could see under her hair was “pretty easy” and then she asked me about submitting the story that will post tomorrow. I am very excited for you all to read it.
Jade and I have gotten closer through this process and probably written each other hundreds of times in various formats. Special rules for Jade: She is more than allowed to text me drunk, stoned or any way she likes. She is allowed to send me collages whenever and however she feels like it, or sparks of inspiration that are just personal and unrelated to any work we're doing. I love it all from her. Never stop.
There are so many other writers I have met through this site and have interesting relationships with and stories to tell you about. But I'll save those for other days, so that this doesn't become a book report or, one of my pet peeve words, a "tome”.
Now if you skipped past my intro (good for you!), I hope you will read the unpopular opinion by a NEW (to us) writer, Leah. I don't know her intensely yet, but I find everything she wrote in this piece to be super interesting. I hope you feel the same and you know you can tell us either way.
Also, this is far from a closed circle, so join in any time you like by writing to me Jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com. I would love to publish your writing and get to know you as well as you want to also.
That was long.
-Jane
Unpopular Opinion: Coffee is NOT Your Friend
How I discovered coffee was not just a "harmless necessity"—it was destroying my life.
By: Leah Welborn
Back in the late 80s, I was the kind of teenager who hung around coffee shops. I should rephrase that - not coffee shops, but one particular coffee shop - Dave's Art Pawn.
I was going to the high school for the performing arts in Dallas, and Dave's, situated among all the bars and art galleries in Deep Ellum, was the spot where it seemed to me that life was actually happening.
If I remember the lore correctly, Dave's had been a typical pawn shop before a man named Chumley bought it and turned it into a hipster cafe that featured art exhibits and folk bands. I remember it as perpetually crammed with all sorts of colorful characters who spilled noisily onto the sidewalk when the place closed every morning at 4am.
I was 17 and had recently moved to Dallas from small town Texas to attend the performing arts high school. I hadn't fancied myself as "country" until then, but it was suddenly painfully obvious that I was a girl from the sticks, with the clothes and habits to match.
Getting city girl hipster cred was suddenly achingly important to me - and coffee seemed to be something of a key.
Though I was just a kid at that point, I'd already been struggling with suicidal depression for nearly a decade. Severe, debilitating depression loomed on both sides of my family. My father's mental illness and abuse finally broke the family when I was 12, and I was glad my mother and I were free from him. But my own mental health struggles were already taking center stage in my life - alongside my theatrical creativity.
At 16, I'd believed my life would be saved by moving to another city and being with "people like me." That was the first time I would make that mistake, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Through the ensuing decades, I bounced from city to city, job to job, relationship to relationship, ever chasing those elusive glimmers of happiness that sparkled like fireflies against the night sky of my life, always just out of reach.
But through it all, I remained loyal to coffee. Like most everyone else I knew, I considered it a "harmless necessity."