Yesterday we found out via her Twitter that writer Emily Nunn was laid off from her gig as a staff writer in the Good Eating section of the Tribune.
This makes us sad, not only because the slow, painful death of print media makes us sad, but because when you read the food pages as closely as we do every week, you begin to think of the folks behind the bylines as, you know, real people.* And we are never happy when real people have misfortune befall them. With that in mind, we thought we’d take a look at some of the happy moments we’ve shared with Emily during our Wednesdays together.
When we look back at all of her work as a whole, it becomes clear that one of the things we always love about Emily’s writing is her bloglike sensibility. She was sarcastic and cranky about Christmas cookies. She did the dead-tree-media version of liveblogging about a day in the life of a chef-in-training. Even when she was actually writing on a blog, she totally grokked the value of repeating your consonants for emphasis and accusing your readers of being losers.
But Emily is also wise, and happy to share her wisdom! There was the unforgettable week when she made up for our own elementary school teachers’ failure to explain the Columbian Exchange by teaching us about the pecan, the cranberry, and the potato in three separate articles. She also picked up where our Hebrew School instructors left off and instructed us in the culinary rituals of Rosh Hashanah.
Then there’s her playful side — she fueled an entire three weeks of pranks and gross-out anecdotes in our private, nonblog life with her breathless laundry list of fake foods, she accused Julia Roberts of being frumpy, she talks smack about other countries’ pastry chefs.
In short, we really like Emily Nunn. We like her writing, we like her attitude, and we don’t like that the Tribune thought she was expendable. We don’t doubt that she’ll land on her feet, but for the time being, we pour one out for Wednesdays a little less Nunnful.
*We have, in our head, a very complex scenario when it comes to the dramatis personae at the Trib — we imagine that Bill Daley, Renee Enna, and (until now) Emily Nunn sit on one side of the room having coffee and chatting merrily about Christmas Cookies, while Carol Mighton Haddix sits at a remove — but not so far away as to seem unfriendly. On the other side of the room, Monica Eng is being excited about chicken wings while Christopher Borrelli kayaks in circles and Kevin Pang laughs quietly over a pile of fast food. Above everyone, Phil Vettel sits on a golden throne, his face shrouded in writhing mist, benevolently passing judgment on everyone’s noise level.
