Editor’s Note
BY MOISES DELGADO
PROSE EDITOR
I’ve been thinking about gossip lately. Gossip is often associated with bad mouthing but gossip really is a form of storytelling we all do in our day-to-day lives. Like my mom with her sisters in California—they call at least once a week and share it all. So and so is back to dating so and so and no one approves to we enjoyed the latest Godzilla movie to so and so got a job promotion. There’s joy and sorrow and nostalgia and the mundane and many many tangents, but they say it all because gossip is a kind of community. My aunts may be on the West Coast and us in the Midwest, but gossip doesn’t know distance.
Quinton Okoro’s poem “the secret” begins with: my sister found out, and was instructed to keep her mouth shut / and so she immediately told me. because of course she would. Some things just have to be told. Because the weight of words can be too much for one person, or because, like we see in “Dianita’s Spiderweb” by Cristina Fríes, words can bear hope. We’d always stand at the edge of the ravine. Here we’d scream our most ridiculous dreams into its echoing hole so that we could hear them bounce back as voices not as loud as our own, but as faint evidence that anything we said could come true. I see gossip even when it is difficult to tell—Why can’t I just say I’ve lost someone I love, writes Isabella DeSendi. And of course, gossip in our interest in other people’s lives. From K-Ming Chang: Through our thin bedroom wall, we could eavesdrop on the front unit. We heard the Nings boiling broths, taking showers, and chasing each other around the kitchen.
I guess what I mean to say is that I see gossip as being inherent to writing. The desire or need or both to share our stories. And on the other end: a want to be heard and to listen. Whether light or heavy, mundane or wild, there is urgency in gossip to be known.
So, I hope you’ll chime into Issue 49 which includes our 2024 Djanikian Scholars in Poetry and Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction! And I hope you do it with a gossipy spirit in mind—as in, with some pan dulce and some coffee in hand and a readiness to listen, tangents and all.