LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ALISSA TU
Dear Reader,
Ghost and Gossip was conceived during Zoom University. With news of family and friends dying, a direct confrontation with unresolved trauma, and constant misinformation, gossip was a means to stay present. Gossip was a bonding agent when the pandemic pushed for self-reflection and reality checks.
From the Zoom happy hours without staff, distracting private messages, and phone calls beyond the screen, these moments of grieving, wallowing, and complaining were acts of intimacy when touch, lip reading, and physical presence were discouraged. Gossip replicated haptic.
The conversation between Becca and me about this issue went a little something like this:
me: ok but gossip as genre
b: yes!!!!!!
me: ok but ghost as genre
b: yes!!!!!
This issue is the physical product of that conversation which was so effortless and seamless that I thought the issue would follow suit. However, delays in decision-making and the UC Academic Workers’ Strike ripped apart the perfect timeline. This uncertainty and haze were reminiscent of 2020-2021, and just like those years before, things decrescendo-ed. The pace quieting and humming as we pieced together the issue.
Kayla Beardslee writes this feeling succinctly, “…but it’s not enough: no reply, no relief. / no reply, no relief. / no reply, no relief.”
This issue is filled with these liminal spaces. Craving to fill the void and gnawing away until someone hit tissue. In “migrations | multo,” readers are left with “he wants you to read this note…” where questions of head-splitting fragments and immigration are left unanswered. While Maria Picone’s narrator interviews a Water Gwishin, “Did you learn to speak your native tongue or did the colonizers take that from you?” Questions are shouted onto the page and never answered inside the void. How can one smooth out the crinkles of this unknowing?
Other pieces such as Bias Collins’s “A Few Places where my Dead Name (Still) Lives Rent Free” and Joseph Aguilar’s “Hell” offer a material existence that is grounded in the past. As if the remnants are palpable yet still leave readers in an unsure space. Aguilar’s narrator cannot live without drinking blood but can live without their grandmother. Collins’s list juxtaposes Bumble and a family’s memory bank, making readers ponder about agency and ownership. Objects in Toti O’Brien’s “Pages of a Broken Diary” carry through time: razor blades and mesh and feathers. These pieces beg the question: how does the material past, something so real, still feel like a haunting? Something that fails to bring a sense of comfort.
Ashley Gilland provides a possible explanation: “I was always mindful to name the closest ghost after myself… she let me pretend identity is transcendent and safe.” If hauntings are based on our own parts, they maintain a false sense of safety despite knowing history. “The siren” and “The Magic Bird” rely on history to create a new story, one where folklore and myth meld with the present, and identity, even in the fantastical, are transforming and morphing when instability, uncertainty, and discomfort, is ever present.
Like Matt Ford in “erotic echoes” reiterates, “It was a story to pass on.” As we exchange our stories, they break off into pieces. Each adaptation is different from the other, but all are forms of gossip, and each fragment’s jagged edge is an inconclusive understanding like the ghosts we try to comprehend. This ghostliness, a lingering feeling that inches above skin, is the only constant comfort. Knowing it is impossible to fully grasp a story is solace, and passing on the story, the gossip, is intimacy. Gossip is intimacy. It presses into our bodies and touches our bones. Experience that intimacy in the ghastly translucence. Let the phantoms mumble into your ears until you create new gossip to haunt, echo, and reverberate with.
With all my heart,
Alissa
Dear Reader,
Ghost and Gossip was conceived during Zoom University. With news of family and friends dying, a direct confrontation with unresolved trauma, and constant misinformation, gossip was a means to stay present. Gossip was a bonding agent when the pandemic pushed for self-reflection and reality checks.
From the Zoom happy hours without staff, distracting private messages, and phone calls beyond the screen, these moments of grieving, wallowing, and complaining were acts of intimacy when touch, lip reading, and physical presence were discouraged. Gossip replicated haptic.
The conversation between Becca and me about this issue went a little something like this:
me: ok but gossip as genre
b: yes!!!!!!
me: ok but ghost as genre
b: yes!!!!!
This issue is the physical product of that conversation which was so effortless and seamless that I thought the issue would follow suit. However, delays in decision-making and the UC Academic Workers’ Strike ripped apart the perfect timeline. This uncertainty and haze were reminiscent of 2020-2021, and just like those years before, things decrescendo-ed. The pace quieting and humming as we pieced together the issue.
Kayla Beardslee writes this feeling succinctly, “…but it’s not enough: no reply, no relief. / no reply, no relief. / no reply, no relief.”
This issue is filled with these liminal spaces. Craving to fill the void and gnawing away until someone hit tissue. In “migrations | multo,” readers are left with “he wants you to read this note…” where questions of head-splitting fragments and immigration are left unanswered. While Maria Picone’s narrator interviews a Water Gwishin, “Did you learn to speak your native tongue or did the colonizers take that from you?” Questions are shouted onto the page and never answered inside the void. How can one smooth out the crinkles of this unknowing?
Other pieces such as Bias Collins’s “A Few Places where my Dead Name (Still) Lives Rent Free” and Joseph Aguilar’s “Hell” offer a material existence that is grounded in the past. As if the remnants are palpable yet still leave readers in an unsure space. Aguilar’s narrator cannot live without drinking blood but can live without their grandmother. Collins’s list juxtaposes Bumble and a family’s memory bank, making readers ponder about agency and ownership. Objects in Toti O’Brien’s “Pages of a Broken Diary” carry through time: razor blades and mesh and feathers. These pieces beg the question: how does the material past, something so real, still feel like a haunting? Something that fails to bring a sense of comfort.
Ashley Gilland provides a possible explanation: “I was always mindful to name the closest ghost after myself… she let me pretend identity is transcendent and safe.” If hauntings are based on our own parts, they maintain a false sense of safety despite knowing history. “The siren” and “The Magic Bird” rely on history to create a new story, one where folklore and myth meld with the present, and identity, even in the fantastical, are transforming and morphing when instability, uncertainty, and discomfort, is ever present.
Like Matt Ford in “erotic echoes” reiterates, “It was a story to pass on.” As we exchange our stories, they break off into pieces. Each adaptation is different from the other, but all are forms of gossip, and each fragment’s jagged edge is an inconclusive understanding like the ghosts we try to comprehend. This ghostliness, a lingering feeling that inches above skin, is the only constant comfort. Knowing it is impossible to fully grasp a story is solace, and passing on the story, the gossip, is intimacy. Gossip is intimacy. It presses into our bodies and touches our bones. Experience that intimacy in the ghastly translucence. Let the phantoms mumble into your ears until you create new gossip to haunt, echo, and reverberate with.
With all my heart,
Alissa
|
ALISSA TU is a Vietnamese American writer born and raised in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been published in Honey Literary, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and diaCRITICS. She is currently recovering from the 2022 season.
|