You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

His point, as I take it, is that you can try to improve your vocabulary or your depth of knowledge by reading to an infinite point, and that alone would not make you a better writer. Because what makes writing good isn’t only a display of technical skill, but the ability to use the writing to search for meaning in the world, to try to make sense of our space in the universe. In On Freedom, Maggie Nelson says that art is “a metabolic activity, a ‘way of churning the world.’”

All writing is about the journey from information to telling, not just the final product. You cannot observe the world without eyes to see it through.

But that is exactly why most church leaders demonize gossip so strongly from the pulpit, because gossip seeks to hold people to account for their actions. It fights against secrecy, and while that can be dangerous when used against people without power, it targets anyone in leadership of any church who has an immense amount of power. Women who brought forth credible allegations of sexual misconduct against Willow Creek Community Church founder Bill Hybels were accused of using false allegations to collude and divide the church.

“We’d like to think that if a whisper network came to us… we would be able to do the right thing. But the likely truth is that at this very moment, we are being called upon to act, and we are failing without even realizing it. Worse, if a reckoning ever comes, we will likely pretend we were doing the right thing all along,” Sarah Jeong wrote in The Verge.

anonymity is a way to claim power that doesn’t belong to you, for better or for worse.

When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it. Anonymity gives people without power an opportunity to grab a little bit as their own. In the early years of women’s novel writing, the stigma of publishing as a woman was so great that in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that many anonymous figures were women. More accurately, Anonymous is anyone subjected, anyone trying to find a way to claw back a little bit of what has been taken from them.

You cannot both expect to be served with libel papers at any moment and believe that the gossiping you do causes no harm. But I am not responsible for the behavior of Deuxmoi; I am responsible only for my own behavior and the behavior of my dog, and she cannot read.