We’ve already had our first launch event, in Portobello Bookshop last week, and there’s another one tomorrow (12th August), in Glasgow. It’s at Alchemy Experiment, and will feature writing by Cheryl Follon, Sam Tongue, Chisom Okoronkwo and Sophia Archontis. Please do come along: you can find all the details here.

Those of you who are subscribers will have already received your copies of the magazine (and if you’re not, you can buy a copy here or at your local bookshop). If you’re a Friend or Patron, you should also have received your stunning print, created by Ryan Vance, using a line from one of the stories in this issue, written by Anthony Shapland. Like so . .

(And if you’d like a copy of this print, do sign up as a Friend, either here on Substack or on our website.)

Over on the site, there’s a lot to see. You can read the editorial for Issue #34, which gives you a great introduction to the magazine’s content. You can also read our interview with Gabriella Bennett, author of the newly published How to Build a City. Gabriella spoke to our Prose Reviews Editor Rebecca Smith, about architecture, childhood, digital cities, and other fascinating subjects. Their conversation is well worth reading.

Our Book of the Month is Shorelines, by Alycia Pirmohamed, which is out now from Canongate. Reviewer Frances Cannon describes it as ‘a poet’s memoir, an experimental approach to mapping a life on the page.’

‘The book’s three sections,’ writes Frances, ‘move from narrative solidity into increasingly fluid, experimental forms. Even the first section begins with the unique positioning of two parallel narratives, representing Pirmohamed’s memories from two distinct regions: the Indian Ocean, which she visited with her father as an adult, and a lake in Midwestern Canada, a memory which she can only partially retrieve from the passing of time.’

You can read the full review here.

We also have another review on the website, this one from Issue #34. Scottish publisher Polygon is this year republishing seven books by author Agnes Owens, bringing them to a new generation of readers. Responding to these books, reviewer Roxani Krystalli highlights ‘a key tension in engaging with Owens’s work in the present day’: the tension between ‘the work itself’ and ‘the story of Owens’s own life, from which those words have sprung.’ Roxani writes:

As with many other artists across generations, the concerns of making a living and domesticity were not separate from Owens’s writing, nor were they mere obstacles to it. Those same concerns were also the kindling for creativity, the drivers of plot, anchors of character, and markers of what animates a life.

The full review, ‘A Wee Touch of Goodness’, is here.

And that’s it for this month. Remember though to book your ticket for our special Welsh Writers Showcase in Portobello Bookshop in October. It’ll feature Anthony Shapland, Rhian Elizabeth and Brigid Lowe, and you can attend in person or watch it online. It’s a collaboration between Gutter and the wonderful people at Folding Rock, our Welsh cousin publication. We’d love to see you there.

What we can do though is to share this rather beautiful cover, and to tell you just a few of the writers whose work appears in Issue 34. We’ve got some amazing fiction writers this time, including the multi-award-winning Eley Williams; author of A Room Above a Shop Anthony Shapland; and Paper Cup and This Bright Life author Karen Campbell. There’s an essay by Kristie de Garis, author of Drystone; poetry by Robin Robertson, Samuel Tongue, Meghan Flaherty and Weiji Wang; plus an interview with Gabriella Bennett, whose new book How to Build a City is also out next month. There are reviews of books by Cal Flyn, Roshni Gallagher, Clementine Ewokolo and Agnes Owens. Plus lots more. Lot and lots and lots more!

In the meantime though, do head over to our website, where you’ll find two new pieces. First is our Book of the Month: With My Own Hand by Ashley Douglas, reviewed by Sarah Orr. Telling the story of Marie Maitland, a sixteenth century Scottish poet, the book is, Orr writes, ‘an important addition to the Scottish literary field [which] skilfully brings to life this long-buried story.’

Also online is ‘Chirologia’, a short story by CL Glanzing that first appeared in Issue #33, back in February. It’s a strange, lyrical piece, in which the narrator gradually disappears into her own marriage, sacrificing herself her husband, ‘the great tenured botanist. The esteemed professor.’

Early on, Glanzing describes with lush detail the greenhouse in which Vincenzo, the professor, works. ‘From every wall burst a cacophony of leaves,’ she writes, ‘foliage, spines, and fronds. Some crowned with dainty pink blossoms, others erupting with carmine and gold. The air was dank, oppressive, but peppered with the spice of watered earth and rotting mulch.’ It is rich, splendid writing, and we’re grateful to CL for providing the title for this month’s newsletter.

You can read the full story here.

Oh yes, and one more thing: If you subscribe to Gutter in July, either here or on our website, you’ll receive a free copy of the magazine from the archives, in addition to the two copies you get during the year of your subscription. So join us!

Each time we reach this point, an urgent enthusiasm takes over. We really want to share this work with you right now, and publication day can’t come soon enough. But wait we must, just a little bit longer.

For the time being, you’ll have to content yourselves with our website, where a couple of great pieces have just gone online.

The first was previously published in Issue #33. It’s an essay by the amazing Ali Millar (author of The Last Days), called ‘The Damned, The Possessed and the Beautiful’. At this point, we’d usually tell you what the essay is about, more or less, as an introduction, a taster. But in this case, that’s not so easy to do.

It’s an essay in which meaning gathers gradually, drawn together like threads, then teased apart again; an essay demonstrating that ‘there is always distance between what is written and what is meant.’

‘I lie there in the curious water, sea glass green’ Millar writes, ‘watching swallows fly overhead, thinking how they flit between continents, neither or both home, hard to tell. Maybe we’re all just in search of enough to sustain us.’

Elsewhere, aged seven, her mother reaches over ‘to stop me picking at the loose thread of the hem of my skirt, careful, she says, pull one thread and it’ll all come undone.’

You can read the full essay here.

Our Book of the Month for June is The Queer Bookshelf: A Readers Guide by Layla McCay, which Gutter’s very own Ryan Vance picked up with ‘a grubby mix of relief and gratitude, that someone has actually done the homework.’

The book sets out to provide a guide to queer literary history – a ‘gargantuan’ task, of course. It is, Vance writes, ‘a fair starting point for anyone brand new to reading queerly, and a good reference point for those of us wanting to fill (perhaps significant) gaps in their knowledge. My own to-read list has grown, especially with regard to older, rarer texts I would otherwise never have heard of.’

The full review is here.

Laura Baliman, our reviewer, praises the novel’s spiralling structure, which ‘twirls inwards as we dig deeper into the island and its people: who they really are, and who they really love.’

The novel, Baliman writes, is ‘not so much focused on stakes, but more on truths – can they find their way out, can they find a way through closed lips?’ There is, here, ‘a radiant mix of the divine and the mundane’. (Thanks to Laura for the title of this month’s newsletter.)

You can read the full review here.

And this month, we have not just one but two Scottish literary legends on the website, with a poem by the wonderful Jenni Fagan, which first featured in Issue #33.

‘I burn all churches to the ground,’ begins ‘Swan Song,’ as Fagan too blends the sacred and the unholy.

Treat yourself to the full poem here.

Thanks so much to everyone who applied for our Finishing Your First Book workshops. We’re grateful to have the chance to read your writing, and everyone who submitted will be hearing from us within the next week.

I still can’t get over not knowing how it’ll all turn out, she says, pulling the last of the mess into a neat pile with the pinkie edge of her hand ready for the food waste caddy. He doesn’t look up from his phone as he tells her quickly that the sun will collapse in on itself creating a black hole that will consume everything in its orbit.

You can read the whole story on our website now.

With spring springing springily all around us, it seems appropriate that our April Book of the Month is plant-themed: The Apothecary by the Sea, by Victoria Bennett. It is ‘a book of micro-essays, sectioned by seasonal rhythms,’ as the reviewer Jemma Neville writes. ‘It reads as though an alternative almanac or commonplace book . . . [and] the tone is one of intimate possibility.’ (Thanks to Jemma for the title of this month’s newsletter.)

Bennett lives in and writes about Orkney, so ‘the plants featured in Apothecary by the Sea tend toward those preferring the salty, exposed soil of islands – thrift, scurvygrass, wood sage, sea campion. In the botanical roll-call of uses, every specimen sounds more nourishing, more essential to longevity, than the next, and I find myself wanting to grind, infuse and inhale the lot in a oner.’

Read the whole review here.

Opportunities

Finally, if you’re a prose writer and you’re working on your first book of fiction or non-fiction, then please do apply to our series of free, small-group workshops that will be running this spring and summer. Participants will develop their editing techniques, receive feedback on their work-in-progress and get advice on submitting to agents and publishers.

The four writers selected will also be invited to take part in Edinburgh International Book Festival’s ‘Fresh Words’ programme, giving them the chance to read their work at this year’s festival. To apply, writers should live in Scotland and be working on a book of fiction or non-fiction. All the details you need are here.

Here at Gutter, we’re starting to think about our next issue already. It’s still a long way off, but preparations begin early – and we’ll have more on that in a moment.

Up on our website, you’ll find a couple of new pieces this month. The first is an essay we published in Issue #33. It’s by Louise Gray, called ‘Hunger’, and it begins with this striking sentence: ‘When my mother died she was still learning to cook.’

The essay is a superb exploration of memory, grief and the author’s relationship with food.

I know these recipes are written by my mother because I have seen letters she wrote. She had a habit of putting the cross bar for t flying in the air rather than through the vertical line, giving the impression she was always in a hurry. The recipes she wrote are dashed off in note form and stained with splatters from a busy kitchen. It is clear she is just getting started, and then it peters out.

You can read the full essay here.

Also online is our Book of the Month review, which this month celebrates a debut poetry collection by Sarah Stewart. Devour Everything brings together poems that, according to reviewer Roshni Gallagher, ‘hover in a space between creation and loss.’ (And thanks to Roshni for this month’s newsletter title.)

The review concludes that Stewart ‘captures the smallness of our individual lives while honouring the depth of emotion, tragedy, and splendour within them.’ Have a read here.

Lastly, with Issue #34 on our minds, we’ll soon be announcing our next two Guest Editors. Thanks to everyone who applied for these roles, we’ll be getting back to you all very soon. We’ll also be opening our submissions window any day now, so take a look at our website for details. We’re looking forward to reading your work.

First, the new magazine. Isn’t it pretty?

And here’s a glimpse at what you’ll find inside . . .

Pretty exciting, don’t you think?

If you’d like a copy this week, you’d better act fast. Order a copy now, or subscribe, and it’ll be on its way to you by end-of-day Tuesday.

Now on to those launch events. First, Edinburgh, on the 17th February, at the wonderful Portobello Bookshop. That one is hosted by Malachy Tallack (managing editor) and Rebecca Smith (prose reviews editor), and it features four superb writers: Ali Millar, William Letford, Lindsay Johnstone and Dawn Wood. You can attend in person, at 7pm, or you can watch online. Tickets are available here.

The second event is in Glasgow, at Mount Florida Books, and it features another excellent quartet of writers, all of whom feature in Issue #33: Alice Mah, Shaun Murawski, Tim Tim Cheng and David Ross Linklater. Tickets for that event are here. Do come along to these events if you can. Say hello, or just wave at us. We’ll wave back.

Now, the website. We have a review from Issue #33, which features Afterbody, a poetry collection by Medha Singh. Our reviewer, Chinmaya Lal Thakur, praises the ‘unceasing, restless struggle [that] not only makes Singh’s poetry in Afterbody vital, alive, and resonant but also makes readers look forward to what she will do next.’ Read that review here.

The interview in Issue #33 is a conversation with debut author of The Salt Bind, Rebecca Ferrier, and that’s now online here. She’s in conversation with the Guest Editor of this issue, Zain Rishi, whose debut poetry collection Noon, which is also out this month. We’ve got a poem from that collection, ‘Before Autumn’ on the website too.

Almost lastly, if you’d like to have a read of our editorial before you order the new issue (which you really ought to do), it’s here. It offers more of an introduction to the magazine, and to some of the amazing writing featured.

And lastly lastly, we’re still looking for two Guest Editors for the magazine, for our next two issues. You’ve still got a bit more than a week to apply, so please take a look at the advert and, if you’re eligible, get in touch.

I don’t know about where you are, but here in Scotland it’s cold. Very cold. It’s the kind of deep icy Saturday on which getting out of bed feels like a foolish endeavour. Better to crank up the heating, huddle under the duvet, and reach for something to read.

Preferably the latest issue of Gutter.

Speaking of which, this being January, we’re now only a few weeks from the launch of Issue #33, and for those of you who read this newsletter I have a treat: a sneak preview of what you’ll find when it gets here.

For those of you who enjoy our selection of essays, this is a fabulous edition, with non-fiction by , Alice Mah and . There are short stories by , Viccy Adams, CL Glanzing and many others, and there’s amazing poetry by Jenni Fagan, William Letford, Niall O’Gallagher, Tim Tim Cheng, and so many more. There’s also an interview with debut author Rebecca Ferrier, by our Guest Editor Zain Rishi, and reviews of books by Medha Singh and Anbara Salam. Frankly, you’re going to love it, and if you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so. It’ll be the best £20 you spend all year.

In the meantime of course, you can find some great new writing on our website.

First, a poem, ‘The Handsome Doctor’, written by the very brilliant Iona Lee. It is at once unsettling and funny.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I give him a quick tour of my wispiest outlines.
The grey waving fronds of me.
We are sonar and heartbeat.

(Thanks to Iona for providing this newsletter’s title.)

Finally, our book of month is Louise Welsh’s latest Rilke novel, The Cut Up, reviewed by Louise Hutcheson. It’s a book in which Glasgow, the story’s setting, is ‘vividly rendered; all dark doorways and dreich rainfall, sleaze and drugs and antique auctions.’ You can read it here.

If you’re not yet a subscriber to this newsletter, please add your email below.

That £10 will get you a digital gift subscription, which you can purchase in the name of the one you love. Our next two issues will arrive in their inbox as a Pdf and/or an Epub file, ready for whatever eReader they happen to use. Frankly, it’s a bargain.

For those who prefer print, a standard gift subscription is only £20. That’s less than the cost of a Cola-glazed ham hock pizza, and only half the price of an underwhelming Lego kit. True, you can purchase a pack of Tiramisu Truffles for £19, but let’s be honest: those will last about four minutes, whereas a Gutter subscription will bring two magnificent copies of the magazine to your friend or sibling or parent or child or spouse or lover or colleague, each one packed with poetry, fiction, essays and reviews. It’ll last all year! If you can find a better deal than that, we’d like to know about it.

Once you’ve made that very wise purchase, you can take a look at what’s new on our website. First, our editorial team has recommended a selection of the best books we’ve read this year. Some of these books are brand new, others are not; some are by Scottish authors, others not. It’s a great mix, demonstrating the team’s broad range of tastes and interests. We hope you find something there that you like. (And thanks to Katy Hastie, one of our editors, who provided the title of this month’s newsletter.)

Finally, a poem. Or two poems, you might say. In our latest issue, we were delighted to feature a piece by Scotland’s current Makar (poet laureate), Peter Mackay. The poem, ‘Duanag mu dheidhinn Dòbhrain’, is in Gaelic, with an English translation, also by Mackay. So if you’d like to read ‘An Innocuous Poem about Otters’, you’ll find both versions side-by-side here. It’s truly superb, and we hope you enjoy it.

The Gutter team wishes you all the best for the end of the year, and we’ll be back with our next newsletter in 2026.

Right now we’re reading and re-reading every page, every line, every word, to make sure it’s correct. Next, we’ll be getting in touch with all of the successful writers to let them know the good news. So keep an eye on your inbox if you submitted!

In the meantime, there’s plenty to read over on our website, including a special Halloween treat: a short story that was first published back in Issue #29, ‘Exit, Ghost’ by Okala Elesia. It’s a peculiar tale, featuring a Tory minister, a mysterious concoction and some rather sinister decorators. It’s told with real verve and humour, and it’s where this month’s title has been taken from, so thanks for that Okala!

Read ‘Exit, Ghost’ here.

A more recent piece of writing is also up on the site: Dan Richards’ essay ‘Fishing in Moominland’, from Issue #32. In it, Dan describes visiting friends in Finland in the aftermath of the pandemic, and fishing with them on a frozen lake.

By now the sun has risen slightly above the tree line, raking gold across the snow flats. Our shadows run for 50 metres. The new light accents the snow’s fuzz; the fern-like textures an echo of Moomin’s confession that, until the events of Moominland Midwinter, he’d always ‘thought somehow that the snow grew from the ground up!’ – as iron-filings frizz towards a magnet, and the hattifatteners bolt towards lightning.

It’s an essay that was one of the highlights of the last issue, and you really should head over and read it now if you’ve not already.

While you’re there, take a look at our Book of the Month review, which this month features The North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain by the writer and historian Alistair Moffat. It takes the BBC’s Shipping Forecast as a starting point to explore the geography, history and culture of our coast. Our reviewer, Ingrid Brubaker, finds an ‘empathy and interest in other people’s stories … that shines through his whole book.’

You can read the review here.

Finally, if you’re looking ahead to Christmas and wondering about a perfect present for the avid reader in your life, you can gift a Gutter subscription for as little as £20. That is a true bargain, we reckon, and a treat that can be enjoyed all year. So what are you waiting for? Go get one now!

If you did submit something to us in September, you can expect to get a response before the end of November. Keep checking your junk folder too: sometimes our emails end up in the wrong place.

In the meantime, we have a couple of great pieces online for you to read, the first of which appeared in our last issue. It’s a fascinating essay by Chitra Ramaswamy, called ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’, after Sandy Denny’s incredible song of that name. It’s an essay that was born out of movement, out of walking, and which is in part an interrogation of that movement.

I was walking because I had lost my hold on time. It felt literal – I could no longer seize the day. And if a person is lost it’s only reasonable that they would try to find their way.

Ramaswamy finds her way through the essay, one step at a time. You can read it here.

The other new piece online is, of course, our Book of the Month review, which this month features Annie Brechin’s collection How to Make Love, a book in five parts, each named after cities. The book, writes Annie Muir, feels like a ‘fly-on-the-wall magic carpet ride through [the poet’s] sexual/romantic life.’

This isn’t simply a recounting of past experiences though – of course not. These poems reflect on the ways in which desire evolves and changes, and how we look back on our past sexual selves, through ‘intoxicating memories’. Some of those memories may be ‘ecstatic’, concludes Annie Muir, ‘some are painful, but they are all very much alive.’

Our Book of the Month review is here, and thanks to Annie for the title of this month’s newsletter, too.

In the meantime, you can have a look at our website. There’s a splendid poem there by the Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, Michael Mullen, which was published in Issue #32. ‘Tinamints’, it’s called, and this is how it starts:

Rid firmamints—jostlin the skyline
Atlas-backed manses cerryin dreich.
Trickin yir eye—wae each bent windae—burnt shooders
skimmin smirr—sittin squat. 

Read the full poem here.

Also from our last issue, we’ve shared our interview with Anthony Vahni Capildeo. They spoke to our editors Sean Wai Keung and Katy Hastie about winning the Windham-Campbell prize, about literary collaborations, and of course about poetry:

“I do think of poems on the page as something spatial,” they said, “people can wander around in and spend a while with them. I don't think of them so much as a timebound sonic work.”

The interview is here.

Finally, our Book of the Month for September is Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Masłowska. The reviewer, Nazaret Ranea, calls it ‘a beautiful, necessary collection’ of poetry. ‘Full of knowledge, memory and life.’

‘There is also something very tender,’ she writes, ‘in how the book speaks of belonging not purely as territory but by giving belonging itself a voice.’ (And thanks to Nazaret for the title of this month’s newsletter.’

If you’re a UK subscriber, a Friend or a Patron of the magazine, your copy should already have arrived on your doorstep. (If you’re not, what on earth are you waiting for?) (And if you’re not in the UK, hold tight, it’ll be there soon.) We couldn’t be happier with this issue – some of our favourite writers are here, together with lots of names that are new to us, and hopefully to you too. It’s a wondrous mix of poetry, fiction, essays and reviews.

If you’d like a dip into the waters of Issue #33 before you commit, you can read our editorial over on the website, which will give you a taste of what to expect. They’re our words of welcome, in an issue filled with thoughts of home.

Also on the website this month, you can find a review of Jennifer Morag Henderson’s new poetry collection, Jofrid Gunn, a ‘flowing biographical narrative’, as Anna Cheung puts it, in which some of the poems ‘read like passages of prayer, quiet and incantatory yet powerful and emotive.’ The full review is here.

If you’d like to join us in celebrating this brand new issue of the magazine, you’ve got a couple of opportunities. Our Glasgow launch is at The Alchemy Experiment on the 20th August, at 7pm. It’ll feature writers George Miller, Finola Scott, Megan Cunningham, Lynnda Wardle and Craig Coyle, and will be hosted by our editorial team members Cal Bannerman and Sean Wai Keung.

The Edinburgh launch, on the 28th at 7pm, will be at Portobello Books, and will feature Chitra Ramaswamy, Iona Lee, Cameron Wilson and Sasha de Buyl. Malachy Tallack and Cal Bannerman will be hosting. You can attend that launch in person, at the shop, or join us online from anywhere in the world. You can get tickets here.

We also have one more event coming up this month, also in Edinburgh, at Typewronger Books. It’s a celebration of writing in Scots and Gaelic, and will feature Michael Mullen, Beth Frieden and others. That’s on August 22nd at the shop, and starts at 8pm. Tickets are here.

Opportunities

Finally, if you’re a writer in Scotland, do remember to apply to the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards. It’s an amazing opportunity, offering support from a fabulous organisation. So, have a look at the guidelines and get your application in!

Our Book of the Month is Mrs Burke and Mrs Hare, Michelle Sloan’s retelling of the story of Edinburgh’s infamous graverobbers and murderers – this time with their wives, Helen McDougal and Lucky Hare, at centre stage.

These ‘impressively cunning women … bring vigour and vitality to the page’, writes our reviewer Jannath Fazli, and the novel is ‘an exploration of gender, justice, and the political nature of history itself.’

‘Through the astute Lucky and the comparatively submissive and reluctant Helen, Sloan creates space for versatility in the form of the femme fatale. To add to this, while both characters are violent and dangerous in their own ways, neither is sexualised overtly, subverting the conventional depiction of the ‘dangerous woman.’’

It’s a fascinating review of a fascinating book (and thanks to Jannath Fazli for the title of this month’s letter).

Another treat on the website is a story by the fabulous writer Rachelle Atalla. An undercurrent of threat runs through ‘Cactus Arms’, which begins in the aftermath of an amputation, with ‘the ball-like stump’ of Paul’s arm, ‘bandaged in cream’. That undercurrent rises to the surface as the story progresses.

The narrator – Paul’s wife Hannah – struggles to adjust to the idea of her changed husband. Her love for him was severed before the loss of his limb; now, she is ‘struck by the notion of his fingernails – five of them that would never grow again.’

Atalla raises the tension expertly, focusing her drama on an otherwise innocuous object. Please do have a read of the story here.

Issue 32

Next month you’ll finally get your hands on issue #32 of Gutter, and what a great issue it is. The full lineup will be revealed in August, but among the writers featured are Chitra Ramaswamy, Dani Garavelli, Dan Richards, Marjorie Lotfi, Sasha de Buyl and Scotland’s current Makar Peter Mackay / Pàdraig MacAoidh. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here on Substack as a Friend or Patron, or else you can visit our website for a standard annual subscription.

Opportunities

Don’t forget, if you live in Scotland and identify as BPOC, you’re eligible to apply for our Guest Reader programme. We’re currently advertising for someone to join the Gutter team for Issue #33, and we’re looking forward to reading your application. Yes you!

The details are here.

Over on the website, we’ve got some great stuff to get your teeth into at the moment. From our last issue, there’s a poem by Ioannis Kalkounos, ‘The Taxi Driver’s Testimony’. ‘You cannot choose your passengers’, it begins:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

he asked for the closest body of water
and I drove him to the sea at 3am.

It’s a lovely piece, and well worth a read.

There’s also an exclusive extract from Summer Days, the debut novel by Gutter contributor Alessandra Thom. That book is out today, and was described by our managing editor Malachy Tallack as ‘astute, funny, and fizzing with life’. Have a read from the first chapter over on our website, then go out and get yourself a copy.

Our Book of the Month for June is ‘Goonie’, the debut collection by Scottish poet Michael Mullan. Our reviewer Cameron Wilson praises these poems, which ‘beg’, he writes, ‘to be read aloud.’

Mullen ‘always seems to be able to mine out yet another precious nugget of language hitherto undiscovered’, Wilson says. He ‘manages to shotgun glamour, spirit, and tenderness, through the thick, beautiful linguistic hide of Scottish poetry.’

A superb review, it is, of a superb book. And thanks to Cameron for providing this month’s title!

Subscribe now

On a quite different note, we’d like to welcome a new member to our editorial team. Writer Rebecca Smith will be familiar to many readers of The Gutter Press. Her book, Rural: the Lives of the Working Class Countryside, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing last year. It’s a wonderful piece of work, and we’re so delighted to be welcoming her to Gutter.

Opportunities

For those writers among you who already have a traditionally published book under your belt, and another one on the way, Literature Alliance Scotland is offering a small number of bursaries at the moment for works in progress. The bursaries will be awarded, unusually, by a lottery, choosing writers at random among those eligible. For more information, and to apply, take a look at their website.

There’ll be more news on Issue #32 in due course, of course, and if you did submit to us, you should hear back before long.

In the meantime, you can head over to the website, where you’ll find Rebecca Smith’s moving, powerful account of a friend’s experience of postpartum psychosis, ‘Ruth’, which featured in Issue #31. It’s a powerful piece, and if you’ve not read it yet, I really recommend you do so now:

I have never seen someone completely vanish before. I sit opposite Ruth on the bench, a plastic tub of strawberries in my hand. She takes one at a time and feeds them to her 9-month-old son. I watch her, trying to find something of the person I knew.

The other new piece of writing is our Book of the Month review, which this month features Michael Pedersen’s new novel, Muckle Flugga. Reviewer Frances Cannon describes it as ‘a new flavour of magical realism’, ‘fresh and thrilling,’ with ‘the air of a modern fairy tale.’

It’s delightful to track the poetic impulses and techniques in his fiction—the book is lyrical and rich with metaphor. Themes from Pedersen’s previous non-fiction prose publication, Boy Friends, resurface in Muckle Flugga, specifically the complicated nature of male friendship, communication and affection.

(The title of this newsletter is borrowed from Frances’ brilliant review.)

And that’s it for this month, but stay tuned to hear more about what’s coming up in the next issue. And if you submitted to us, remember to check your junk mail!

Over on the website this month, we have a real treat for you, with two online-only stories to enjoy, plus another from Issue #31 by the fabulous, Booker-longlisted author Martin MacInnes.

All three of these stories were jointly commissioned by the Edinburgh Science Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and we’re delighted to have the chance to publish them together.

The first is by Eris Young: ‘Asking for Trouble’. In it, the reader is thrown backwards, into the depths of a jungle, where researchers encounter a fungus previously unknown to western science. It is a fungus that offers almost unimaginable hope, turning what is most poisoned and damaged into pure, clean water.

The second story is by L.R. Lam, which centres on the work of a mysterious artist called Verdigris. Their great masterpiece, a weathered old safe, the contents of which are unknown, sits in the National Gallery of Scotland. After 50 years, it is finally going to be opened, its secret revealed. The story is called ‘Future Safe.’

The last piece of fiction is ‘Adam’s Breath’, by Martin MacInnes. Adam was a collector of air, the invisible breath of the world. He gathered it in jars and vials, each one looking precisely alike. But with Adam now gone, his sister Zoe must try to make sense of what her brother left behind. What remains of the dead, she wonders, and our many bygone worlds? (This month’s title comes from Martin’s story.)

With all of this to enjoy, we are spoiling you. So you won’t mind, I hope, if you have to wait a little longer for our Book of the Month review. The book is Archivum, a collection by the poet Thereza Muñoz, and it’s published at the end of April. You’ll find our review online in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, for us at least, it’s back to reading your work!

Speaking of, we have just opened out submissions window for the next issue, to be published in August. As usual, we’re looking for your best essays, stories and poems, and, as usual, we can’t wait to read them. All the details on how to submit are over on our website. You’ve got until the end of March.

Of course, that’s not all you’ll find on the website. As usual, we’re sharing some new work from the magazine, and this month it’s a poem by the fabulous and hilarious Hera Lindsay Bird. In it, she imagines herself ‘on the back of a wild, white goose’, all responsibilities abandoned.

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I’m sorry I missed your call, I will say in my answerphone message
I live on the back of an enchanted Soviet goose now, get over it already!!!!

The poem is called ‘Sometimes I get so fucking tired of it all’ and we cannot recommend it highly enough. (Thanks also to Hera for the title of this month’s newsletter.) Read the poem here.

Also on the website, of course, is our Book of the Month, Small Town Joy by Carrie Marshall, which looks at ‘how queer music changed the sound of Scotland.’ It’s reviewed by Nyla Ahmad, who praises Marshall’s ability ‘to tackle the topic with enthusiasm, grace and attitude.’

‘This whole book feels like a mixtape,’ writes Ahmad, ‘lovingly assembled by a friend’s cool, knowledgeable older sister.’

You’ll have to wait just a little longer for the book’s release, but for now you can read the review and preorder your copy.

And that’s that for another month. Please do send your writing in to us for Issue #32, or get in touch if you’d like to write reviews for the website or the magazine.

There’s a host of fabulous writing to look forward to in Issue #31. There’s fiction from Martin MacInnes, Rachelle Atalla and Harry Josephine Giles; essays by Jim Crumley and Rebecca Smith; poetry by Hera Lindsay Bird, Shane Strachan, Julia Liu and Bradley Taylor; Alasdair Gray Archive commissions by Lucy Lauder, Harvey Dimond and Joey Simons; and loads, loads, loads more. You won’t get a better bunch of writing for this price, we reckon.

Another treat in the issue is an interview with the playwright Stef Smith, whose stage adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun was hailed at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival, and whose short-form television series Float recently won a BAFTA Scotland award. Stef spoke to our managing editor Malachy Tallack about these successes, and the challenges of writing for different media. You can read the interview online now. As Stef says, of working in theatre:

“There's something so extraordinary and irreplaceable about sharing a story with a group of people who are all bearing witness to something, and having individual experiences in a collective way”

Another gem from the magazine that’s up on the website already is this review, written by Laura Baliman, of Stuart Murdoch’s novel Nobody’s Empire. Murdoch is well known as the singer in Belle & Sebastian, but this is his first work of fiction. The book’s protagonist, Stephen, like the singer himself, ‘deals with chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as M.E.), an illness that is misunderstood, under-researched and for which there are few known treatments.’ It is a ‘pilgrimage’ of sorts, this story, which focuses on spirituality, mental health and, of course, on music. ‘The triumph of this novel,’ concludes Laura, ‘is not only in its accessible and powerful prose and plot, but in its sincere representation of chronic illness.’

If you’d like to find out more about what’s featured in the magazine, you can read our editorial now. It tells of ‘a glistening thread of transfiguration’ that runs through the issue, from a woman who turns into a gorse bush and a ‘possibly magic’ goose, to a missing limb and a dystopian folk tale.

Our Book of the Month for February 2025 is ’s thrilling new novel Carrion Crow. That book will be published a bit later in the month, and so will our review. Check back on the website in a couple of weeks to read it.

Remember, the deadline for applying to our series of workshops for writers finishing their first book of prose is the end of February. Four writers will be selected to take part. They’ll get feedback on their work-in-progress, learn crucial editing skills, find out how to submit to agents and publishers, and much more besides. The workshops are open only to writers living in Scotland who have not previously published a book. They’ll be led by our managing editor, Malachy Tallack, author of five books of fiction and non-fiction.

You can find out all of the details and submit your application here.

We don’t want to give away too much just yet, but we can tell you this issue features some outstanding writers, including Martin MacInnes, Harry Josephine Giles, Rachelle Atalla, Jim Crumley, and the very, very wonderful Hera Lindsay Bird. What more could you ask for?

That’s all in the future though. What about right now?

Well, our very first Book of the Month of 2025 is Some Deer, a collection by the poet Vik Shirley, published by Broken Sleep Books. Sean Wai Keung, our poetry reviews editor, writes of how this surrealist work made analysis difficult, forcing the reader to think and rethink, over and over:

I found myself grasping for deeper meaning in almost every line, only to then have the line right after take me in a completely different direction again.

This, he writes, is ‘very much meant as a compliment’. The poet ‘is adept at showing us both the frivolous nature of language and also how unsettling language can be.’ You can read the full review here. (Thanks also to Sean for this month’s newsletter title.)

The last piece we’ll be sharing from Issue 30 has also just gone online, and it really is a good one. A short story by the tremendous Helen McClory, ‘Hardly to be an Unaccountable Creature’ was co-commissioned with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, to mark the 200th anniversary of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

As readers of McClory will have come to expect, the piece is strange, funny and pin-sharp. It features a ‘golden boy’ of the Scottish performance poetry scene, who finally gets his well-earned comeuppance, first in an awkward interview with a journalist, and then . . . well you’ll have to read it to find out.

Workshops

Finally, we are delighted to be launching a series of workshops aimed at writers who are finishing their first book of prose. Four writers will be selected to take part. They’ll get feedback on their work-in-progress, learn crucial editing skills, find out how to submit to agents and publishers, and much more besides. The workshops are open only to writers living in Scotland who have not previously published a book. They’ll be led by our managing editor, Malachy Tallack, author of five books of fiction and non-fiction.

You can find out all of the details and submit your application here. The deadline is 28th February.