Editorial
Introducing Issue #33
A literary truth: reading gifts us new ways to write, and speak, and read, and live. To engage with the written work of others is to be changed by something intangible but essential: intertextuality. The space between texts is where the magic happens—and Gutter #33 is riddled with texts, and the spaces between.
The psycho-botanical power-play of CL Glanzing’s ‘Chirologia’ pivots on a library-find: the titular book inspires the protagonist to convert an imposed silence imposed into wordless devotion. In Kelli Dianne Rule’s ‘The Almost’, the rustling physicality of a smutty romance novel finds echoes in groaning pleather, chugging engines—and say what you will about Kindles, but you cannot conceal a lover’s number on a bookmark within an ePub. In our interview with Rebecca Ferrier, she considers how her debut historical fantasy, The Salt Bind, owes a literary debt to Terry Pratchett, Alice Tarbuck, Daphne du Maurier, and more, while in Viccy Adam’s microfiction ‘Rattle’, a creative writing teacher’s criticisms of cliché lead to a scathing self-reflection: ‘Emotionally witholding’.
Another cliché: literature is a conversation—albeit one which drags into the discussion other writers, art forms, sometimes even the dead. Andrew Dennison’s ekphrastic poem ‘Sons’ sketches a funeral first captured by Scottish Realist James Guthrie, while Niall O’Gallagher in ‘Cairt Breacain Na H-Alban’ invokes Edwin Morgan to debate the limits of map-making. In ‘The Damned, The Possessed and the Beautiful’, Ali Millar considers book-making, film-making, memory-making, as acts of distraction. ‘I will read what I want to into whatever I want to’, she says, postponing the moment when the essay must reluctantly turn to face its final destination of fire and ash.
Indeed, heat runs through this issue, though rarely as a welcome presence. Purifying flame flickers at the edges of Jenni Fagan’s sacrilegious ‘Swan Song’. Ben Blyth’s ‘Peat Smoke’ contrasts the intimacy of a bothy’s fading firelight with an ambivalent countryside. In ‘Heraklion’, Dan Power recalls being at the mercy of the sun, cast adrift on the Mediterranean Sea, while Jubril Badmus’ clear-eyed ‘Days’ considers how the sun barely holds a candle to human cruelty: ‘I mocked the sun’s absence of shame when / after all that brightness, it still competed with / the brightness of a bomb over Mubi’.
Two pieces in particular bring heat to a subject now never far from Gutter’s pages: climate collapse. ‘Ring Rust’, by Alice Mah, punctures the cosiness of a festive, nostalgic steam-train ride with the flaring of Grangemouth oil refinery, and our seemingly inescapable petrochemical future. The impact of that dark fate looms large over Lindsay Johnstone’s ‘like we were never even here’, in which Highland wildfires shroud the horizon. Both pieces invite readers to consider the same unsettling question: How should we experience our human comforts in a suffering world?
What of that comfort? Well, there’s good food, for starters. William Letford praises the healing miracle of festival food in ‘T in the Park’, McLord Selasi pays tribute to packed lunches and community care in ‘Agnes’, and Jack Westmore’s ‘Recipe’ appreciates the solitude of a squid prepared for consummation: ‘Loneliness transformed into / something that feeds us.’ Elsewhere, intertextuality returns in Louise Gray’s essay ‘Hunger’, in which her mother’s cookbooks, journals and ambitions echo her own complex relationship to appetite: ‘Food isn’t just a choice about price and ethics and nutrition, it is about how you feel.’
And really, isn’t that true of everything? How we feel about the world, how we feel about how others feel about the world, how we express those feelings—that’s the food, and flame, of life. Here’s hoping this issue of Gutter, and all its intertextual magic, leaves you, dear reader, fired-up, and well-fed.