Editorial
Introducing Issue #34
In Eley Williams’s short story, ‘Ramble,’ the narrator asks themself: ‘Did I have the words for that, then?’ It’s a tricky question, one that echoes throughout Issue #34 of Gutter.
‘Ramble’ is a story of trespassing, of protest, and of things unspoken between parent and child. The unsaid words, ‘That I simply loved him, and he had nothing to fear’, are an ongoing silence within the story – a silence that gives way ultimately to song, to voices raised in melodic defiance.
Karen Campbell, in ‘The Human Touch’, also shows us how words can fail, and how misunderstanding blooms in the wake of that failure. Faced with this realisation at the conclusion of the story, Campbell’s protagonist Morna knows, of course, that words ‘were so important’, but ‘she couldn’t find a single one.’
It’s natural for those who work with words to imagine and test the limits of that raw material, to explore not only what language illuminates but also what it conceals and the ways in which it can let us down. Words can be a bridge between us, but they can also be a barrier, a border.
In ‘Taras’, Marina Merryweather charts the turning of a year through the variations between Slavic names for months. It is a story about love, and about conflict too, past and present. ‘February,’ she writes. ‘It used to be the same word in Russian and Ukrainian – liutyi. The word means something like fierce, or savage, or harsh, much like the temperature in the year’s coldest month. Russian stopped using the traditional Slavic names long ago.’
Yet again, in this story, language collapses at a crucial moment, as a lover leaves for the front line in the war between Russia and Ukraine. On hearing the news of his departure, the narrator begins ‘to stammer, unable to allow any more words past my lips.’ Sometimes, words just aren’t up to the job.
For other writers in this issue, however, language is a thing in which to revel. Admirers of Cheryl Follon’s poetry will find the same exuberance and intensity here in ‘The eighth-floor rooms extremely popular’, a dazzling piece of prose featuring medieval woodworm, a man in clogs, a ‘resident photographer’, and the renowned entomologist E.O. Wilson. It’s a piece that should be read twice over, at least.
Likewise, Dylan McNulty-Holmes’s ‘Optimistic Phone Background’, a poem alive with colour, with ‘sweetskinned / Kumquats’ and a ‘plump orange moon’. The poem’s speaker longs for summer, and yearns too for ‘Your // Limbs, gorgeous splay, firecracker, climbing / Bittersweet’.
Language may not always serve us as well as we would like, but in the right hands, the right mouths, it can do remarkable things.
One glittering highlight of this issue is ‘Flood,’ a story by Anthony Shapland, the award-winning Welsh author of A Room Above a Shop. It’s a piece in which confusion is conjured through precision; in which each word is rightfully placed, evoking an experience of instability and disorientation.
Just as in Eley Williams’s story, it is a song that provides a moment – a memory – of connection: ‘Outside,’ Shapland writes, ‘they had sung together. Fine voices raised. Words scatter. so low. slow. A phrase of lost verse. The air around her feels thin, a light-headedness in the amber blur of flowers. She hums.’
Shapland’s work was recommended to us by the editors of Folding Rock, a fabulous Welsh literary journal – a cousin to Gutter, you could say. The publication of his story in this issue marks the beginning of a loose collaboration between the two magazines. Our hope is to introduce more Welsh writers to Scottish readers and vice versa, to establish new literary links between the two nations.
The next step in this collaboration is a showcase event featuring three writers from Wales: Anthony Shapland, Rhian Elizabeth and Brigid Lowe. That will take place in Edinburgh on the evening of October 14th, and we’d love to see you there.
In the meantime, dive in to Issue #34. We hope you’ll find many words here that speak to you.