enough to sustain us
June 2026
The year turns fast. Once again, we’re back at that stage of the production process when Gutter is almost ready to go. Our fingers are hovering above the ‘Print’ button as the last few commas are nudged into place. (Okay, it doesn’t quite work like that, but it’s nice to imagine it that way.)
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.’