otherwise unwritable things

January 2025

Another year is here, and we hope it’s a great one for you. We’re already very excited about the almost-imminent launch of Issue #31 of Gutter. The magazine will be arriving in shops and letterboxes next month (and if you’ve not got a subscription yet, you should do so now to guarantee yourself a copy: we fully expect them to sell out).

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.