winter runs into winter

December 2024

Here in Scotland, it’s cold and dark right now: a time for woolly hats, big jumpers and books. Winter is the best for reading, I reckon, when other distractions fade frostily into the background. And if you’re lucky, Christmas will restock your to-read pile, just in time. What better present could there be than a book, after all?

(A Gutter subscription, perhaps? We all know someone who’d enjoy that.)

With the dwindling year in mind, several members of our editorial team – including our Guest Reader for Issue #31, Olivia Calderón – got together to choose some of the best things we’ve read in 2024. It’s an eclectic selection, from a ‘lyrical, varied, and incredibly tactile’ poetry collection, to a collaborative storytelling guide full of ‘puritanical demon lairds’, to a hopeful memoir of transition by a Hollywood star.

Check out our recommendations here.

Speaking of Issue #31, it’s very nearly ready now. All of the pieces are in place, and we’re just checking the magazine over to make sure it’s as perfect as can be, before we send it to print in January. There are some fabulous writers featured, and next month we’ll give you a sneak preview of some of those names. I hope you’ll be as excited about this issue as we are.

We’ve now sent out emails to everyone who shared their work with us in our last submissions window (thank you, all of you!) So if you submitted and haven’t yet heard back, do please check your junk mail folder. We try our very best to reach everyone, but these things sometimes do go astray.

Returning to our website, there’s another essay up this month, from our last issue, written by the magnificent poet Helen Mort. It’s about a trip to Greenland, and centres around ideas of extraction: the extraction of precious minerals, of natural resources, of stories, of language.

Yesterday I learned the word for absent summer – Nipitartut, when winter runs into winter, nothing in between. Apparently, that’s what Narsaq has been experiencing lately, a strange flatness in the year. The owner of the museum told me, and corrected my pronunciation, showed me how to say it the South Greenlandic way. When I told him I’d been to the glaciers in the east, he raised his eyebrows. I wrote the word down in my field notebook Nipitartut, Nipitartut and then felt like I had stolen it.

It’s a great piece, which we were proud to publish. You can read it here. (And thanks to Helen for the title of this month’s newsletter.)

One last great gift for you: a story from our archive, written by the tremendously talented Heather Parry. Heather’s new novel, Carrion Crow, will be published by Doubleday early next year, but in the meantime you can read this piece, which she wrote for Issue #20 of Gutter, in 2019. It’s an odd one, in the most delightful and surprising of ways.

You came back to down to earth when you heard me talking to the mental health ward, and crawled, molasses-like, to unplug the phone from the wall. I held your face and called you an idiot; there was crystals at the corners of your eyes and you stank, but still you were smiling.

The story is called ‘Human Mummy Confection’. Enjoy!