Spotlight: Taylor Strickland, Morag Smith & Flora Leask
One of the greatest privileges of publishing Gutter, is being able to connect with writers familiar and new. Each issue, we’ll shine a spotlight on some of our contributors, to discover more about what inspires them, and where they hope their writing takes them next. Today, it’s our pleasure to speak to Issue 28 contributors, Taylor Strickland, Morag Smith & Flora Leask.
TAYLOR STRICKLAND
Instagram: Taylor Strickland (@taylor.strickland.arts)
Website: Taylor Strickland
What was the inspiration behind ‘Maelstrom’?
'Maelstrom' is one small versioned excerpt from Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's magnum opus, Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill (The Birlinn of Clanranald). This 18th-century poem's scope is so vast, summarizing it can be a challenge. But if I might try:
The poem eulogizes a society at risk of extinction and, as a parable of survival, sends a stormbound crew aboard a traditional Hebridean galley from South Uist to the shores of Antrim. One of the earlier, and most evident, examples we have of PTSD in western literature, the poem's psychology is contrasted with hard-carved detail that fleshes out an elaborate conceit of man and vessel, where the vessel comes to embody traditional society, and the crew's social dynamic its lifeforce. As individuals the crew are memorialized, but it is only through their teamwork that hope is realized.
What's been your favourite book of the last twelve months?
Can I name a few and in one case subvert the 'positive' connotations of 'favourite'?
World Light - Halldór Laxness - One of the most morally complex novels I've ever read. It's both abhorrent and sublime. A work of art in the highest sense.
Pessoa: An Experimental Life - Richard Zenith - Perhaps the hardest biography to write yet Zenith accomplishes it masterfully.
The Other Tongues Anthology - Irish Pages Press - Few anthologies can claim better editorial and production standards. A marvellous selection of poems.
Finding the Mother Tree - Suzanne Simard - A deeply humane, pioneering scientist whose backstory reaches the relatable and expressive power of a lyricist.
The Tradition - Jericho Brown - His formal innovations are alone an accomplishment, but they do more by confirming his moral vision.
What We Owe The Future - Will MacAskill - Longtermism is willfully blind to present decision-making and morally questionable; effective altruism reinforces capitalism. Read this as proof.
Are you working on anything exciting or challenging at the moment?
I'm in the process of completing my full-length poetry debut, tentatively titled Dwell Time, as well as another collection of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair poems (I recently released a collection of Alasdair poems, titled Dastram/Delirium.)
Who is an undersung author or poet you think more people should know about?
Byron Herbert Reece. Read Fable In The Blood and Better A Dinner of Herbs. His life is a frustrating one. Born to a God-fearing farming family in the southern foothills of Appalachia, he struggled to balance a love of land, poverty, duty to a consumptive family, faith and doubt, and his practice as a writer. Despite being recognized and receiving the Guggenheim, his life ended in suicide.
His work wavers between near-brilliance and potential, and being a formalist to the core, his poetry can sound dated. Critics describe a rural 'hill-voice' in his verse, but I hear Romantic Scotland and England more than I do Appalachia (I have family from the region), and there are socioeconomic explanations behind this displaced voice. If his poetry can sound underdeveloped, the reader must consider that, from a young age, Reece lacked access to a lot of the diverse, foundational reading which someone from a similar time period, like Randell Jarrell, benefitted from. Something of an autodidact with only Lord Byron and the Lord Jesus Christ at his disposal, he would have risen to the reputation of other mid-20th century luminaries had his circumstances been different, so I believe. Also, his work needs a publisher with greater outreach. Canongate, Birlinn, hear me out, if you're reading this, haha!
MORAG SMITH
What was the inspiration behind ‘Forever Grass’?
I live in suburbia, which is a constant source of rage and inspiration. I do a lot of walking around places where human beings and their dreams of a perfect/easy life are in direct opposition to nature. I find the small things we all do or don’t do in our daily urban/suburban existences easier to approach than melting ice caps. Part of my own writing process is scribbling down all sorts of bizarre notes on my phone while I’m walking/travelling/not sitting still and taking a deep dive starting from some small thing. There are quite a few new housing estates near where I live where folk have ripped up their front gardens and put down a nice bit of plastic. So, I went from plastic grass to planetary destruction but also from a boring front lawn to the incredible wildness and variety going on underneath. It was more productive than throwing bricks with notes attached through their front room windows.
What’s been your favourite book of the past 12 months?
I might have said Catherine Sowerby’s Find Yourself at Constant Falls. However, that was covered by a few folk in your last issue, Iso ’ll mention Lindsay MacGregor’s Desperate Fishwives. I love the way she talks about nature (inner and outer), layering the contemporary with the ancient and timeless. I also like the way she roots poems in individual flowers, birds, people, and landscapes then manages to make them wild and unsettling. Her language feels fresh and surprising, the poems are technically interesting and the whole book is shot through with ironic humour.
Are you working on anything exciting or challenging at the moment?
Everything I work on feels exciting and challenging at the time I’m doing it – I’m currently pulling together work around those small conflicts between people and nature in the places where they meet or fail to meet. Some of them are from my own personal history, where the seeds of the present situation are there in all our pasts, but many are from weird stories I’ve heard (the house of someone I work with was invaded by bats last year) or odd subjects I’ve come across. (1960s motorway architecture). I’ve also become part of a very small poetry group I formed with a few folk I met at the Ginkgo poetry prize awards in London. We chat by email, sometimes online and share work and feedback – always a joy and a challenge.
FLORA LEASK
What was the inspiration behind your submission?
I had bought myself an innocent smoothie (other brands available) with spirulina in it, mainly because I was attracted its murky blue colour. I realised I didn’t know what spirulina actually was, and promptly fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole about biomasses of cyanobacteria. It turns out that the first people to eat this strange substance was, of course, the Aztecs, who would collect it from the lakes of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, and dry it into cakes. On www.ancientgrains.com I also discovered that the Aztecs were the first people to eat Chia seeds. I found the juxtaposition between how foods like spirulina and chia are seen by the Western world now and how they were used back then hilarious – I guess the image of white women in Lycra drinking spirulina smoothies and also doing ritual blood sacrifices like the Aztecs stuck with me, and I had to get it on the page.
What's been your favourite book of the last twelve months?
A book that I can’t recommend enough to people is Trafalgar by the Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer. This novel is mixture of science fiction and magical realism, philosophy and pulp – basically it doesn’t get any better than this. Each chapter is a different story of the exploits of the swashbuckling Trafalgar Medrano, who recounts his adventures in space while smoking black cigarettes in the dimly lit bars of Rosario, Argentina. If you’re not interested already, then this book isn’t for you. Also, the cover and design of the Penguin Classics Science Fiction edition is so minimalist and beautiful.
What would be your ideal set-up for writing - do you swear by any writing rituals or routines?
As a poet, I don’t really have a routine, I either just wait till the moment strikes, or sit at my desk and say, ‘it’s time to write that poem about X or Y that you’ve been thinking about for a while now.’ If possible I prefer to give myself absolute freedom to write out half-formed thoughts and phrases by hand, and then transcribe what I have there onto my laptop, editing as I go.
Last summer I tried to challenge myself to write a novella, and that was much more difficult because you have to maintain the momentum of being obsessed in what you are writing. For that I gave myself a minimum of 500 words a day, every day. No matter if they were good or bad, I had to write something, and could go over the limit too if I wanted to. It’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done – I have no idea how real novelists do it!