Editorial
Introducing Issue #30
This is issue 30, which marks Gutter’s fifteenth anniversary. To celebrate, we’ve had a makeover, with an updated cover design and some tweaks within – most of them to improve accessibility for readers. There have been changes behind the scenes as well, with four new members of the editorial team having joined in the past year: Katie Goh as our prose reviews editor, April Hill as our social media manager, Malachy Tallack as our managing editor, and Sean Wai Keung as our poetry reviews editor.
These are precarious times for arts organisations, so it’s heartening that Gutter, still, should be not just surviving but thriving. That success is embodied in our readers, of course, in those of you who’ve chosen to open these pages. But it’s also demonstrated by the number of writers – ever-increasing, it seems – who send us their work in the hope of publication.
Reading that work can be a great pleasure. There is so much to admire and to enjoy. But it is also a responsibility. Writing is not just submitted to a magazine like this one, it is entrusted. As editors, we try to keep in mind how significant the act of writing can be for some, and how precious its results. We can only publish a fraction of the poems, stories and essays that are sent to us, but we are grateful for each and every one.
In her tremendous essay in this issue, ‘The Arts Centre’, about a visual arts residency and the birth of a friendship, Sara Baume learns that ‘Not writing, as it turned out, made me twitchy’. It’s a discovery with which others will be familiar. And though, as Helen Mort explains in ‘Extraction’, writing can be fraught with reticence and guilt, that doesn’t necessarily ease the urge. Reflecting that coexistence of awkwardness and necessity, she says, of her time in Narsaq, Greenland: ‘I don’t know what I think I’m doing here, but for a moment, it seems to be the only place in the world I could possibly be.’
The poet Jen Hadfield, in her interview in this issue, explains that writing, for her, is vital. It is a way of processing her experiences, she says, of making sense of the world. It is also, though, a kind of fortification. She compares the words she writes to a limpet shell, made ‘to protect myself from the extraordinary present tense that we all live in.’ Think of that: words as shelter, words as home.
Jen’s insistence on the sheer necessity of writing, brings to mind another remarkable poet, John Burnside, who died earlier this summer. One of the most outlandishly gifted authors ever to come from Scotland, John was a man for whom writing was compulsive. He couldn’t not do it; the words seemed to pour out of him.
Novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, essays, literary criticism: in each form he excelled. His work, often, carried an intense darkness. He wrote of grief, of violence and horror, and of his own tumultuous upbringing. And yet, too, he offered comfort. Again and again, he pointed readers towards beauty – in the natural world, especially – and towards wonder.
In his writing, there is the intimation, always, of something hidden, something lurking just beneath the surface, that could, with the right kind of attention, be revealed. The ‘pull of the withheld’, as he called it, was both his impetus and his subject.
John was also a teacher and a generous mentor to many. His literary legacy will not just be the books he leaves behind, but the scores of writers whose lives he touched with his encouragement, his wisdom and his kindness.
‘[W]e are blessed by the dead,’ he once wrote, ‘and we know that we are, in spite of our protestations to the contrary. They leave spaces in our lives that, for some of us, are the closest thing to sacred we ever know.’
Writing feels essential for some, a compulsion that cannot be ignored. But no matter how solitary the act may seem, a writer is always in conversation: with those who have left behind the ‘sacred’ spaces of which John Burnside wrote; those whose words and ideas have moved them – to whom the poems in Jackie Kay’s new collection, reviewed in this issue by Eilidh Akilade, are dedicated; and those who, in time, may read what is written. We’re proud, here at Gutter, to help such conversations continue.