Editorial
Introducing Issue #31
There is an undercurrent of change in this issue of Gutter, a glistening thread of transfiguration. It’s there in Ioannis Kalkounos’s poem, ‘The Taxi Driver’s Testimony’, which features a man in the backseat of a car transformed into a seal. It’s there too, most glaringly, in Charis de Kock’s irresistible short story, in which an unnamed woman turns into a gorse bush. It begins in her mouth, this change – tongue then teeth – and spreads outwards, golden yellow flowers followed by thorns. It’s an age-old subject: One thing becomes another, a person is forever altered. But unlike, say, Kafka’s Gregory Samsa, de Kock’s protagonist finds relief in her transformation. She has escaped ‘an unforgiving city’, and found instead ‘a new connection’. Metamorphosis can feel like coming home.
That’s not so far, perhaps, from what Hera Lindsay Bird desires in ‘Sometimes I Get So Fucking Tired Of It All’. In her inimitable, exuberant style, Bird imagines herself escaping that ‘all’ – her everyday life – and being carried by, yes, a bird, a giant and ‘possibly magic’ goose. Together they will soar above the forests of Russia, and go ‘honking over abandoned Bolshevik gymnasiums’. It’s a glorious fantasy, described with just that jolting wit and extravagant lyrical waywardness that makes Bird’s poetry such a delight to read.
Of course, not all metamorphoses are welcome. What they bring, often, is not relief or delight, but a kind of horror – to those who witness the change as well as to those who are changed. Rachelle Atalla, in ‘Cactus Arms’, describes the aftermath of an amputation, a missing limb that haunts a marriage already doomed. Hurt, bitterness and the taint of fear are brilliantly illuminated in the story by a cheap plastic lamp.
More unnerving still, perhaps, is Rebecca Smith’s essay, ‘Ruth’, charting a friend’s descent into, and re-emergence from, postpartum psychosis. ‘I have never seen someone completely vanish before’, it begins. The essay – written with the consent and approval of Ruth, who is eager to increase awareness of this condition – highlights a terrible irony. Throughout her illness, Ruth is convinced that something is wrong with her baby: ‘Koa is not normal’, she writes in a text; and later, ‘he isn’t going to be ok’. Yet it is she and not the child who has been altered, who is suffering, who is in danger. Smith recounts this, and the helplessness she felt in the face of a cruel transformation, with tender brevity. It is essential reading.
Jim Crumley, in his superb essay, ‘The Hully’, looks back to find the source of his own earliest changes. Growing up in Dundee, on one side then another of the Balgay Hill, it was the land itself that, in boyhood, wrought him. The birds and animals with which he shared that place instilled in him a love of the natural world. But the hill also made him a writer; it gave him his subject. ‘Landscapes are fundamental to what my life has become, the raw material for much of my work, the moulds which fashion my pieces of mind.’
Returning to Dundee, as he does in this essay, Crumley sees a place that has changed a great deal in the decades since he left, just as he, too, has changed. Yet, still, he feels ‘rooted’. That rootedness is not just personal but familial; it goes deep. His past, quite literally, remains on Balgay Hill: ‘my parents and three of my grandparents lie there, regressing back into the very soil that sustained them’.
Time, of course, is always the great modifier, and Harry Josephine Giles paints the poignancy and threat of time’s passing in her dystopian folk tale, at the end of this issue. Awakening from a sleep on ‘a little green hill’, a woman finds her village diminished: quiet, half-empty, falling apart. People she knows are still there, but they are worn-out, their hearths are cold, their voices are without affection. She has seen the future, this woman. It is the same world, and it is changed. As Martin MacInnes writes in his own short story, elsewhere in this magazine, ‘Nothing truly disappears, it only transforms.’