PIG, Polaris, Product & More

lower case is where we share events & happenings from indy and micro press, radical publishers, fanzines ETC. Suggestions welcome.

PIG is one of those ideas that you think “Why hasn’t that existed before?” You can follow them on Instagram, Bluesky and Substack for regular updates on Poetry in Glasgow (and beyond).

From one of their first updates they inform dear readers: “On Wednesday 19 February, you have the choice between attending the Glasgow Launch of the latest issue of Gutter (at the Alchemy Experiment on Byres Road) or pop down to Sweeney’s on the Park on the southside for the Time for One Poem open mic. The Gutter celebration will be hosted by Sean Wai Keung and Cal Bannerman and include readings from Kate Wallace Fry, Rachelle Atalla, Gabriel Levine Brislin and Niamh Gordon.

If you missed the Glasgow launch (or just cannot get enough of Gutter), there will be a second launch event at Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh on Thursday 20 February, which will also be streamed online. Join for readings by Mattea Gernentz, Harry Josephine Giles Ioannis Kalkounos and Rebecca Smith.

The following Monday (24 February), Big Red Cat zine will be hosting their first event of the new year. The showcase will be vaguely Valentine’s themed with some open mic slots and a cheeky session of poem speed dating. Keep an eye on their Instagram to book your ticket (£5).”

Sign up to their newsletter HERE.

We Are All in the Gutter

Speaking of the mighty GUTTER, their brand new issue (31) is hitting the stands right now. It only has two issues a year (February and August) so it’s worth the wait. This issue contains essays, poetry, interviews, fiction and a collection of work as part of the Alasdair Gray Archive Commissions (including a great essay by Joey Simmons).  This loose collection is held together by what the editors describe as “an undercurrent of change” & “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’.

Highly recommended.

Subscribe HERE.

Scottish Left Review continues to go from strength to strength under the capable editorship of Cailean Gallagher. Issue 144 (February/March 2025), under the theme of New Coalitions of Service and Care, includes articles by April O’Neill on the scrapping of the National Care Service ‘We Feel Discarded’; Jen Bell on how a Scottish Minimum Income Guarantee could loosen the grip of a punishing welfare regime, who writes “To build a welfare state that respects and liberates working class, unemployed, and disabled people, we must start by bending every devolved tool towards dismantling the punitive machinery of the DWP”; and Arianna Introna who writes a disability justice perspective on the waning of welfare demands by the independence movement; and Luke Beesley on The National Care Service: a Victim of Elite Class Struggle.

‘Care’ is such a massive issue in our society, tragically overlooked, and the focus of a complete clusterfuck by the Scottish Government.

Subscription details HERE. Options include £12 for six issues (print), £10 for a digital subscription or £50 for a Solidarity Subscription which goes towards paying artists and writers.

Polaris

Polaris is edited by Janette Ayachi and can be found online HERE. We’ve not seen nor heard new poetry from Kevin Williamson, formerly of this parish, for two years +. Thankfully that’s to be rectified at the launch of Polaris, the zine which is ‘a celebration of poetry, art and nature’ …

Kevin writes: “You’re all invited to the launch of some new poetry of mine on 8th March. It’s been two and a half years since I last did a poetry reading (the final Neu! Reekie!) or had any new poetry published. My new work, like much of the poetry I’ve been writing recently, is lyrical rather than performative. This one is called ‘Walking Through Carrifran With Sascha’ and features in the new edition of the excellent Polaris zine.”

Product 

Product magazine offers new writers the chance to develop a story (fiction or non-fiction) for publication. All welcome. All the details are HERE.

Last year Product published FIRST LOVE, a ‘lo-fi collection, full of epic, playful, inventive writing from Scotland and beyond’ including my favourite, about Fran, a levitating art student in Euan Currie’s short story That Famous Photograph. Buy it HERE. 

Permission to Grieve

SÍDHE PRESS – @SidhePress – is a German/Scottish micropress based in Berlin. They have submissions open for their next anthology, on the theme of GRIEF. They write:

“We are looking for poems and short CNF about grief. By this we mean not only the grief for a person/ for people, but also grief for animals, grief for a place, a home, a time, an idea, our health, the world, climate change. Ambiguous grief, anticipatory grief, reflective grief, rituals of grief.”  Submit HERE.

Photo by Eileen Pan via Unsplash