Following last week’s interview featuring new Welsh literary magazine Folding Rock, we turn to Scotland’s Gutter and meet co-editor Colin Begg.

Colin is an NHS doctor, editor and writer from Ayrshire. In his twenties, he tried and failed to be a screenwriter and so got stuck-in at his day job. A chance encounter at a book festival led him to co-found Gutter, ‘the Magazine of New Scottish & International Writing’, in 2009. He also works as a freelance editor and his own poetry has been widely published.


What are you doing this morning?
My daily routine is not very routine. It's determined by my kids, my wife’s schedule and my day job. Today I woke up with my youngest kid at 5.30am and managed to get them back to sleep for a wee while. Then we got up and cuddled on the couch watching CBeebies for half an hour before breakfast.

My dull, sensible morning habits are a glass of orange juice, a cup of tea and porridge with fruit and nuts. I’ve eaten porridge pretty much daily for 20 years. I make it fresh on the hob each morning. When I met my wife there was a bit of a Mexican standoff around the best method: she's Irish and prefers full cream milk, I am a soak-the-oats-overnight-in-water Scotsman. We compromised on semi-skimmed.

I’ve just finished a duty weekend at the hospital so I had to head here at 7.30 this morning to hand over my patients to the new team coming on service for the week ahead. It's five miles away: in summer I cycle but today I coaxed my elderly Skoda into life and listened to the radio on the way. 

After handover, I had time to check emails and do this interview. In an hour I have a grand round meeting where we discuss complex patients under our care. Then I'm free from my NHS duties for a couple of days so I will head home. This afternoon I'm planning to finish the last chapter of a book about mental health I’ve been reading, then I’ll spend a couple of hours on a poetry collection that I am writing, before it's time to walk and collect my eldest from our local school.

Describe your work environment—what can you see from your desk/ through the window?
I can see a bare wall. The NHS is a glamorous place: my office is a pale room shared with four other doctors, lit by a high window through which you can hear people in the outpatient clinics below.

At home my wife and I share a messy, book-lined study space that I have just spent the best part of the past month trying to wrangle into order. There was paper everywhere. And pens, lots of lovely gel pens (shout out to cultpens.com.) Marie Kondo can do one, a degree of clutter is stimulating to the imagination, but even I have limits. My desk has a view of our wee bog of a back garden, with houses beyond stretching towards a steeple at the end of the road.

Which magazine do you first remember?
I grew up in the 1980s so three spring to mind: The Beano (I was a subscriber, fave characters Gnasher and Smudge), Bird Life (nature-boy that I am, I was a member of the RSPB's Young Ornithologists' Club and relished its monthly arrival. My first publication was in their readers' corner, a terrible punning joke.) Then as a teenager, my aunt, who worked for Oxfam, subscribed me to New Internationalist as a Christmas present, which opened my eyes to another world.

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine?
I am from the pre-html generation (I got my first Usenet account in 1993...) and so I remain a print fetishist. It's the smell, the feel, the page-flicking! I subscribed to NME for most of the 1990s and I still have a soft spot for good music journalism. Select was my favoured glossy from that era, they always had great features and free mixtapes.

Historically, Scotland had a good scene for small publishers doing interesting arts and cultural work, and I was a regular reader of the sadly departed freesheet Variant. So much commentary is now syndicated online by big outfits but I am a cheerleader for smaller arts magazines like The List  and The Skinny.

What other piece of media would you recommend? 
I'm actually going to recommend you an independent record label, Last Night from Glasgow. They take their name from one of the very few songs with a lyric about my home town (‘Super Trouper’ by Abba...) They try to put artists from Glasgow, Scotland, and beyond on the cultural map—in a similar way to Gutter's support for voices from peripheral places.

As McAlpin says to Duncan Thaw in Alasdair Gray’s novel ‘Lanark’, “Glasgow is a magnificent city, ...why do we hardly ever notice that?”
“Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York.

Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.“

Describe Gutter in three words:
Engaging. Cooperative. Cosmowegian

How would you sum up the current state of Scottish writing?
Exciting but always precarious. There’s a lot of great new work being created but for some reason it still seems unfashionable in the wider Anglosphere to be a Scottish writer outwith a circumscribed set of parameters (e.g. gritty McRealism, detective noir, tartanised exoticism.) The grassroots scene across Scotland is diverse and thriving, but it’s hard for writers to make the jump to mainstream success.

Of course that is true to an extent across the arts everywhere, but Scotland punches higher internationally in music and visual arts than it does in literature, especially compared to Ireland for example. The reasons are complex, but distribution margins and the loss of several Scottish-based independent publishers over the past five to ten years have not helped.

The magazine launched in 2009 and has just published its 31st issue. What’s the secret of its longevity?
There have been some serious bumps along the road but I think the secret is threefold: good people, good will and good writing. Fundamentally, all of us on the team love the magazine and really believe in what we are doing. And everyone gets paid. We work as a co-operative and the selecting editors rotate for each issue, which helps prevent tonal & stylistic stasis. We also bring in new guest readers for each issue. Usually these are people just starting their journey in publishing, which creates a network of fresh talent around the magazine. We've also been lucky to have access to some of the best designers in Scotland, so the mag looks lovely too.

Please show us one spread that sums up how the magazine works.
Gutter is a perfect-bound, 152-page, book-length collection that comes out every February and August. Each issue has a feature interview with interesting people in the literary ecosystem. This spread is our interview with playwright Stef Smith, whose acclaimed adaptation of Amy Liptrot‘s ‘The Outrun’ premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival last year.

We aim to be a magazine in the original, literal sense of a storehouse, offering readers a twice-yearly playlist of the best new fiction and poetry from emerging and established writers from Scotland and beyond. Gutter takes an outward-looking perspective from Scotland so we regularly feature international writing, either alone or as part of a loose theme.

We also publish reviews, creative non-fiction, and essays. The print edition is supplemented by our website content , our monthly Substack newsletter and regular live events–check out our Instagram and X feeds.

What has the magazine taught you that may be helpful to anyone else planning to launch one?
You can't do it alone, you need to make connections with people who share your vision and can help you realise it. Be mindful who you bring on board and keep looking for fresh voices to avoid stagnation. You need people who can listen to each other, so the cooperative model works well for us. Running a small literary magazine is a two-way street and you need to focus on building your writership as much as your readership. Paper, ink and postage are expensive. Unless you are independently wealthy or have a generous benefactor, margins will always be tight – so you will need to actively seek out funding sources and creative partnerships. Find someone who is good at writing grant applications, buy them a coffee and listen.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
We have an editorial team night out planned. The WhatsApp poll remains tied between bowling, karaoke and ‘just dinner’ The suspense is unbearable.

Co-editors Colin Begg and Henry Bell
Designer Ryan Vance 

guttermag.co.uk