Welcome to Sextet Issue IV: Melting Point. As the summer solstice approaches, we gather together to shrug off our winter coats and crack open our tinnies… it’s officially taps aff!
From Shetland and the Faroes, to Russia and Singapore, we are delighted to welcome these eighteen diverse and accomplished authors to our Glasgow-based publication. In spite of the increasingly frightening political landscape of late, we remain fiercely proud of this city’s history of anti-racism and anti-fascism. Nae pasaran!
In Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film, the eponymous Movern Callar hangs her head out of the window of a Spanish taxi cab, bathed in sepia and giddy with the sense of having escaped her dreary Scottish town. In this issue, our writers explore this familiar feeling of liberation. We ask them to transport us: to forgotten childhood holidays, balmy summer nights, or to other worlds entirely.
Our writers look to language as alchemy: both Maxine Chen and Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki piece together poetic collages, snipping, pasting, and borrowing to create entirely new meanings. Deralyn Owen sculpts a womanly form with her words, while the Crone in Kellie Wells’s tale surrenders her corporeality, dissolving into the evening light. Lio Steve provides us with instructions for connection with the self, the past, and the vastness around us. Mart Fisher pays tribute at once to the celestial and the cerebral, and Ruslan Garrey asks questions without expecting answers. Taken together with David Brennan’s trio of poems, words become rhythms, spells, and incantations.
It’s not all sunshine and roses. Fiona Burton brings us back down to earth with an oddly moving description of bin juice in an account of a Scottish landfill blaze. It finds its nostalgic American counterpart in Patrick Redmond’s We Piss Together in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, while more unpleasant smells play out in Joshua Sneddon’s expertly long-winded yarn.
Across the contributions, we witness some varying attitudes to the season: the works of both Savannah Burke and Maddie Portune conjure up a sweet, sickly summer air, while Magnus Williamson plunges us back into cool, refreshing water. Through an open window, some anxieties slip past: William Ross tosses in sticky sheets the night before an appointment, and Cassie Minicucci marches us through a highly strung pre-date ritual.
Ultimately, though, we welcome the warmth in. Daniel Rye’s Brass Band serenades the rising sun as it sheds light on Johnathan Orchard’s ‘little heaven place’. With these words, this noise, these chants, we claim what is ours.
We are so grateful to our contributors for transporting and uplifting us. We thank our readers, old and new, for being here to share in the afterglow. All are welcome in this place.
–Maggie