A Peek Into the Open Maw of Extra Teeth Issue Nine
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Next month we’re holding a FREE Q&A session for anyone interested in submitting to literary magazines. Anna and Heather will be talking all about our submissions process, our selections process and our editing process, as well as sharing our own experiences being published by literary magazines. There’ll be plenty of time for audience questions too. Register for free here and join us at 7pm on May 20th!
Toothfish dash the waves beneath a frozen world. Stag horns bleed whilst selkies swim. Bronzed bellies get bronzer by resort holiday poolsides, and the end of civilization tastes like Play-Doh. Where swallows screech the arrival of summer, a volcanic eruption of whelks on Scottish pebble beaches heralds something darker. Beware the painter’s sugary gifts, bite the hand that feeds (especially when it’s twice your size), and above all, when the influencer says jump, choose to love yourself instead.
For as twee as advice like love yourself can be, it is in this simple, inherently revolutionary affirmation that Extra Teeth once more finds its feet—returning to print, to your local bookshop’s bookshelves, and to our subscribers’ doorsteps with Issue Nine, out this month.
Maybe it’s something in the water, something in the air. Maybe it’s a world on the brink of collapse, and our exceptional cadre of writers’ unique reactions to meet that impending doom with a knowing smile and a brighter tale. Maybe it’s the sheer joy of this issue’s submission to finally—after a year’s funding-and-mental-health hiatus—to be back in the hotseat, selecting only the very fiercest, most original, transportive and, above all, toothiest literature in Scotland for publication. (Not to mention the irrepressibly sunny dispositions of our two guest readers, Yasmina Floyer and Bhavika Govil, the latter of whom we interviewed recently.)
Maybe it’s a bit of everything, simmered into one big radiant pot of words.
Whatever it is, the resounding narrative throughout this particularly special edition of Extra Teeth magazine is one of triumphant and defiant self-love. The kind of love strong enough to withstand—nay, overcome—the loneliness, the toxic beauty standards, the ableism and misogyny, transphobia and racism, the homogenisation of culture by AI-ified capitalism that feels so inescapable right now. In other words, Issue Nine of Extra Teeth is, just maybe, exactly what we need—not to take our minds off the problems at hand (though the escapism of a good story is always a healthy indulgence) but to show us how to fight back.
Take, for example, this exclusive sneak peak into ‘Ae Well Done You’ by Katie Webster, a lilting, poetic and personable story of a disabled patient and care-worker, written in the Highlands’ Caithness dialect. In this passage, Katie’s protagonist demonstrates the power of taking time to relish even the smallest, seemingly insignificant part of an otherwise challenging day:
That night, I take that welldoneyou til my bed on ae ward.
[...] I turn it over on my tongue like a flavour. Like a single artisan chocolate, a sip o whisky liqueur, a smear o brandy butter, like somethin I have been close enough til smell on ae breath o ithers but never got til taste for mysel. Like you get on Christmas when ae nursies have til come back til ae wards after ae late shift teabreak. I know for certain that there is not anither soul on ae ward who has ever had a welldoneyou like this before.
I show it til Laila, ae winsome- wishsome-wantsome girlie who lives in my head. I let her take a nibble, she tries it on her tongue and her face lights up with an imaginary smile, so’s we’re just like that mum and daughter I saw sharin a hot chocolate in ae cafe at ae theatre, that one time charge nurse that didna last; that one time just-just-just before a fuss kicked off and we were hustled back til ae bus, and it was agreed that a trip til ae panto really wasna for us.
In ae next bed beside me, my pal Maryhen huffles for my hand. I reach over and lace my fingers through hers. The memory o ae flavour o ae welldoneyou shares between us and I hear her mouth gummin and strong-strong sookychowin on her long split ends. I hear it settin off ae wordmoths flutterin in her hair, as she searches-searches for ae word for it, for ae word for ae flavour o a welldoneyou. She wilna find it. No such words have ever been said in ae Dayroom for her til hear.
Ae breathin o ae sixteen women in ae high-grade ward deepens intil sleep, and mine deepens with them. I will have ae sweetest sleep, my dreams honeyed with a single, special,
welldoneyou.
It’s not just the fiction in this issue which bites back at the wrongs of modern society, either.
In every issue of Extra Teeth, we make sure to select two original essays to close the magazine; not only so as to deliver a singularly unique package of prose to our readers, but to help those readers reset and reconnect with the world around them after the many pages of fiction.
In Issue Nine, our two essays focus on erosion: namely, the current and ongoing erosion of reproductive rights as explored in ‘The Quick and The Dead’ by Lottie Whalen, and the erosion, or ‘great thinning’ of minority languages like Scottish Gaelic, discussed by Paul McQuade in his piece, ‘A Seed’. With precise, delicate writing, our two essayists make a point not simply to highlight the issues at the core of their work, but also to provide us clear, navigable paths toward reversing the damage done.
Here is another exclusive look at what’s to come from the ninth physical edition of Extra Teeth, out on the 29th of May—a small excerpt from ‘A Seed’ by Paul McQuade:
I saw a common purpose between land and language, and thought, perhaps, both require not just new words but new ways of speaking, living, being. The training of some metaphysical muscle that only humans – to the best of my knowledge – possess. So much rests on this strange little animal.
Which is to say, you, which is to say, me, which is to say, us.
I keep looking for connections between land and language that are not poetry, not daffodils. I keep thinking something should exist that forms the link more reasonable than the idea of a soul. [...] But I can’t find something that makes sense of all these things rattling around in my skull. The closest I can get is the Leiden theory of language evolution, a relatively obscure school of linguistics that considers language a living organism. It says language is a kind of friendly parasite to which the human being is a host.
If I get past the parasite part, I can think of language like a kind of vast sinew stretching across speakers, textbooks, and etchings from The Book of Deer to the toilet stall. It lives. It lives through and with other languages. It hybridises, evolves, survives. Even the deadest language, with no speakers, kept in a reliquary of a deep library storage box, lives this way.
[...]
We shift, however subtly, from an object in need of protection to a climate, to a landscape. It extends responsibility beyond the narrow view of native speakers, whose choice not to speak ‘dying languages’ is taken as proof of obsolescence, and the broader view of non-speakers, for whom these languages form foreign bodies whose loss means so little. In this ecological view we are not responsible for language-life but for the maintenance of the world in which language lives. That is, a world in which bodies find community find expression find place. The responsibility falls on all of us who share this host organism that opens us up to each other as speakers and non-speakers alike. The living body of language.
Which is to say, you, which is to say, me, which is to say, us.
Before I sign off (and bid you take this opportunity to subscribe to Extra Teeth, thus making sure you get your paws on a copy of the mag before it sells out!), I would be remis to leave without a word on this issue’s illustrator.
As you may already know, every issue of Extra Teeth is painstakingly illustrated by a different guest artist, selected and mentored by our very own Esther Clayton of ec-designstudio. Each issue’s illustrator is given access to our prose selections before anyone else, so that they can create a unique set of drawings to accompany each piece. The final product is a 100+ page magazine with full colour cover-to-colour illustrations completely unique to Extra Teeth.
This time round, we have had the extraordinary fortune to work, not with a ‘traditional’ illustrator, per say, but rather with one of Scotland and the UK’s most exciting street artists. With graffiti and the spray-paint can as her preferred medium, KMG’s commissioned work has decorated everything from Glaswegian dockyards and Aberdonian tenements to Kilsyth bothies, shopfronts in Belfast and now, Issue Nine of Extra Teeth.
Fancy a swatch at what she’s got in store for us? Go on then, sink yer teeth intae this...
So, if you need a little extra love in your life, some words to escape into or set a fire beneath you; if you’re looking for the perfect gift for the reader in your family, or just fancy a bite of something new; be sure to subscribe to Extra Teeth for just £20 a year, today. Paid subscribers of WITH BITE receive a discount for an extra 20% off!
Issue Nine of Extra Teeth will be published on 29th May 2025. Single issue copies are available to pre-order via the Extra Teeth shop or from your local bookshop.
- Cal Bannerman
We’ll be launching the magazine with brilliant readers in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Join us at one of the events below!
I'm so excited!! 🖤