Review: Making Soup in a Storm

This week sees the deadline for submissions to New Writing Scotland 25, and a large and hopeful pile has no doubt been forming in a bunker somewhere beneath the University of Glasgow, awaiting the scrutiny of editors Brian Whittingham and Valerie Thornton. Meanwhile, Making Soup in a Storm, the 24th edition is now available.

A slim edition, with few contributions from established writers, NWS24 is nonetheless the likeable curate's egg it has always been. As ever, it contains work in English, Gaelic and Scots, though there isn't a lot of Scots this year, though Andrew McCallum's 'The Ballad o Paw Broon' is an enjoyably pungent fantasy about the paggering clan fading in the wake of the death of their cartoonist.

Of this year's poetic offerings, I enjoyed Julia Rampen's 'Recycling', and thought the more of it when her contributor's note revealed she is just 16. While we are on the subject of biog notes – could the editors perhaps consider a ban on the quirky and self-deprecating sorts which always make me cringe. I don't need to know about people's imaginary pet elks, their relationship with Jesus or their love of 'remarkable stones'.

Back to the verse: the most striking poems here are Martin McIntyre's two Gaelic pieces which, even in translation are powerful and strange. Also in Gaelic, Christopher Whyte has a long and moving piece, dedicated to the murdered Italian polymath Pasolini. Judith Taylor's poem on Hallowe'en lanterns begins as a familiar observational piece and pans out into something more winningly cosmic. These were my highlights, but there is plenty more, including good staple Scottish fare like the knockabout, the nature lyric and the pithy narrative. There is also a handful of concrete poems – hard to say if we are having a pictographic renaissance or whether the current editors are keen on the concrete.

This year's prose pieces are mostly short. The one which first took my eye was an unusual, fractured and theatrical piece by Chiew Siah Tei, a Malaysian woman currently studying in Glasgow. 'A Slice of the Mid-Autumn Moon' tells of 6-year old Mingzhi, a Chinese boy learning to write, who witnesses the death by plague of his younger sister and the arranged marriage of his older one. Disturbing, unresolved (it may be part of something longer) and bristling with ambiguity, it highlights a writer of much promise. As is Tracey Emerson, who in 'April' doesn't flinch in her blackly comic depiction of a carer taking a disabled girl for tea and cake – she picks out the characters effectively and makes much of her part-fond, part-pained narrator.

The title piece by Vix Parker is also quietly disturbing. Emma makes a vain attempt at a journey during a blizzard but abandons her car and returns home, feeling compelled to make soup instead. In a Carveresque mini-drama, she is changed by events happening offstage. Keeping the calamity out of the story's focus is often a good bet, but Mary Paulson-Ellis goes further in 'The Story of the Boy Who'll Not Have Done It'. It's a familiar scenario – a missing girl, an awkward boy, distraught mothers, a police interrogation room. But we know from the title in that he is innocent, and the writer cleverly unveils the story of what hasn't happened – smart stuff and carefully handled.