#creating iris

To our Iris family:

The second issue of Iris, 'Histories,' will be released Tuesday, 14 April! We are excited to share it with you and so very grateful to our wonderful contributors. However, given our quietness on social media and the site, we felt you deserved more than just a surprise announcement. We are posting this letter to apologize for - and explain - the months of silence here at Creating Iris.

The reasons for our absence from the web are many. We had a lot of difficulties to overcome in these past months, as well as some happy things that, unfortunately, distracted us from Iris. Members of team Iris have started graduate programs and college; embarked on gap years; lost jobs; found new jobs; etc. There simply wasn’t time to devote to Iris when there were so many other responsibilities putting pressure on us, and we did not want to release an issue that was not the best it could be. Technological problems with our email manager compounded the difficulty and added to our apparent lack of communication, as we have learned that over the course of a server change, we lost some emails, never received others, and discovered that some emails we’d thought were sent actually never went through.

We are very excited to release the second issue, and we hope that you enjoy it! We apologize so sincerely to our wonderful contributors who have trusted us with their work and treated us with such respect, patience, and understanding.

We are especially excited to announce that this issue is the first to feature writing by a young author. Beginning with the next submissions cycle, we will accept submissions from writers under the age of eighteen. This change in our policy is the product of a lot of research into publishing conventions and an investment in a more robust submissions manager. More information will follow in the coming weeks. However, we are so excited to publish writing by the young people for whom we write.

Iris is, as it always has been, made possible by our wonderful contributors and staff, who give so generously of their time and talents. Thank you for your support, patience, and love. We look forward to being much, much more active, and getting to know you all all over again.

With love and gratitude, Amanda, Bex and all of team Iris

I will be speaking about creatingiris for Burst Radio, from 11 to 12am GMT, today. If you've never had a chance to listen to my voice -and somehow feel the desperate need to do so- you can listen to the show live with the link above. It'll also be available in streaming for 7 days.

This past week, I had the privilege of attending a talk sponsored by my university featuring Alison Bechdel. Alison’s talk, entitled “Drawing Lessons: The Comics of Everyday Life,” focused mostly on her experiences writing and drawing her memoirs, and how she went through that process with her family and with herself. However, she did touch upon Dykes to Watch Out For, and its place as both a comic of queer visibility and political activism. In particular, she said that she stopped writing Dykes in 2008 because in some sense, being queer has stopped being a subversive gesture. That gave me pause.