IR×SL: The Collaboration Issue

A note from editors Essence London and Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice

Dear Reader,

With everyone scribbling in their own little corners and magazines keeping to themselves rather than sharing resources and ideas, the literary world often feels fragmented. Who spread the notion that isolation is necessary in serious work? Of course, there are plenty of masterpieces with a single name or logo printed on the cover, but what a lonely approach to art! What a limited approach!

Editors-in-Chief Essence London (L) and Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice (R) at the IRxSL reading, AWP ’19

Here, Indiana Review and Split Lip Magazine present the Collaborative Voices folio, a glimpse of the imaginative possibilities when we center community in all stages of creation. You’ll find themes of America and what it takes to make it in this country, because America is something like a collaboration, wild and fraught, an experiment of democracy that’s currently being tested at every turn. We never said the work would be easy.

The cover art, Wondermakers No. 61, is also wild, almost like it shouldn’t work but it does. Artists Jenna Freimuth and Mindy Sue Wittock send embroidery frames back and forth, back and forth—“When you feel like you can fall right in, that’s when we stop”—then they begin anew with the next frame. The falling is only the beginning for some collaborations. We look forward to seeing yours in the world.

With tenderness,

Essence London & Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice