Iris Fire

Cover Image by the incredible www.twitter.com/mel0nfarm !!  Check out their twitter for more art!  You can also get stickers and more at their etsy www.etsy.com/shop/melonfarmart !

CW for Iris Fire: abuse, body horror, eye trauma, emetophobia

Iris Fire means many things to me.  At its core it is a story about threading the needle's eye through cedar sweet seas.  A story about seeking the Fettle Fair, only to become the tree that gowns downwards.

Iris Fire is a story that could never have been completed.  it was written in the midst of an attempt to escape an abuser that perversely only entrenched me further in abuse.  Iris Fire is a failed project, one or which I bear a great deal of shame.

Perhaps above all else, Iris Fire is about words.  one thing that has stuck out most prominently about abuse is that it coerces you into swallowing your own words - to speak throat grasped in another's breathy rasp.  Iris Fire was written when I learned how to speak in resistance to that, when I learned how to speak sideways.  To some that might mean 'word salad', but to me it means.  Everything.  In a sense, Iris Fire was the first time I ever spoke for myself.

What Iris Fire is not is a recovery story.  There is a tendency to read it as such because it is an escape story, but I ask you to resist the urge.  

I don't know what Iris Fire has to offer you.  It was, after all, never meant to be put out publicly.  I hope that you might pluck a passage that tickles you just so.  I hope that you might derive insight obliquely, through tracing words with your tongue.  I promise my next writings will exist for a sake more than my own.  For now, please allow me this indulgence  of letting my words flutter fetterless.

-Ashes McAlister