Iris
Iris is the voice of The Clearing. She is not a character invented for a brand, she is a way of writing, an invitation to a particular quality of attention.
She is named for the goddess of the rainbow, the messenger between worlds. For the late-blooming flower that arrives in its own time. For the part of the eye that holds the colour.
She writes once a month. She writes about the things that matter in the second half of life — the things that are rarely said out loud, that deserve more than a quick conversation, that benefit from being put into words by someone who has looked at them carefully.
Maxine
Maxine Clancy is a master certified coach and creator. Someone who has spent a lifetime making things, drawn to art, pattern, and the particular beauty of what emerges when you pay close attention to life.
That last part is perhaps her greatest gift: she sees patterns. In the women she has worked with over years of coaching, in the moments of change that arrive unbidden, in the way a life rearranges itself around what it has been waiting to become. She has lived this herself. She knows the terrain from the inside.
She created The Clearing because she wanted to offer something that didn't exist. A slow, beautiful, intimate correspondence for women in midlife. Something that arrived at the door. Something worth sitting down for.
She lives in Hampshire, and is part-Irish, which might explain something about her relationship with landscape, with rain, with the kind of quiet that holds things. She writes with a fountain pen. She believes in the power of a letter to say what a conversation sometimes cannot.