Introduction: Talking with Each Other

IN THE LONG ISOLATION of our COVID year and then some, the quiet was initially welcome, at least to me: into that diminution came the wild-dolphins in canals, deer in the streets, foxes and raccoons and rabbits populating our depopulated public places. A flat version, nostalgic, two-dimensional, but everything that had been broken away was accounted for, even if it were missing (we could see its outline, we could blame the cat). The Interviews Issue Sometime in the early aughts, a bit more than fifteen years ago, members of The Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Kinship, and Identity-the former name of The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC)-wondered aloud at a dinner or in a meeting room why the organization didn't have its own conference. When the last panel was finished, the Executive Committee met to debrief;it's at that meeting that the journal you're reading was conceived, as well as my commitment to editing it.