Two Writers, Two Decades of Correspondence
For more than 20 years, Robert McGill and Siobhan Phillips have regularly exchanged emails about their lives and work. This year, as they both published novels, they decided to reflect together on their enormous—and still growing—record of correspondence.
Robert McGill: So, I recently sat down and read our email correspondence from the past two decades—about a million words, all told. I didn’t go back as far as 1999, when we first met in Oxford. But I have everything after 2002, after we finished the Creative Writing program at East Anglia, when you returned to the U.S. and I went back to Canada. That moment could have been the end of our friendship, right? Instead it was the beginning. I bet that in the last two decades—leaving aside the year we overlapped on a postdoctoral fellowship—we haven’t spoken on the phone or seen each other in person more than a dozen times each. But all the emails!
: All the emails! I reread them recently, too. In my email program, they’re in a big folder labeled “friends.” Long ago I should have given our conversations their own folder, but now I’m almost grateful that in rereading our messages I had topick through a landscape of other connections. In 2001—year of the earliest emails between us that I have—the evidence doesn’t predict that this will be my most important epistolary relationship of
