I have some exciting news! For the rest of 2020, my friend and fellow writer Isabel Robinson and I will be collaborating on a project called Letters of our Lives.
Our Story
Phil and Iz met through the blogging community in 2015. Back then, Iz was studying in China and Phil was living and working in London. Both are writers – Phil published her memoir The Latte Years in 2016, the year after Iz began her first blog, Nanjing Nian chronicling her adventures in China. Internet tag followed; a blog comment here, an email there, and in 2017 Phil and Iz became proper penpals, writing long letters about their lives to one another from opposite ends of the world. Phil moved home to Hobart in 2018, and though only Bass Strait now divides them, the correspondence has continued.
They have met twice in person – that’s it!
Letters of our Lives is Phil and Iz’s first creative collaboration.
Our Project – Letters of our Lives
Inspired by the Women of Letters project begun by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire in 2010 to ‘revive the lost art of correspondence’ and ‘showcase brilliant female minds’, Iz (here) and Phil (here) will write a letter each month on a shared theme for the rest of 2020.
Letters of our Lives is also the title of a novel Phil wrote when she was 14. The story followed the lives of two teenage girls, one living in country Tasmania and the other in chic, cosmopolitan Sydney. While that’s not their exact situation (and the story had a tragic ending!), they love the reference to childhood and the value of a carefully composed letter in a world of texts and tweets.
[sidenote from Phil: I found the original Letters of our LIves the other day! Here’s the hand-drawn title!]
These letters are a response to our lives, inner and outer, past, present and future.
We hope you enjoy our project.
If you’re a writer and would like to join in, we’d be open to it. Please contact either one of us via the contact forms on our blogs.
Yours in correspondence,
Iz and Phil x