Audra Linville and Folarin Adesina have been writing to each other since the spring of 2009. They met once, briefly, at a translators' colloquium in Toledo. They have not seen each other since.
She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He lives in Lagos. Their correspondence has run, by Linville's count, to roughly four thousand messages over seventeen years.
Most of the messages are email. Some, in the early years and again recently, are paper letters. They have, twice, attempted to migrate to a messaging app and have both times reverted to email within three months.
Linville, a translator from French and Italian into English, says the migration failed because the messaging app encouraged short messages and immediate replies. The pair had agreed early in their correspondence that messages should be answered no sooner than a week and no later than three months.
That rule, she says, is the reason the correspondence has lasted.
I spoke to Linville in March, and to Adesina by email in April, and to a third correspondent, a retired librarian named Coen Halsema in Groningen, in May. Halsema has maintained a fifteen-year correspondence with his daughter, who emigrated to New Zealand in 2010. The three of them, taken together, suggest something about how sustained letter writing survives in a medium that was not built for it.
All three said roughly the same thing about email: that it works as a vehicle for correspondence only when the writers treat it as if it were paper.
This is not a matter of length, although both Linville and Halsema write long messages, often two thousand words. It is a matter of pace.
Email, Linville points out, defaults to a fast rhythm. The interface invites reply. The inbox accumulates. A message that has been sitting for two weeks begins to feel like a debt.
She and Adesina solved this by writing, in 2009, a one-page document they called the protocol. It says, in summary: no reply before seven days; no expectation of reply before three months; no apology for slowness; no acknowledgement of receipt.
Halsema, with his daughter, has a different protocol. They write on the first of every month, on either end, regardless of whether they have replied to the previous letter. Their letters cross. They do not, mostly, refer to each other's most recent letter at all. They are simply two letters a month, one in each direction.
Adesina described the practice in spatial terms. The correspondence, he wrote, is a room he and Linville have built and maintain. The room exists because they have agreed that it does. The room does not require either of them to be in it on any given day. It does require that they come back to it, on roughly the same terms, for years.
The room is full of references neither of them would explain to a third party. There is a running disagreement about a single line in Italo Calvino. There is a sustained, sixteen-year exchange about the work of a translator named Marian Schwartz, neither of them having corresponded with Schwartz herself. There is a list of books they have promised to read and have not.
What they do not write about, all three correspondents said, is news.
Linville and Adesina do not, generally, tell each other what has happened in their week. Halsema and his daughter do, but only briefly, at the bottom of the letter.
This too is a protocol decision. The news of one's life, Linville suggested, fills any container offered to it. Once the news arrives, it takes over the letter, and the letter becomes a bulletin. Their correspondence has avoided this by mutual agreement.
There are losses in this approach. Adesina pointed out that he did not learn of Linville's father's death until eleven weeks after the funeral. He did not feel hurt by this. Linville had not, in the previous letter, been ready to write about it; by the next letter, she was.
The point, Halsema said, is that a letter is not a phone call and should not pretend to be one.
All three correspondents print their letters out. Halsema keeps his in a binder, by year. Linville keeps hers in a filing cabinet. Adesina prints only the ones he wants to keep and recycles the rest within the week.
All three said they had no plan for the archive after they died.
Linville is the only one of the three who has, in the last few years, gone back to paper for some letters. She writes the longer ones, she said, by hand, on the same pale grey paper she has used since 2014. The paper costs her about three Canadian dollars a sheet. She uses about forty sheets a year.
She said it slows her down. The slowing down, she said, is now the point.
None of the three would describe their correspondence as a literary act. None of them is preparing a book. None of them, asked directly, would say what the correspondence is for.
It is for itself. That is, perhaps, the only honest answer about any long-running letter, in any century, in any medium.