Like Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, this month’s guest bloggers spend hours critiquing each others work over the phone. Separated by long distances across America and different time zones, poet Harriet Levin and novelist Elizabeth L. Silver let us take a look at one of their online chats.

ELIZABETH: I remember the first time we met. You were the big shot director of the writing program at Drexel University in Philadelphia and I was a lowly adjunct with my first post-MFA teaching job. You were an Iowa grad, had a major book of poetry published, and were a Yaddo alum. But our personal backgrounds had so many similarities that I was instantly drawn to you. Those early conversations, which centered on our writing and our relationships, cemented what has become a truly beautiful friendship in my life.

HARRIET: Thank you, Liz. I’m going to hang this on my wall, and whenever I feel down, take a look at it. Truth to tell, it was you actually who inspired me. You were working on a novel and I saw how you went about it and then I literally watched you land an agent, because you were sending out emails from the computers in the Writing Center, while I was trying to write fiction for the first time and had no idea what I was doing.

ELIZABETH: I loved how when we met, we were both conceiving our novels, talking about the work and our approaches to writing fiction. You might not know how eager I was to see you every day, that  I came to my job at the writing center at Drexel just to find out how your novel was progressing and to share my struggles. I had no idea I inspired you at all.

HARRIET: You know when you meet someone whether it’s important. Not every meeting is like that. If you have a good olfactory sense, you can smell it on your skin, because you’ve made contact. I’m the sort of person who has to move her seat in a restaurant when the person beside me wears offending perfume or hairspray, and I’m also the kind of person who moves closer. It was like that with you, Liz, this sense I had (and still have) that life is always happening around you.

ELIZABETH: Now that I’m going to print out and place next to my laptop when I feel down. Is it clear that Hari is a brilliant poet?

HARRIET: And boy did you help me with my work. I’ll never forget the day when, over the phone, I told you I had reached the climax of my novel, but didn’t know how to resolve it. I was out on the deck off my kitchen, gripping a broom handle in my free hand, raising it into the corner of the porch door to swipe off a spider web. I have an idea, you said, and then you spelled out the resolution for me! It was right there but I couldn’t see it and you were able to see it so clearly. I put down the broom and went into the house and wrote the next pages.

ELIZABETH: That’s so funny because we discuss plot and story all the time, but I don’t remember that exact bit. The truth is that I wish we still lived in the same city, but our friendship has really blossomed long distance. We share work over email and spend hours critiquing it over the phone. It is these long-distance workshops that I rely on, that I treasure, and that I seek at all points in the writing process.

HARRIET: What’s more, in this past week alone, we both discovered that we had started new novels.

ELIZABETH: I could hardly believe it when you told me! As we both enter this terrifying period of novelty with our new projects, I feel a calmness knowing that I will have you along my side in the process. Thank you.

HARRIET: And knowing about the success of your first book, Liz, convinces me that you can do it again. That we both can. Thank you.

Harriet Levin’s The Christmas Show was published by Beacon Press and Girl in Cap and Gown was published by Mammoth Books.

Elizabeth L. Silver is author of the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton published by Crown  in the US and Headline Review in the UK.