How to Begin: Letters to a Young Writer

From the celebrated ceramic artist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, a tender story—unfolding in letters, poems, and images—about what it means to be an artist.

This is a story about how to begin.

In 1921, Edmund de Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth von Ephrussi, a young student in Vienna, wrote a letter to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She too was a poet, or an aspiring one, just at the beginning of a creative life. To her surprise, Rilke wrote back. It was the beginning of a five-yea...