How to Begin

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-year correspondence—one that included exchanges of poetry and became, through lyrical, funny, exhortatory letters, a profound friendship. The two never met.

How to Begin is a story of artistic ambition. It is about asking for advice and then disregarding it and about finding ways to keep going when no one believes in you. It is about wanting to be a poet but also about failing to be one. De Waal writes lyrically about his grandmother, but also tells of his own multi-genre artistic practice, and how one might want to be a poet but become instead a visual artist, a prose stylist, and a reader of poetry.

Every artist—great artists, struggling artists, so-called failed artists—was once faced with the beginning, the problem of how to start out. How lucky we are that we have de Waal and his grandmother and Rilke to show us the way.