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 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.

Fifty years later, Elisabeth’s grandson Edmund de Waal sends her his own poetry, and she responds with guidance and a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

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. De Waal writes lyrically about his grandmother but also tells of his own multi-genre artistic practice, and of how one might want to be a poet but instead become a visual artist, a prose stylist, and a reader of poetry.

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