Alina Stepanov ’25, Expose Editorial Fellow

After Rilke: Letter to a Young Writer

Dear First-Year Writing Student,

In my first year, I often sat on a bench on campus, attempting to read. In one of these instances, I was reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas. This was a different sort of literature; it was one of history and socio-politics that has shaped the modern world. Very suddenly, it seemed, my imagination was challenged to consume literature differently. I was launched into a new vector of engagement with the world. While I was pondering this new literature on that bench, a professor walked passed me. She said, “What a wonderful time. You can now read.” Reading was different in college. However, I discovered, and you will too, that this literary journey in college is only the tip of the iceberg.

For every first-year student beginning their journey through higher education, college is a portal that cyclically leads back to reading, introducing you to a vast collection of literature you may have never encountered before. Engaging with words and books will always guide you reciprocally to writing—the two are intertwined, always. If not, what you read will flow through you, leaving nothing but vague images and lingering sentiments from forgotten authors. Ultimately, it is up to you to choose how to engage with the new literature you encounter.

Reading does something to the brain. I have discovered this (and you might have as well) while reading from a young age. It feeds the imagination, and suddenly, the world becomes clearer. Reading is like being one of the first people to see and ponder the very first photo of the Earth taken from outer space in 1947. Indeed, it sharpens your focus so that it can travel many distances and yet you can see the world at a distance and in its entirety. Despite this, you only start to truly understand the world when you write, and, I must argue, this phenomenon is nurtured when you begin reading in college.

Throughout your first year at Purchase College, you are confronted with literature and, consequently, writing, particularly in College Writing. This course marks the beginning of something quite important, as the vector of engagement that originates from reading becomes more applied when you start writing. It forces you to reflect on the literature you consume to identify what points were impressed upon you. After this, you should, through writing, understand what this all means to you in the grand scheme of things.

Now, new student, I won’t lie—it requires a great amount of mental strength to even start the writing process. I have endured it, and I have seen you do the same when I was a peer mentor in College Writing as part of Teaching Good Prose. Through Zoom and in person, I have seen you attempt to create your voice in writing to manifest it on a page. A narrative voice is a writer’s relationship to their writing, crafted diligently through in-class free writing and structured essays. I have seen you learn this in the face of digital burnout and the echoing remnants of a global pandemic. And I have seen you, still heavy with sleep, come to class in the mornings so that you can finesse your writing voice. I know that you have been relentlessly digging for the gold of your words somewhere in the trenches of your mind. I know that these mental processes can cause a seismic headache: I experienced it all.

I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but it is still difficult to see myself in my writing sometimes. But I take solace in the advice passed down by writers like Rainer Maria Rilke, who writes, “for a person to advise, even to help another, a great deal must happen. Many different elements must coincide harmoniously; a whole constellation of things must come about for that to happen at once.” A great deal happened when I first began to read differently during college, and when I started writing in response to those readings, too. The literatures were, for me, a whole constellation of events aligned, and writing became essential—it transformed into an art that was inescapable in nature. During my whole college career, I would be confronted with a blank paper and expected to write. It began when I started reading and continued in College Writing; from then on at SUNY Purchase, I would only write because all of our efforts will be reproduced in our Senior Project. All of this unfolded harmoniously and, for that reason, I may finally be in a place to advise you:

To begin writing, fellow student, the first and most important component of developing your voice through writing is to read. The second component is to find a book that truly inspires you, as this will fuel your writing. From there, you—whether it’s harmonious or not—create your constellation—a galaxy wherein your voice and your writing are in a shared orbit. This is exactly what I am doing now with Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; it is empowering my writing voice, as I am giving you advice.

In order to write, you must, Rilke asserts, “Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it.” This is to say, young writer, your inner need is your writing voice, and to attain it you should discipline your writing by reading more, and more again.

The student essays shared in the spring 2025 issue of Expose emulate this discovery of the world stemming from reading, as students boldly began writing based on their relationships with literature. And by writing, they are engaging with what these literary works examine and explore by critically thinking, and thus, they and you are engaging with the world. Dear student, you are constructing your voice through a discovery of the world within and through literature. This practice is essential to hone because you can pierce through the loud noise this world creates, and you will be able see it clearly. You are disciplining yourself in communicating with this voice, one that comes to you naturally by your own will and that is cultivated by your own inner need.

Yours,

Alina