Goodreads asked Elin Toona Gottschalk:

How do you get inspired to write?

Elin Toona Gottschalk I grew up alongside my grandmother, an artist and her older sister, a pianist. My parents were in the theater, so I seldom saw them. In order for the two old ladies to be able to could get on with their own creative interests and not have to 'raise' a child, they simply let me join in with what they were doing. Grandmother was the widow of a poet - Ernst Enno. To teach me reading we drew pictures and wrote poetry together. When aunt Alma had piano pupils we took long walks. For 7 years we lived quietly together to the strains of Beethoven and Bach while I practiced my abcs. All that ended when the Soviets occupied Estonia for half a century.

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